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For about two years since May 2012, Ankit Khandelwal from Kota, Rajasthan, has worked on his international management project. However, Khandelwal did not go to any regular business school. Instead, he used the free Massive Open Online Courses (Moocs) and OpenCourseWare (OCW) from top universities such as Harvard, Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) taken through the platforms of Coursera and edX to pursue his project.
“Over a 22-month period, Khandelwal studied materials from more than 20 MIT courses, including trade negotiations, mergers and acquisitions, and financial accounting, along with courses from other universities. “In order to lead/work with the global workforce, I also need to make myself more global; so I studied OCW courses on Russia, China, Japan, and Central Asia,” says Khandelwal.
This is what probably edX was aiming at when it began operations in early 2012. Beginning with two universities as partners, edX today has 60 partner institutions, 300 different courses and three million students, of which about 10 per cent or 350,000 students are Indians. “When edX first launched two years ago, we had no idea what to expect. And even today — with dozens of global institutions and millions of learners participating in edX Moocs —we, as an industry, have so much more to learn as we continue to develop online education. As colleges and universities see the impact of Moocs on learning, we’ll see more blended classrooms incorporated into the curriculum,” says Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX.
Ever since edX was founded by MIT and Harvard University in May 2012, France, China and Japan have created their national infrastructure using edX open source.
In India, the Union Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has given approval for signing a Joint Declaration of Intent between the Ministry of Human Resource Development and the US Department of State for cooperation in the field of higher education for Study Webs of Active-Learning for Young Aspiring Minds (SWAYAM), a programme for online education.
The SWAYAM platform server will be based in India and US universities will be invited to offer post-graduate academic programmes with certification on the SWAYAM platform. Officials said that this would be offered using open edX. From India, edX has Indian Institute of Technology - Bombay, Indian Institute of Management - Bangalore, and BITS - Pilani as partners. Agarwal says edX is in talks with other business schools and top schools to further their reach and partnership. edX has entered the school education space through its high school initiative. As a part of this programme, edX will offer 27 new courses geared to high school students across the world. The edX high-school MOOCs are developed by many of the best universities in the world, including UC Berkeley, Rice, MIT and include courses such as The Road to Selective College Admissions, apart from subjects such as geometry and algebra.
The objective of this programme is to offer high-quality, engaging and interactive courses to prepare high school learners for post-secondary studies. edX will also offer students a verified certificate option for a fee that will vary from course to course. edX also provides an option for getting a verified certificate. Approximately 1.1 per cent of all students who sign up opt for a verified certificate; for Indian students, the figure is 0.4 per cent.
After free education, edX plans to enter the online paid professional education space within the next few days. According to Agarwal, this would be a paid model which includes executive education, corporate training, and continuing education. edX has done a pilot paid course on Big Data with $500 fee and there were 141 students from India among the batch of 3,500 students who were part of the MIT Professional Education/Big Data pilot course.
The flip side of Moocs is that its success rate is not very high. Industry experts point out that 90 per cent of people who enrol for online classes fail to complete them.
According to Agarwal, the success rate of Moocs cannot be assessed using the tool used to assess traditional universities. He points out that the dropout is restricted to a small segment of a very diverse group of Moocs learners eager for access to education.
Data collected from edX shows 56 per cent of learners rated ‘gaining understanding of the subject matter for lifelong learning’, as an extremely important reason for taking an edX course, and 57 per cent cite ‘learning from the best professors in the world’. Notably, only 25 per cent rated ‘earning a certificate of mastery to add to my professional credentials’, as an extremely important reason for doing a course.
Agarwal says the completion rates among their active students show that certificate rates average 50 per cent, which go up to 80 per cent in certain courses. Similarly, the completion rates of learners who have paid for a verified certificate are 60 per cent. Agarwal notes that these numbers are well within the range of completion rates in traditional universities.
EdX has launched a Verified Certificate of Achievement for students wishing to receive a certificate at the end of the course.
Other Moocs providers are also gearing up to the growing opportunity. Lovleen Bhatia, co-founder and CEO of Edureka, says while Moocs is here to stay, there is a need to buttress the delivery methodology. Edureka provides instructor-led, paid online courses.
“These should necessarily increase learner engagement and better their learning process.” Bhatia explains that the general Moocs model consists of free recorded instructional videos with no live training sessions with industry experts, with no personalised feedback and assessment.
On the other hand, according to Bhatia, real-time, instruction-based learning techniques come with offerings such as live and interactive online training sessions, expert guidance for all courses, projects for hands-on experience, 24/7 support and lifetime access to course materials, among others.
He says the latter model ensures greater involvement of the student, scoring a 70 per cent course completion rate against general Moocs model’s four per cent among IT industry professionals.
Last year, Edureka received 20 times growth in users and 50 times growth in website visits. Bhatia notes that continued research and mapping of customers’ requirements have helped them come up with futuristic solutions, which allow students to understand, learn and comprehend a course with much more ease and clarity.
While 88 per cent of Edureka’s market is in India, 65 per cent of its revenue comes from abroad, says Bhatia. Edureka’s combined market consists of the US, the UK, India, East Europe, south-east Asia, Australia, North Africa and Western Europe. Indian student market base includes Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, and Chennai.
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