India has the second largest enrollment in Online Education in the world

Venkata Susmita Biswas | The Hindu | September 1, 2013

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), drawing 155,000 students from 162 countries in 2011 when first launched. But now it has become a favoured massive online open course (MOOC) destination for students from India. edX, a not-for-profit MOOC platform founded by MIT and Harvard University, gets a large fraction of traffic from India, says Anant Agarwal, Pesident, edX. “The response from India has been overwhelming.

According to Prof. Agarwal, “MOOCs will change higher education in India by providing access to quality education. edX will do this by helping schools offer blended courses on campus or purely online options depending on the need.” He adds that research into learning from data gathered by edX and conducted by xConsortium partners including IIT-Bombay [IIT-B] indicates that MOOCs will help improve education and pedagogy everywhere, including Indian campuses.

In a new partnership with IIT-B, edX hopes to make courses offered by IIT-B available to an international audience. “IIT-B will develop next-generation online and blended learning courses, as well as fill a specific professional development need in India: training engineering teachers. With approximately 5,000 engineering colleges in the country and student enrolment in these colleges now over 1.25 million, IIT-B will use edX’s open source platform to increase the number of qualified and experienced engineering educators in India and beyond,” says Prof. Agarwal.