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IITs, Infosys,
TCS, to offer free online courses
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MUMBAI: Seven leading IITs, Infosys, TCS,
Cognizant and industry lobby Nasscom are coming together to launch a bunch of
free, online courses that could potentially help 100,000-150,000 people a year
get high-quality education and make them job-ready.
The courses will be offered using the model of massive open online courses (MOOCs),
which is globally creating an upheaval in the world of higher education. The
first three courses in computer science are expected to roll out this October
. ( Read :
What is MOOC: Massive open online courses - Srikumar.com )
"This programme is particularly relevant to India
because of the high number of young students who need to be educated and
trained," says Lakshmi Narayanan, vice-chairman of Cognizant.
MOOCs
make high-quality education from top universities accessible to anyone, anywhere
in the world, online and for free.
The model was rolled out in early 2012 back-to-back by two start-ups, Udacity
and Coursera, both emerging out of Stanford University. This was followed by edX,
MIT-Harvard's online courses platform.
About 15 faculty members from the seven older IITs will form the faculty and are
currently designing the course.
The participating IITs are Delhi, Madras, Kharagpur, Kanpur, Roorkee, Bombay,
and Guwahati.
"We are currently working out the details of the programme in consultation with
Nasscom," says Prof Bhaskar Ramamurthi, director, IIT-Madras.
"We are also hoping to rope in more than 500
mentors on a voluntary basis from industry and academia," adds AK Ray, professor
of the Centre for Educational Technology at IIT-Kharagpur.
This is the biggest industry-academia partnership to help students and
professionals access top-quality course content and meet specific industry
demands. "For the first time, students from both rural areas and metros will
have access to the same content, channel, tests, experts and certification,"
says Cognizant's Narayanan.
People who take the courses will be eligible to write proctored exams for a
minimal fee and get certificates. For the computer science courses,
IIT
will give certification. For the foundation courses, industry will give
certificates. It could also be a joint certification with IITs.
"Students from the second year onwards in science and engineering from any
college can take the courses that will be offered multiple times a year," says
Andrew Thangaraj, associate professor of electrical engineering at IIT-Madras.
"It will make a difference in their career progress."
Google
is providing its Course Builder platform for hosting MOOCs. HackerRank will
provide their web portal, where students can practise their programming
assignments and get them verified and graded.
Till now, IITs have been offering open courseware on the National Programme on
Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL). This is a repository of video lectures
created by professors of the seven older IITs and IISC-Bangalore available to
anyone, anywhere in the world on
Youtube etc. However, NPTEL does not give any certification; neither does it
have any interaction or synchronised classes. In the next phase of NPTEL, all
these seven IITs and industry have joined hands to offer courses on the
web-based MOOCs platform, which will also offer certification
Source:
Economic timesArticles:
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