Make online education click

By Gayle Christensen, Brandon Alcorn. Massive Open Online Courses can help spread quality education in India at little cost to students. India is facing major challenges in higher education. In 2007, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh noted that in almost half of India’s districts, higher education enrolments were “abysmally low” and that two-thirds of Indian universities and 90 per cent of Indian colleges were rated as below average on quality parameters. Unsurprisingly, in the face of the state failure to meet educational demands, higher education is becoming increasingly privatised with Indian elites and portions of the middle class leaving public institutions for private ones, both within India and abroad. This flight from public institutions further weakens the capacity of the state to meet the educational needs of the population, perpetuating the problem. Unfortunately, the private institutions tend to be confined to narrow professional tracks and are often plagued by weak internal governance and state regulation.
Access, quality issues
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) may be one potential solution, not to overcome India’s higher education challenges entirely, but to help alleviate some of the country’s access and quality issues in higher education. MOOCs have attracted international media attention over the last two years. Leading universities from around the world have partnered with MOOC providers, such as Coursera and EdX, to deliver high-quality online courses for free to millions of students around the world. More...