On 25 th January 2019 at Alliance School of Business, Alliance University Bangalore, we had an interesting Open Forum session where Dr. Sukanya Kundu from the Operations Management stream spoke on the Perception and expectation levels of Massive Open Online Course (MOOCs) from 3PM to 4.15 PM.
 |
| 25 Jan 2019 Open Forum meeting |
Dr Sukanya has done more than ten Coursera MOOCs on different subjects, while the other speaker Dr. Satish Menon had done some from the Indian government MOOC provider, National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) from Delhi.
Dr. Satish Menon is presently doing a series of 4 MOOCs from EdX offered by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston on Business Analytics, to be completed with a capstone Project.
I am sure some specialists from NPTEL would be interested in knowing why NPTEL MOOCs are a big failure and sucks !!
Each NPTEL MOOC video is about 30-60 min duration and dragging, when we know human attention span cannot be got for more than 10 mins. Coursera and EdX MOOC videos are never more than 10 mins in duration.
I have unfortunately not taken NPTEL MOOCs, having completed some from Coursera and EdX three four years back . It is a matter of great pride that one of the first Blended MOOC exercises from India was done in Alliance University during 2013-14 session by my students from MBA Jan batch. I presented regarding this experiment at a recent Future of Learning International Conference at IIM Bangalore on January 4,5 2019. (click here for the pdf of the paper..)
The audience was interested in knowing more about the differences and similarities of MOOC courses offered by NPTEL and Coursera/EdX.
NPTEL allows free access for their MOOCs for anybody (with the poorly designed and delivered content, even though we have very capable IIT Professors who can do a better job and some other privileged tech institutes enjoying central government funds). NPTEL charges Rs 1000/- for the certificate. Most of the Universities already allow 20% of credits to be selected from among the NPTEL courses. NPTEL exams are fully Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ) based on the tiring 60 min long recorded videos.
Dr Satish Menon is doing a MOOC module with MIT for which he has paid US $ 3600 (almost INR 250,000/- ) for a five course module and a capstone project. The MIT MOOC exams are evaluated by peers doing the courses, with expectations of what constitutes points for grading. Moreover the capstone project is a real time complicated issue. Dr Satish Menon is doing a complex capstone project of planning and executing an International Blood Bank Project.
The lively discussion which threw light on the vital differences, weak and strong points of both the Indian govt and foreign MOOC offerings, ended with the following outcomes.
1, NPTEL is poorly designed and executed, we need more professionalism in the system, but it is very cheap. NPTEL MOOCs have not yet caught the fancy of the Indian student community.
2. Privately run Coursera / Edx courses are taken by some of the most experienced Professors from some of the top world class academic institutes, but they are costly, if you want a certificate.
The Open Forum session was an eye opener to what a MOOC should be and what a MOOC should not be. It was sad to note how adminstrative authorities with power but no academic sense can kill a government project.
The Indian government needs to seriously address this quality issue of NPTEL if it is to succeed. Fortunately IIT Bombay and IIM Bangalore have their own Edx platforms and I am sure they will come successful wih flying colours in their MOOC designing and MOOC delivery experiments ..
George..
Sir, Like you said NPTEL MOOC is a very good platform and Govt. should add quality to it. But i hope the platform to transfer knowledge as open source remains the core idea. This is very important for students from every corner of the country to learn science with quality at will.
ReplyDelete