WHY MOOCS FOR THE FUTURE OF INDIAN HIGHER EDUCATION

WHY MOOCS FOR THE FUTURE OF INDIAN HIGHER

EDUCATION
Shri Bhadresh I Patel1, Shri Kiran M. Dave2, Shri Anilkumar A. Mistry3,

Shri

Ashokkumar A. Parmar4
1

Lecturer(SG), Computer Engineering Department, B.&B. Institute of Technology, Vallabh Vidyanagar, Gujarat,
India, Email: bipatel11@gmail.com
2
Lecturer(SG), Computer Engineering Department, B.&B. Institute of Technology, Vallabh Vidyanagar, Gujarat,
India, Email: kiran_1958@yahoo.com
3
Lecturer, Electrical Engineering Department, B.&B. Institute of Technology, Vallabh Vidyanagar, Gujarat, India,
Email: amistry8@gmail.com
41
Lecturer(SG), Electrical Engineering Department, B.&B. Institute of Technology, Vallabh Vidyanagar, Gujarat,
India, Email:parmarashok2002hod@gmail.com
Abstract The status of education has always been the primary factor of a nation that defines its academic
capital, human resource and vision of development. Replacing this education sector with the recent
advancements of technology would be one of the most concrete steps towards national development. In India,
20 million students with 20000 different courses contributed by 200 top universities and also over 5,000 or
more engineering colleges affiliated to different universities, offer conventional and engineering education.
Teachers in colleges do the teaching, but universities rigidly control the program of study, syllabus, and
examinations. The quality of education, is a matter of concern. MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses)
permit learners to access and benefit from the teaching by renowned professors. MOOCs offer an
unprecedented opportunity to revitalize education. These cause complete dis-intermediation of the university
system, making them very affordable; however, they have several shortcomings in their present form.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have evolved as a new paradigm of digitized open education which
could be implemented in a massive domain of India. In a developing country like India where significantly
large number of people live in rural areas and cannot afford quality education, MOOCs can definitely be
considered as game changer. MOOC is a platform where faculties and subject experts from all universities
and organizations across the world, come together to teach you the subject of your choice available in the
MOOC providers list.
Keywords Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), Online Education, India, Higher Education (HE)

I.
INTRODUCTION
The 2000s saw changes in online, or e-learning and distance education, with increasing online
presence, open learning opportunities, and the development of MOOCs. The special feature of
any correspondence or distance education until now has only been the transfer of courseware
through online medium. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have recently received a
great deal of attention from the media, entrepreneurial vendors, education professionals and
technologically literate sections of the public. The promise of MOOCs is that they will
provide free to access, cutting edge courses that could drive down the cost of university-level
education and potentially disrupt the existing models of higher education (HE).[4]
Massive Open Online Courses (commonly MOOCs) has emerged as a recent path-breaking
educational paradigm promoting openness in education to the all higher education institutes
MOOCs are also intending the business attentions since the extensive market in education is
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WHY MOOCS FOR THE FUTURE OF INDIAN HIGHER EDUCATION

unleashing potential. MOOCs scenario of the world, the prime hubs for conducting MOOCs
lie concentrated within the developed countries of the first world, especially UK, US and
Australia. But China, India etc. like developing countries contribute the majority of students
going abroad for higher education in these developed countries. Even the students from the
developing countries accessing MOOCs count to a significant number in terms of the total
student community accessing MOOCs. In India education sector also contribute economy and
significant development. Youths constitute about majority of the national population which
signify a huge potential area for higher education, India would obviously become a gamechanging superpower in terms of MOOCs in Asia. [6]
II. HIGHER EDUCATION IN INDIA [8]
The modern university in India is a Western import. It goes back to the establishment of three
universities in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras in 1857, as the colonial government looked to
educate a class of Indians to staff the growing bureaucracy. By the turn of the century, India had
five universities and 145 colleges, with 18,000 students (almost all male).
In 1947, when India became independent, 21 universities and 496 colleges were in operation. The
gross enrollment ratio (GER) was less than 1 percent, and female students were barely a tenth of
the total. But over the past quarter century, there has been an explosive expansion in Indian higher
education (Table 1).[8]
Table 1, Data for 199091 is from Ministry of Human Resource Development, Statistics of
Higher and Technical Education, 200809; data for 201212 is from the All-Indian Survey
on Higher Education, 201213.
199091
201213
184
184
Universities
Colleges

5748

5748

Students (millions)

4.9

4.9

GER (%)

4.3

4.3

Source: Data from Ministry of Human Resource Development

Four principal factors have driven this rapid growth. The first is simply demographic. With more
than 30 percent of the population below the age of 15 and more than five million people entering
the 1524 age group annually, the demographic momentum in the country is huge. Between
19912010, the population increase in the 1564 age group was 249 million; between 20102030,
it will increase by an additional 230 million.
Second, the college-age population is more prepared for higher education than its predecessors.
Near universal primary enrollment, resulting from a combination of public funding and private
efforts, has led to substantially higher secondary school enrollments and has been further boosted
by a national secondary school program launched in 2009.
Third, rapid economic growth as well as greater integration into the global economy has increased
the demand for people with advanced knowledge and skills. Finally, demand for higher education
is being driven by major changes in the aspirations of the population, as well as state policy that
aims to increase the gross enrollment ratio to 30 percent by 2020. Already, India has the second
highest number of students (after China) enrolled in institutions of higher education in the world.
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It should, however, be emphasized that quantity is not quality. The vast majority of the students
are very poorly trained.
The supply response has been taking place at several levels. The firstand the most important in
quantitative termsis the rapid expansion of private colleges (and increasingly, private
universities), largely affiliated with state-level universities, especially in professional education.
By 2013, nearly three fourths of all colleges in India were privately managed.
The second has been the effort of the federal government to expand the supply of national higher
education institutions. While these are regarded among the best in the country, they enroll only a
tiny fraction of all postsecondary students.
Third, a new emphasis on skilling came with the 2008 creation of the National Skill
Development Corporation (NSDC), which is charged with providing skills to 500 million people
by 2022, much of it by private vocational training providers (VTPs) and assessing bodies. The
central government is providing funds to state governments for the reimbursement of training
and assessment costs. Finally, distance education constitutes 11.9 percent of the total enrollment
in higher education. With all this activity, Indian higher education faces multiple challenges. The
governance of higher education is weak, both at the regulatory level and within institutions of
higher education. The quality of education for the vast majority of institutions and students is
dismal. Surveys suggest that barely a quarter to a third of graduates are employable, lacking both
domain knowledge and soft skills. With millions of young Indians entering labor markets with
aspirations and formal credentials but few skills, the economic, social, and political
consequences of this mismatch do not augur well. At the heart of this challenge is a massive lack
of qualified personnelironically the very purpose of higher educationto administer, teach, or
conduct research. As of July 2014, the faculty vacancy rate in the Indian Institutes of Technology
and the 39 central universities was 40 percent (Rukmini, 2014).Fragmentation increases the
challenge. The average size of a higher education institution in India is about 700 students, less
than half of that in China.
III. TRENDS OF EXPANSION OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN INDIA A VISION OF
OPEN LEARNING AND MOOCS [6], [8]
According to Martin Trows classification of stages of Development of higher education (Trow,
2006), a country is at an elite stage of higher education when the gross enrolment ratio (GER) is
less than 15 per cent; at a stage of massification when the GER is between 15 and 50 per cent
and at a stage of universalization when the GER reaches 50 per cent mark. As per this definition,
the higher education sector in India with a GER of 21.1 per cent in 2012-13 is in its initial stages
of massification.
Although the system remains at the lower end of the massification, India enrolls a larger number
of students than the largest country (such as USA) which has universalized higher education.
With around 28.5 million students, 0.70 teachers and 35 thousand institution in 2011-12 (MHRD,
2012a), the higher education sector in India is not only large but also the second largest in the
world after China. Higher Education is a diversified sector and huge domain in India. Indias
higher education system ranks third largest in the world after China and the United States. The
expansion of the higher education sector in India, especially in the recent past, is very impressive.
Between 1951 and 2012 the number of universities and institutions of national importance increased
from 27 to 621; colleges from 578 to 34.9 thousand and students from around 200 thousand to 28.5
million. However, the expansion was the fastest in the decade of 2000s. The enrolment increased from
8.8 million in 2001-02 to 28.5 million in 2011-12. This implied an addition of around 2 million students
annually to the sector making it the highest expansion for any decade (1).
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The growth and expansion of higher education in India during the post-independence period can broadly
be categorized into three stages: i) a stage of high growth and limited access (1950-70); ii) a stage of
declining growth in enrolment (1970-1990); and iii) a stage of revival and massive expansion of
enrolment in higher education 1990 and after (Varghese, 2014). Let us discuss the characteristics of each
of these stages.

Open and distance learning in India is the largest of its kind in the world. India boasts of having
Indira Gandhi Open University, the largest university in the world, In due course, more open
universities (including 12 state open universities and 119 institutions of correspondence courses
in conventional universities) were introduced under the headship of Distance Education Council
(DEC) to cater wide and open education throughout [4]. However, with the ensuing digital era,
different courses in these open universities have been supported with digital study materials.
Some of these are also available online. However, the number of online courses is scarce
compared to the whole course domain. Hence MOOCs, India has no concrete Government setup
running to provide such courses. However different private operated MOOCs providers of Indian
origin provide such courses to the learners. Discussing over a world scenario, Indian students lag
in MOOCs enrolment compared to the developing nations. But when compared within the
developing nations India holds the highest number of students for MOOCs enrolment. Also it
leads the BRICS nations in this respect. But analyzing the status in a deeper view, reports
showcase that most of these MOOCs enrollees from India have enrolled for the MOOCs
providers having foreign origin. This interprets the poor scenario of India-based MOOCs in spite
of having a huge prospective market.
IV. A NEW MODEL FOR HIGHER EDUCATION [7], [2]
While India's sheer size may make its higher education challenges more immense, the underlying
issues are common across most low and middle-income countries. Traditional brick-and-mortar
higher education institutions are failing to meet the educational needs of growing populations in
India and elsewhere in the Global South.
Developing academic programs, building reputations, attracting students, recruiting faculty, and
creating appropriate governance structures require large resources of time, talent, and treasury, as
well as coordinated private-public partnerships to achieve national scale. While countries in the
Global South, India included, are embarking on that path, it is not a realistic way to meet
educational demand, particularly in the near term.
In their paper focusing on the effect MOOCs may have on business education, Ulrich and
Terwiesch (2014) illuminate the very high cost of providing traditional university education. The
researchers focus on business education, but they believe (and we agree) that the implications of
their findings extend beyond business school to higher education in general. They find that by
taking advantage of online education that uses chunked asynchronous video paired with adaptive
testing, as MOOCs generally do, business schools can save sizeable sums of money while still
delivering a quality product.
In one example, an online executive education program with a tenure-track faculty and $4,000 fee
generates $1,000,000 in surplus for the business school over the 10-year life of a course, while a
comparable MOOC-style course with a price point of $400 would generate $3,680,000 in surplus
over the same period. The difference comes from cost savings during each subsequent course
offering after the course module has been developed, as well as from the significantly expanded
enrollment opportunities of the MOOC-style course.

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In places where well-functioning higher education systems already exist, it is hard to imagine a
sea-change in the way education is delivered along the lines of what Ulrich and Terwiesch outline.
A powerful combination of student, faculty, and administration interests are likely to maintain the
residential university experience, along with the many tacit benefits that come along with it.
However, in India and much of the Global South, where states and universities are struggling to
meet demand for higher education, a new educational model that offers high-quality courses at a
low price to a much larger number of students is exactly what is needed.
Another area of cost saving not touched on by Ulrich and Terwiesch is the ability to take
advantage of the course-development work that leading universities around the world are already
involved in. Coursera, edX, the Open Learning Initiative, and other online course providers have
already developed hundreds of free courses. Some organizationssuch as Kepler, based in
Kigali, Rwandaare already taking advantage of these courses to educate college-age Rwandans.
We believe that traditional university coursessupplemented by high-quality online courses
offered by leading universities and third-party organizations that repurpose freely available
content from universities around the worldcan comprise a new higher education ecosystem in
the Global South. This would not only provide higher education access to a far greater number of
students but also improve quality both directly and by example, as well as increase the variety of
and flexibility of higher education programs to better suit the diverse needs of students.
In order for this new model to succeed, the credentialing challenge must be met. If local
universities are offering their own content online for credit, the question of credentialing or
obtaining a degree will be handled by that university. However, for third-party organizations that
assemble a curriculum of free courses from a group of universities and facilitate student
completion of those courses, the question of who, if anyone, certifies that these students have
learned the course material remains open.
Without trusted credentialing that can signal to an employer that a student has mastered the course
content, the supply-chain from education to employment will break down and many students'
primary motivation for enrollment will disappear. In a later section of this paper we look more
closely at this issue
V. THE FIRST WAVE OF INDIAN MOOCs STUDENTS [7],[9]
A new education landscape that combines online learning environments with brick-and-mortar
classrooms may be able to deliver high-quality education at an affordable cost to a large number
of students, but it will need to attract students. Findings from data and surveys of the first 1.7
million participants in Penn's Coursera courses suggest that this will not be a problem. Indeed,
students around the world are clamoring for new educational opportunities.
Two thirds of the 1.7 million students who have enrolled in a Penn Coursera course have come
from outside the United States. Half of those non-US students, over 500,000 enrollees, have been
from non-OECD countriesdespite the fact that the largest MOOC providers, including
Coursera, are based in the United States; more than half of Coursera's institutional partners are US
universities; and MOOCs are taught almost exclusively in English.
Furthermore, access to MOOCs requires adequate technology and a high-speed internet
connection in order to stream or download video content, complete quizzes, and participate in the
student forums. Despite these barriers, international participants demonstrate enormous interest in
MOOC options.
Students from India in particular are signing up for MOOCs in large numbers. In virtually every
study, Indians comprise the second largest national group enrolling in these courses (after
participants from the United States), ranging as high as 13.2 percent in an analysis of the first year
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of edX MOOCs at Harvard and MIT (Ho et al., 2014). Indians make up 6.9 percent of the first 1.7
million students to take a MOOC offered by Penn. They significantly outpace the next largest
groups: Brazilians (4.0 percent), Russians (3.3 percent), Canadians (3.3 percent), and Chinese (1.9
percent). An additional 2.5 percent of MOOC students are Indians living abroad.
This population of Indian students is an interesting case study of the role that open online
education could play in higher education in the developing world, what types of students are
likely to take advantage of new online education models, and what stumbling blocks exist on the
road to wider MOOC adoption.
First, MOOCs are supplementing rather than substituting for traditional higher education for
many students in India. MOOC students are on average very highly educated (or rather,
credentialed), and Indian MOOC students are more educated than their non-Indian peers. Most
(84.3 percent) of Indian MOOC students have postsecondary degrees; nearly 40 percent have
graduate degrees (Table 2).
But nearly 40 percent of Indian MOOC students are also currently enrolled in a traditional
undergraduate or graduate education settinga larger number than among the non-Indian MOOC
student population (Table 2). Of these students, approximately half are currently enrolled in an
undergraduate program, and half are enrolled in a graduate program. Indian MOOC students, with
a median age of 26, are also significantly younger than other MOOC participants.
So while the majority of Indian MOOC enrollees are already in the workforce, a sizeable and
larger-than-average number of young Indians are combining traditional learning with MOOC
learning. These students may be supplementing poor-quality traditional educational options,
enrolling online in courses that are not being offered by their brick-and-mortar institutions, or
even preparing themselves for entrance exams into the most competitive traditional institutions.
The picture that seems to be emerging in India is one in which MOOCs are able to fill in some of
the gaps of an underperforming higher education system and provide opportunities that students
are eager to avail themselves of.
However, the fact that so many of the Indian MOOC students have already passed through the
Indian higher education system suggests that MOOCs are not primarily a higher education tool
rather, they mostly serve professional-training needs. The majority of Indian MOOC students are
employed full-time and using the courses to develop skills that help them at their current job or
will help them find a new one (Christensen et al., 2013). Employed Indian MOOC students and
those currently looking for work are predominantly drawn from industries with relatively welldefined skill sets and promising job prospects. Specifically, 70 percent of employed Indian
MOOC students work in STEM fields (engineering, computers or mathematics) or business.
VI. BARRIERS TO ACCESS [4], [7]
While there is much to be optimistic about in terms of the potential for MOOCs to augment
higher education in the developing world, it is important to consider the barriers to access and the
populations that have been largely excluded from the first wave of MOOCs.
There are at least four major barriers that students need to overcome in order to enroll in and
engage with a MOOC in a technical field: 1) reliable access to broadband internet and a computer,
tablet, or mobile phone to retrieve course content, 2) adequate primary and secondary education
that has prepared the student to understand university-level academic content, 3) strong English
language skills, and 4) free time to devote to watching lectures, completing readings, and
submitting assignments. Courses in the humanities and the social sciences have the additional
challenge of contextually grounded content and its appropriateness in different cultural settings.
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In the developing world in general, and in India specifically, these barriers are undoubtedly
restricting access to MOOCs to the small subset of the population that is middle and upper
income. Moreover, two major groups are conspicuously underrepresented among Indian MOOC
students, even if they pass the income test.
Table 2, POPULATION AND MOOC PARTICIPATION IN INDIA'S 10 LARGEST CITIES

City Name
Mumbai
Delhi
Chennai
Bangalore
Hyderabad
Ahmedabad
Pune
Kolkata
Jaipur
Total

Population (2011)
12,478,447
11,007,835
8,696,010
8,425,970
6,809,970
6,352,254
5,049,968
4,486,679
3,073,350
66,380,483

Percent of Total
Population (2011)
1.0%
0.9%
0.7%
0.7%
0.6%
0.5%
0.4%
0.4%
0.3%
5.5%

Percent of Indian
MOOC Students
17.3%
16.9%
7.8%
19.3%
6.2%
0.9%
2.7%
3.5%
0.5%
75.1%

First, Indian women make up just 20 percent of Indian MOOC students. This female enrollment
rate is less than half that of non-Indian MOOC participants. It also stands in stark contrast to the
gender breakdown at traditional Indian universities, where the Gender Parity Index (GPI) has
climbed to 0.86, indicating less unequal participation among men and women in traditional higher
education in India.
There are a number of factors that are likely contributing to this gender disparity in MOOCs,
including unequal access to technology, lower rates of female participation in STEM fields, and
limited job prospects for females. Whatever the causes, the gender disparity is a major obstacle to
overcome if MOOCs are to be used as a tool to meaningfully and equitably expand educational
opportunities in the developing world.
Second, few rural residents of India are enrolling in MOOCs. According to a geo location of IP
addresses, three quarters of all Indian MOOC students reside in one of India's ten largest cities,
despite the fact that those cities only account for approximately 6 percent of the Indian population
(Table 2). Not only that, but over half of Indian MOOC students come from Mumbai, Delhi, or
Bangalore, which suggests that enrollment in MOOCs is an urban phenomenon that is very highly
concentrated in the most populous, developed, and prosperous Indian cities.
Access to internet and computing technology is an obvious hurdle for MOOC access in rural
India, along with significantly weaker English language skills that would make it impossible to
understand most MOOC courses. However, with two thirds of India's population still residing in
rural areas, any conversation about how MOOCs can help meet educational demand that the
traditional higher education system cannot needs to consider how to do so in rural as well as urban
areas.
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In mid-2014, according to data released by the Telcom Regulatory Authority of India (2014), the
total number of internet subscribers was 260 million. Of these, wired internet subscribers were 19
million and wireless subscribers 241 million. Broadband subscribers were 68 million (or around a
quarter of all households). This suggests that to increase access, it will be necessary to deliver
content to mobile devices, customize content for local realities (including language), and build
communities of practice that can leverage peer-to-peer learning.
VII. CONCLUSION
India is the second biggest market for MOOCs (massive open online courses) in the world,
following the US. In time, however, India may surpass the US. After all, India's population is
second to China's and India is third in terms of university enrollment worldwide; respectively the
US and China are first and second for university enrollment at the moment but this may soon
change. [7]
MOOCs represent a huge opportunity for Indians in terms of an open education revolution. It
could potentially give millions access and availability to high quality learning if they have
Internet connectivity. First, there are more applicants than slots at top Indian universities. Second,
millions of Indians live in poverty and are unable to afford or gain access to a higher education.
Dr. Sugata Mitra, however, has shown than even in the slums of India, young Indian children
often have tremendous potential for learning with digital technology. He has shown that kids from
the slums are often more capable of learning at high levels with digital technology than previously
thought or assumed and are essentially diamonds in the rough of an educational forest, so to
speak. Third, Internet connectivity is not always available throughout India, which is often a
barrier for open education and MOOCs. Even when Internet connectivity is available, bandwidth
might be too low or slow for videos to stream. [7]

Fig.1 Top 3 of 98 countries MOOCS University Request [5]

For these reasons and many others, US-based MOOC providers are entering partnerships with
Indian colleges or universities or making alternative arrangements to make MOOCs more
accessible and available in India. The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay), for
example, is the first college in India to join not-for-profit edX and to offer MOOCs. The
partnership was created to fill a specific need in India: training engineering teachers. The
partnership will extend an open engineering education to a global audience, though the US and
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India are the largest populations of edX learners worldwide and will be the primary recipients of
the partnership of an open engineering education.
Coursera and Udacity (both for-profit ventures) have also been making arrangements to make
MOOCs more accessible and available in India. Coursera is working on a mobile application so
students from poorer backgrounds can access MOOCs on Akash tablets. It is also offering a
course on web intelligence and big data with the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT Delhi).
Perhaps not surprisingly, since Coursera currently produces the largest number of MOOCs
worldwide, they have seen a huge increase in Indian student enrollment as well.
Udacity, too, has seen Indian enrollment increase over the past year. In May, Udacity teamed with
Georgia Tech and AT&T to offer the first online massive open online master's degree program in
computer science for less than $7000 in tuition. The program is specifically targeted to India and
the Middle East. The deal is seen as revolutionary within higher education circles and many
administrators are eagerly awaiting the results.
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