JOIN USThe Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore (IIMB) will introduce free Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) in several areas taught by none other than the professors from the premier institute. The facility will be available by next month.
The objective of launching MOOC is to take IIMB courses to a wider section of people. The courses are being offered in association with edX, a non-profit online initiative by MIT and Harvard.
The IIMB will start as many as eight MOOCs by the end of the year and 10 by the by next academic year. The initiative will begin with four courses next month.
Speaking at the inauguration of the courses here on Thursday, Dr Sushil Vachani, Director, IIMB said:“The way education will be delivered in future will be radically different from what it is now. Setting up a campus like the IIMB requires 100 acres of land and other infrastructure. This kind of real-estate based education is not easily possible,” Vachani said. But he said MOOCs could presently only be used to “supplement education”.
Dr Vachani also spoke about customising these courses for various organisations and companies. But they will be charged “a lot more.”
Anant Aggarwal, CEO, edX, who spoke via video conference, said that at present, four-and-a-half million people had enrolled for its courses, of whom five lakh students were from India alone. Stanford University, UC Berkeley, IIT Bombay are some other institutes in edEx.
Dr Vachani said that 10,000 students had already enrolled for the courses; 5,000 are for Business Statistics alone.
Shankar Venkatagiri, professor at IIMB who will be teaching the course in Business Statistics said that people over 70 were also enrolling for the course.
There are also as many as 150 PhD holders. Even the IIMB director will be taking a course in December.
Enrolment from July 7
Starting July 7, students can enrol for courses in Business Statistics, Innovation and IT Management and Operations Management. Each course will be of four to five weeks long and will be imparted through multimedia—video lectures, audios, infographics, quizzes and even group discussions.
At the end of the course, students will get a certificate of completion. Although the courses will be offered primarily in English, as part of its objective to reach a maximum number of people, the courses will also be transcribed in Hindi and subsequently to other languages. Log on to: https:// www.edx.org, to enrol.