MUMBAI: India has an unrivalled youth demographic, with about half of its 1.25 billion population being under the age of 25. Education should be the key to unlocking the potential of this young population. Unfortunately, though, Indians of college-going age are just 30 per cent of the youth.
Online education has long been seen as a way to increase access to learning — a point emphasised upon by Sir Timothy O’Shea, Principal and Vice-Chancellor, University of Edinburgh during his talk on the digital future of education at an Asia Society event on Tuesday. Mr. O’Shea referred to his own experience at the University of Edinburgh, where he introduced several online degrees and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The MOOCs, he said, are usually for free and open to all, unlike traditional courses, and create online communities for learning.
Companies like Coursera and edX, a non-profit start-up from Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, offer such free online courses from top international universities to millions of students. The Indian government has recently announced plans to launch a, platform called Swayam that will offer free courses from IITs, IIMs and other central universities.
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Highlighting the advantages of having 80 such online courses at the University of Edinburgh, he said they include international students not needing visas and paying course fees in their own currency. The potential of online courses changed significantly in 2012, Mr. O’Shea said, when professors at the University of Stanford reached over a 100,000 courses through online courses.
During a discussion between Mr. O’Shea and Indu Shahani, former Dean, H.R. College of Commerce and Economics as part of the event, Ms. Shahani said a challenge to introducing MOOCs in India is the highly-regulated nature of higher education. Bombay University alone has 800 affiliated colleges, she said, while there are 36,000 such colleges nationwide. With education being regulated by the University Grants Commission (UGC), MOOCs cannot be part of the curriculum and can be introduced as supplemental learning, she said.
Ms. Shahani asked Mr. O’Shea how educators in India could motivate young people to become autonomous learners when taking supplemental courses like MOOCs is not mandatory for their degree. “We are still a very teacher-centric system, and I have found that when we encourage students to take up Coursera courses or the like, the completion rate is less than 10 per cent,” she said.
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In reply, Mr O’Shea said the key to motivating students is to introduce a form of credit for taking MOOCs, which in turn can hold promise of better employment chances. “The credit has to be recognised and there has to be some system by the which these credits can be accumulated. In today’s context, it makes no sense to say that credits cannot be gained by doing an online course, like a course from MIT for instance, and that these credits cannot be accumulated,” he said.