by Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, Mint & Wall Street Journal
The relative merits of classroom teaching versus online instruction are something for experts in pedagogy to argue about. But the ability to watch a Yale class in game theory or a Harvard class in ethics while sitting in front of a computer thousands of miles away is an opportunity that wasn’t available to most people till recently. At a more prosaic level, some science tutors in Mumbai complement their class lectures with short revision modules that they load on to the mobile phones of their students, who can then play them at any place, say, a city bus. There are early signs that Indian students are quickly adapting to online education, perhaps since it offers them an escape from the current mediocrity in the university system. Two recent stories in the Financial Times and Nature said India is the second biggest source of students for two large online initiatives—edX and Coursera. In fact, the Financial Times report mentioned the case of Amol Bhave, a 17-year-old from Jabalpur, who got admission into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US, thanks to his excellent performance in an online course on edX, which is backed by MIT and Harvard.
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