Massive potential of online open courses

Massive potential of online open courses

They could make up for the lack quality teachers in India’s technical education

Massive Open Online Courses are barely two years old, yet over 150 top-tier universities are offering more than 500 such courses for students around the world. After Americans, Indians form the largest pool of students enrolled in these MOOCs.

These courses offer an alternative to lecture-driven classroom instruction by making custom digital content available online to students anytime, anywhere. The terms ‘open’ and ‘massive’ refer to the fact that anyone (literally) may take these courses, resulting in tens of thousands of students registering for them.

Work in progress

A semester-long course taught traditionally as, say, 40 hours of classroom instruction is broken into hundreds of media-rich modules spanning a few minutes each. Each module, together with a few follow-up exercises, helps a student understand a concept, a design, a result, and so on. Student responses to exercises are generally evaluated by back-end servers in real-time.

While the tools and platforms supported by service providers such as Coursera, edX and Udacity may be termed ‘version 1.0’, it is expected that MOOCs pedagogy will evolve over time. The motivation is not necessarily to replace existing classroom-based courses but to explore alternative models of course delivery.

It is unclear whether students are willing to pay for these courses unless they get certified on completion. In turn, universities may not issue certificates without a rigorous model of assessment, among other things. In these aspects MOOCs remain ‘works-in-progress’.

An approach that may be particularly relevant for India is one that is adopted by Georgia Tech for its Oonline MS in Computer Science programme launched in partnership with Udacity for fee-paying students. They will be eligible for award of the degree from Georgia Tech provided they successfully complete all evaluation components in the required courses.

MOOC-based courses offered to a closed group of enrolled students are referred to as SPOCs, or Small Private Online Courses. The one aspect of SPOCs that needs particular mention is that course components such as tests, quizzes or exams are proctored or invigilated. Additionally, a part of the course may involve classroom-based problem-solving sessions where students are assisted by teaching assistants.

The latter is referred to as the ‘blended’ form of course offering. We believe many more universities in India can take advantage of this new-found pedagogy to improve both scale and quality of education, while overcoming serious constraints resulting from faculty shortages.

Each state-wide technical university, for instance, affiliates a few hundred engineering colleges that offer programmes with a common syllabus and centrally administered examinations.

Suitable to India

The likes of Delhi University would hugely benefit from using SPOCs in a calibrated manner. The same pedagogy around SPOCs can be fruitfully adopted by the 3,400 polytechnics in India that serve over 20 lakh students.

Clearly, the creation of digital content (consisting of voice, video, text and animation) is a big challenge. Other than subject experts to guide the creation, we will need content developers who are well-versed with tools to create and string together instruction modules and exercises, and host them on a platform.

Fortunately, content needs to be created once, but updated periodically. One would, however, need several instructors to hand-hold students in problem-solving tutorials.

It is clear that in India there is a need to significantly expand opportunities for post-secondary education while simultaneously focusing on quality of instruction. Given that faculty is in short supply, we must resort to technology to fill existing gaps in quality.

A reluctance to adopt this changed pedagogy is because of resistance to change on the part of teachers and administrators.

One way out is to run courses simultaneously in two modes. Any decision to accelerate adoption or to wind down adoption of MOOCs must be based on the outcomes of these experiments.

Given the enormity of the task of increasing the gross enrolment ratio in India to 30 per cent by 2030, universities and regulators (UGC, AICTE and others) must collectively move forward in adopting this great development in education technology.

Source | Business Line | 26 August 2014