Open Access is an initiative that aims to make scientific research freely available to all. To date our community has made over 100 million downloads. It’s based on principles of collaboration, unobstructed discovery, and, most importantly, scientific progression. As PhD students, we found it difficult to access the research we needed, so we decided to create a new Open Access publisher that levels the playing field for scientists across the world. How? By making research easy to access, and puts the academic needs of the researchers before the business interests of publishers.
We are a community of more than 103,000 authors and editors from 3,291 institutions spanning 160 countries, including Nobel Prize winners and some of the world’s most-cited researchers. Publishing on IntechOpen allows authors to earn citations and find new collaborators, meaning more people see your work not only from your own field of study, but from other related fields too.
To purchase hard copies of this book, please contact the representative in India:
CBS Publishers & Distributors Pvt. Ltd.
www.cbspd.com
|
customercare@cbspd.com
With the largest population of the world and one of the highest enrolments in higher education, India needs efficient and effective means to educate its learners. India started focusing on open and digital education in 1980’s and its efforts were escalated in 2009 through the NMEICT program of the Government of India. A study by the Government and FICCI in 2014 noted that India cannot meet its educational needs just by capacity building in brick and mortar institutions. It was decided that ongoing MOOCs projects under the umbrella of NMEICT will be further strengthened over its second (2017–21) and third (2021–26) phases. NMEICT now steers NPTEL / SWAYAM (India’s MOOCs) and several digital learning projects including Virtual Labs, e-Yantra, Spoken Tutorial, FOSSEE, and National Digital Library on India—the largest digital education library in the world. Further, India embraced its new National Education Policy in 2020 to strongly foster online education. In this chapter, we take a deep look into the evolution of MOOCs in India, its innovations, its current status and impact, and the roadmap for the next decade to address its challenges and grow. AI-powered MOOCs is an emerging opportunity for India to lead MOOCs worldwide.
Department of Computer Science and Center for Data Science and Analytics, Ashoka University, Sonepat, India
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India
*Address all correspondence to: ppd@ashoka.edu.in, ppd@cse.iitkgp.ac.in, partha.p.das@gmail.com
1. Introduction
MOOCs in India have evolved significantly over the past decade, providing access to quality education, bridging the skills gap, and democratizing learning, with a future focused on localized content, emerging technologies, and partnerships with employers.
– ChatGPT, 23:22, 14 May 2023.
India is a young nation in an aging world. The median age in India is about 28, compared to 37 in China and the US, 45 in Western Europe, and 49 in Japan. This simple stats, known as demographic dividend1, is the main steam behind the resurgence and emergence of India as a global leader in various domains. Early this year (2023), India has surpassed China as the world’s most populous country [1] and as one of the largest work-forces2 globally. During the next 25 years, one in five working-age group persons will be living in India. As ET rightly quotes [2] a report of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII)
“If India’s demographic dividend is productively employed, growth prospects will brighten, helping it to leapfrog its GDP from the current $3 trillion to $9 trillion by 2030 and $40 trillion by 2047.”
This certainly is an extraordinary opportunity with a temporal window spanning nearly five decades [3] from 2005 to 2006 to 2055–2056. India will need to focus on the right policies [4] to reap rich dividends from this demographic transition.
The mammoth size of the work force alone cannot take the nation forward; in fact it may become a huge liability, unless this working age population is skilled and is employable. According to India Skill Reports 2022 and 2023 [5, 6, 7], employability in India has improved3 from 33% in 2014 to 46.2% in 2022, and to 50.2% in 2023. Yet, nearly half of the working population is still unemployable. This certainly is a big concern.
Raising education standards, in both rural and urban sectors, is naturally of foremost priority [3]. Every child needs to complete high school and go on to skilling, training, and vocational education. Only schools with modern curricula, open digital universities for higher education, and adoption of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) at scale can contribute significantly to India’s qualified workforce.
Thoughts about scaling the quantity as well as quality of education has been around since the onset of the demographic transition window4. However, in 2013, Ministry of Education5 (MoE) undertook an in-depth study on the issue jointly with Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI). The findings firmly corroborated the adoption of MOOCs at a national level. We quote:
“The Indian higher education system has undergone massive expansion to become the largest in the world enrolling over 70 million students. Such expansion would have been unimaginable without the extensive use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools. To illustrate, if India were to create this additional capacity through increase in brick and mortar institutions alone, it would have had to build six universities and 270 colleges each and every month in the last 20 years have been impossible to achieve with India’s limited resources. Instead, India chose to go the MOOCs way.”Source: From 2013 to 2030: the nuts and bolts of transformation [8], p. 11. More in [9]
This reaffirmation of faith on MOOCs resulted in accelerated growth of the digital education system in India riding on the wings of National program on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) from 2001, NPTEL Online Certification (NPTEL-NOC) from 2014, Study Webs of Active-Learning for Young Aspiring Minds (SWAYAM, India’s own MOOCs) from 2016, University Grants Commission’s (UGC) approval of credit earning from SWAYAM in 2016, and finally National Education Policy (NEP) in 2020.
The pandemic put a brake on the world and the world leaders of MOOCs like Coursera, edX, and FutureLearn lost 30 to 50% of enrolment [10] in 2021 over 2020. But SWAYAM managed to stay at the same level as India moved faster on MOOCs to protect and build its education. And since then it has been growing strongly—not only in numbers, but also in depth, diversity, and deployment. We tell that story in this chapter.
1.1 Background
Starting with Vedic Education (∼1500 BCE) and subsequent Buddhist Education (∼500 BCE) India has had a rich tradition of education systems since the Ancient era. It followed the Gurukul system of learning where the student (shishya) lived near or with the teacher (guru) and got educated through oral instructions (shruti) in an one-on-one interaction. Over time the need of scale led to the emergence of education hubs6 [11] at multiple places such as Takshashila (∼600 BCE), Nalanda (∼400 CE), and Vikramashila (∼800 CE). These institutes continued with the gurukul style and drew learners from far and middle east. However, scriptures (written forms of education) started to complement shruti and group-instructions started to supplement one-on-one instructions. Education systems continued flourish in the Medieval (∼600 CE–∼ 1600 CE) and Early Modern (Moghul) eras (1526 CE–1850 CE) through the proliferation [11] of Maktabs and Madrasas7 at places such as Delhi, Agra, Jaunpur, and Bidar. Beginning of the Modern era witnessed the invasion of and capture by the British. They systematically dismantled8 [12] the traditional Indian education system9 to introduce classrooms-centric teaching with multitudes of rigid institutional framework. For over 150 years India has been following that system to the letters. In this chapter, we refer to this as Traditional or Brick-and-Mortar10 or Classroom System of Education.
Since independence in 1947, India focused on building educational institutions11 at national scale. While many of these institutions such as IITs, IIMs, AIIMS started to shine very soon, within a few decades the enormity of the scale of building brick-and-mortar institutions appeared daunting and India launched its Open and Distance Learning12 (ODL) programs through Indira Gandhi National Open University [13, 14] (IGNOU).
Easy availability of personal computers brought in a paradigm shift in the way students can learn using technology and Digital Learning13 started becoming commonplace in the 1990s. Teachers and students started using technology in the forms of soft copies of books, presentations, audios, videos, contents from repositories. During the early years, digital learning used technology yet the teacher and the student continued to be co-located at (almost) all times.
Advent of the internet elevated digital learning to the next level where the teacher and the student could be separated in space in Remote/Online Learning14. The education is relayed through technology, such as discussion boards, video conferencing, and online assessments.
Finally, online learning took to a massive scale with the introduction of MOOCs worldwide. We discuss that in the next section in depth as understanding of the MOOCs is key to understanding this chapter. In Table 1, we summarize the discussions above with a brief overview for and ontology of education systems in India.
Name of learning paradigms
Mode of study material
Space: teacher and student
Time: Sync/async
Intervening medium
Mode of interaction
Gurukul
Physical
Co-located
Sync
Face-to-face
One-to-One
Classroom
Physical
Co-located
Sync
Face-to-face
One-to-Many
Open & Distance
Physical
Separated
Async
Postal Mail
Sparse
Digital
Electronic
Co-located
Sync
Face-to-face
One-to-Many
Online/Remote
Electronic
Separated
Sync
Internet
One-to-Many
MOOCs
Electronic
Separated
Async
Internet
Machine-to-Many
Table 1.
Evolution of education systems in India.
Note: The ontology of educational paradigms are not standardized. Digital is often used more generically to mean physical as well as online learning using digital technology. e-Learning is taken synonymously with digital or online learning. Remote learning at times stands to mean Distance learning that may not be online. Traditional or Brick-and-Mortar and commonly use to mean Classroom. Finally, Hybrid as a mix of Classroom and Online.
1.1.1 Massive open online education (MOOCs)
MOOCs is Massive (designed to work at wide scales—from 10 to 10 thousand students or more), Open (for registration to all, for access to any content, and for free or affordable education), Online (using access to local or remote cohorts and real-time interactions over internet), Courses (self-paced with scripted assignments and instructor feedback—preferably with credit mobility and learning community support). MOOCs originated from connectivist cMOOCs (with focus on community and connections), and extended xMOOCs (with focus on scalability) in the early years of the millennium with the term “MOOC”15 being coined in 2008. Many US universities started offering free online courses for the public and Coursera [16] (Stanford), edX [17] (Harvard and MIT), and Udacity [18] (Stanford) emerged in 2011–2012 in US. Also, FutureLearn [19] (consortium of 12 universities) started in UK by the end of 2012. Figure 1 shows a simple schematic of this evolution process, MAUT [20] provides a brief history, and Aldahmani et al. [21] investigate the development process of MOOCs to assess their opportunities as well as challenges.
Figure 1.
Milestones in MOOCs and open education.
Over the past 10 years 1200+ universities across the world [22] have launched free online courses. Importantly, many countries including India (NPTEL [23], 2014 & SWAYAM [24], 2016), China (XuetangX16 [25], 2013), Italy (EduOpen [26], 2016), Israel (Campus-il [27], 2018), Mexico (MéxicoX [28], 2015), and Thailand (ThaiMOOC [29], 2017) launched their own MOOCs.
After about a decade of launch, MOOCs world-wide reached an enrollment [22] of 200 million in 2021. As of now, SWAYAM, India’s MOOCs, has an enrollment of 30 million and is steadily growing. Consequently, it is important and relevant to understand the various dimensions of MOOCs in India and explore the roadmaps. This chapter attempts to do that.
1.2 Motivation
In the last section, we have noted the transformation of education systems in India and the traction of MOOCs in India in the past decade. Recently, India’s commitment to MOOCs has reached a new height with Government of India (GoI), in its Union Budget 2022–2023, announcing [30] the establishment of National Digital University (NDU) to offer exclusively online courses from various public and private universities. Under NDU, courses will start from July 2023 and the students will be able to opt for certificate, diploma, or degree courses with credit mobility through Academic Bank of Credits (ABC) [31]. In view of this fast track for use and growth of MOOCs at national scale, it becomes imperative to study the evolution, present status, and future roadmap of MOOCs in India. Hence, we formulate a few research questions the answers to which would be key to the understanding and planning of MOOCs in India.
1.2.1 Research questions
RQ1: How has MOOCs (and its ecosystem) have evolved in India over the decades? What has been its connections to digital and online learning in general? What are the milestones?
RQ2: What are the innovations in processes and technology that MOOCs in India have created/adopted? Which of these innovations have been key game-changers?
RQ3: What has been the impact of MOOCs in India in terms of direct and indirect outcome? How is it transforming education in India?
RQ4: What are the challenges of MOOCs in India? How are these being addressed or can be addressed? Is India missing out on some key opportunities for innovation—especially in technology of MOOCs?
RQ5: What should be the roadmap for MOOCs in India for the next decade?
It is important to seek answers to these questions and/or accept that more research is needed to answer them as the nation raises various pertinent questions about education in the new age. For example, right before the start of the budget session of 2023–2024, Agarwal [32] asks “Why Swayam portal’s a dampener for Modi govt’s online learning dream. 3 cr signed up, 4% finished”—an oft-asked question on poor completion of MOOCs.
Next, we survey the literature to seek answers to these questions and identify the gaps which the current study intends to fill up in this chapter.
1.3 Literature survey
We survey two sets of literature to understand the state of the art for the research questions above.
We study literature on MOOCs in India to identify prior work relating to all the five research questions including evolution, innovation, impact, challenges, and roadmap. We survey over a dozen significant articles published during the past 5 years.
We also study literature on research on MOOCs in different countries to contextualize the research questions with respect to the developments across the world. We manage the enormity and complexity of such a study by focusing on about 10 significant review articles on MOOCs research published in the last 3 years.
1.3.1 Survey of literature on MOOCs in India
Over the past decade a lot has been written on MOOCs in India. Most of these articles provide overview of MOOCs projects in India with reference to infrastructure, investment, diversified needs, quality, web metrics, and challenges. They cover more or less the same ground and discuss similar points barring the temporally changing statistics. Some of the articles in this category, as published in the past 5 years, include Haumin et al. [33], Singh [34], Agarwal et al. [35], Sagar [36], Hooda et al. [37], Mishra [15], EdNet [38], Sharma et al. [39], and Amit et al. [40]. We relate to them in our discussions on questions of impact (Section 4) and challenges (Section 5.2).
In contrast to generic overview, Jaganathan et al. [41], Thakur et al. [42], and Pant et al. [43] compare SWAYAM with leading MOOCs of the world—private as well as country-led (including China) and identify a set of challenges for India. We address them in Section 5.2.
Finally, a few recent articles deal with unique questions and/or carry out novel analyses. For example, Varyani et al. [44] use Power-Interest Grid as a tool to analyze the problems and concerns of various stakeholders including students, teachers, parents, institutions, content /technology producers, and apex bodies. Singh et al. [45] show high acceptance of MOOCs as an alternative for internship for management students during pandemic and suggest that it may be extend for other domains also during the normal times. Kaicker et al. [46] highlight the need for Public-Private Partnership for MOOCs (Section 3.8) and online degrees.
1.3.2 Survey of literature on MOOCs research
The research on MOOCs is at least as old as the coinage of the term. Hence, we first take a look at the most cited research articles on MOOCs as compiled by Ledwon et al. [47] through an extensive analysis of citation data on Google Scholar. While these 20 papers have been well-cited and are impactful, they span 2008–2017 only as any paper would need 3 to 5 years to pile up an impactful citation. Hence, in the fast pace of technology, many of these papers have lost relevance for today’s MOOCs. In Table 2, we summarize 14 review articles starting with the seminal paper by Liyanagunawardena et al. [48]. Of these, nine papers are from 2019 to 2022 and provide comprehensive current state of the art in MOOCs research through their findings.
Finds four lines of research: (a) the potential and challenges of MOOCs, (b) MOOC platforms, (c) learners & content in MOOCs, and (d) the quality of MOOCs and
Bias toward theoretical or conceptual studies; neglect for analyses of actual practice.
Observes—quantitative methods, survey & interview for data, and descriptive statistics for analysis.
Focus on issues of students, followed by issues of design, context & impact, and instructor.
Attention to learner retention, learning experience, social learning, and engagement.
India has ∼10% MOOCs learners [54] of the world, yet its MOOCs is not studied here along with US, Canada, Australia, China, Israel, UK, Spain, Sweden, and The Netherlands
Use four dimensions—organizational, technological, social, and pedagogical—to ascertain the quality of MOOCs.
All but one article focus on only one or two dimensions, often pedagogical dimension.
Assign all 103 articles to the categories of the Quality Reference Framework for MOOCs [58], they observe that oft-neglected organizational, technical, and social dimensions are relevant and decisive for the design and quality of MOOCs.
Supervised ML to classify to 6 topics—institutional approach, pedagogical approach, evaluation, analytics, participation, and educational resources.
Content analysis by visual network analysis.
Least articles on pedagogical approach & educational resources; most on participation & evaluation.
Analytics and resources most cited; pedagogical and institutional less cited.
Table 2.
Summary of the reviews of MOOCs research.
1.3.3 Research gaps in literature
Based on the survey of literature, we identify the following gaps:
Most articles on MOOCs in India are repetitive and provide only generic overview with similar analyses of impacts, challenges, and resolutions.
No article talks about evolution of MOOCs and its necessary ecosystems in a comprehensive manner.
There is no attempt to evaluate MOOCs in India with respect to various process innovations.
Most studies comment on a select set of challenges without interrelating their possible resolutions.
Research on MOOCs in India as well as from India are both quite inadequate: Table 2 (Pradhan [52], Zhu et al. [53], and Meet et al. [56]).
Research on MOOCs is focused more on input (adoption) and much less on output and outcome (completion status, democratization) [56].
Some of the reviews are contradictory:
Stracke et al. [57] observe pedagogy as the dominant dimension of research, while Despujo et al. [63] find that pedagogy getting least attention17.
While Pradhan [52] finds marginal contribution in research from India and Zhu et al. [53] do not consider India while studying research in nine countries; Meet et al. [56] finds India having the third highest population of MOOCs researchers.
No review article on applications of emerging technology in MOOCs research like Knowledge Graphs, AI-powered MOOCs, or bots for MOOCs could be found.
1.4 Methodology
Given the national (pan-India) scope of the research in this chapter, we decided to use multitude of data sources and research methodologies.
1.4.1 Data sources
The major data sources (Figure 2) used for the study are summarized below:
Literature on MOOCs: Over 300 published articles on MOOCs (and related areas in digital/online education) are studied (about 60% of these are listed in the references). The study focused on seminal papers from the early years, extensive topical discovery for the past 5 years, and review papers for the rest.
NPTEL Data (2014–2022): Data of MOOCs offered in NPTEL from 2014 to 2022 along with various statistics such as enrolment, exam registration, exam attendance, pass percentage, local chapter engagement, student distinctions. Specific interest is focused on MOOCs impact data and data on various shortcomings and lacunae (gaps).
MOOCs/GoI Sites: MOOCs in India are significantly covered in GoI and institutional sites that provide a lot of program information along with rich time series data on MOOCs. These include but are not limited to NPTEL, SWAYAM, and IITM BS.
Expert Interviews: The author had the opportunity to be acquainted with a number of experts (and first-movers) of MOOCs in India. They have been interviewed (as a part of this study or earlier) to provide informative insights into various aspects of MOOCs in India.
MOOCs Hands-on: The author has been an active MOOCs instructor18. In the process, he has gathered a lot of hands-on information on MOOCs and had the opportunity to interact with participants on their feedback.
AI19/ML20& GPTs21: The author has conversed with ChatGPT (and other GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 engines) at length to explore specific AI developments for knowledge graph of MOOCs, AI-power MOOCs, and LLMs in MOOCs. This gives a good perspectives on what research is going on in this area.
Figure 2.
Methodology framework of the study with major data sources.
1.4.2 Data analysis
For each research question, multiple of the sources are used—each with a set of appropriate transformations as shown on the arcs in Figure 2.
EvolutionDigital/Online/MOOCs: To chronicle the evolution of MOOCs in India over decades, we first review articles from MOOCs literature and dates & chroniclers from MOOCs & GoI sites to identify significant events and then arrange them in a timeline with causal relationships. We validate and fill the gaps from interviews with experts. We present a single-page summary22 in Table 3 which is subsequently used in the chapter to understand the ecosystem and its causal transformations to assess the innovations, impacts, and challenges of MOOCs in India.
InnovationsProcess & Technology, Global & India: Innovations in MOOCs in India have primarily been in the processes of delivery, mentoring, engagement, and empowerment. Hence, to understand the innovations we study the processes in various MOOCs including NPTEL and IITM BS program in depth and identify the introductions of process innovations (with causal necessity and resultant outcomes) at different stages of the timeline. We complete the process using various innovation-guided filters on the data sources as shown in Figure 2.
ImpactEducational, Social & Economic: Impact is primarily assessed from NPTEL Data using various metrics. This is supplemented with literature review (including data from social media like Quora) and the hands-on experience of the author.
RoadmapChallenges, Research & Roads Ahead: Challenges are identified from published literature (indirect), MOOCs /GoI sites23 (indirect), NPTEL data (direct), and hands-on (direct). Availability and projections of emerging technology are extracted from the literature (and technology sites) in consultations with ChatGPT (with factual validations). Finally, experts are consulted on the recommendations of the roadmap.
MOOCs in most countries grew bottom-up. Typically, universities created contents and course providers distributed them [93]. For example, we had Coursera and Udacity from Stanford, edX from Harvard and MIT, or FutureLearn and 12 university partners in UK [76]. In contrast, MOOCs in India grew top-down through IGNOU, NMEICT, NPTEL, SWAYAM, and others, where the MoE coordinated the spectrum of initiative from open institutional education and educational content creation, distribution, and certification in associations with HEIs. MoE funded the projects at national level as well. Similar initiatives (Section 1.1.1) have also been taken by China [42] (XuetangX [25]), Italy (EduOpen [26]), Israel (Campus-il [27]), Mexico (MéxicoX [28]), and Thailand (ThaiMOOC [29]) where all but XuetangX are free. Notably, no other free MOOCs are as large as SWAYAM.
MOOCs need an ecosystem to exist, grow, and succeed. An ecosystem where Open Educational Resources (OER), OER Repositories, Open and Distance Learning (ODL), Open Credits and Certification, technology-leveraged processes (like Hybrid mentoring strategies, Industry Associates, Proctored Exams, Internships, and Credit Mobility), and most importantly a open mindset to accept and recognize education beyond the brick-and-mortar, exist and thrive in a harmonious manner. Further, this needs to be supplemented with technology (connectivity, authoring systems, interactions mechanisms, etc.), technical as well as domain expertise, and finances. In India, these happened over half-a-century mostly driven by MoE and partly in an organic manner and we chronicle the significant events of this period in Table 3.
2.1 Open University: Open and distance learning (1974–1985)
While pinning the onset of the process is difficult, we can trace this evolution to 1974 when Mr. Dipanshu Sharma from the Ministry of Education and Social Welfare organized a seminar [94] on Open University in collaboration with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the UGC, and the Indian National Commission for Cooperation with UNESCO. On the recommendations of the seminar, the GoI appointed an eight-member working group on the open university under the chairmanship of Prof. G. Parthasarathi, the-then Vice-Chancellor (V-C) of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). The working group recommended (Working Group Report [94], 1974) as follows:
“… establishing an open university by an act of parliament as early as possible … the university should have jurisdiction over the entire country so that, any student even in the remotest corner of the country can have access to its instruction and degrees.”
On the basis of the recommendations of the working group and several years of deliberations and due diligence, the Indira Gandhi National Open University Act, 1985 (IGNOU Act 1985) [13, 14] was passed by both the Houses of Parliament in August 1985 and the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) came into existence on September 20, 1985. India’s march on open education started.
Over 1000 students graduated with diplomas and were convocated in 1989, audio-video courses were the first broadcast by radio and television in 1990, UGC recognized degrees from IGNOU as being equivalent to other universities in 1992, the first virtual campus in India via Internet was launched in 1999. Meanwhile, things started moving in other fronts in India.
IGNOU has made a significant mark in the areas of higher education, community education, and continual professional development. It has been networking with reputed public institutions and private enterprises for enhancing the educational opportunities being offered by it. As a world leader in distance education, IGNOU has been conferred with awards of excellence by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), Canada, several times. As of 2020’s, IGNOU has [66].
Nearly 4 million enrolled students
21 schools and 67 regional centres
About 2667 study centres and 29 overseas centres (in 15 countries)
Approximately 20% of all students enrolled in higher education in India are enrolled with IGNOU.
Offers 274 academic programs comprising courses at certificate, diploma, and degree levels.
810 faculty members and 574 academic staff at the headquarters and regional centres and about 33,212 academic counselors from conventional institutions of higher learning, professional organizations, and industry among others.
2.2 Online and digital education (1985-2009)
Soon after IGNOU, India started realizing that open and distance learning cannot scale unless the telecommunications and (then emerging) information & video technology are engaged in it. Also, ODL meant using a pedagogy different from face-to-face classroom teaching24. All these needed focused research in what emerged to be known as Educational Technology or EdTech today.
In 1987, Prof. Anup Roy [86, 95] moved to IIT Delhi from NITTTR, Chandigarh, and setup the country’s first Educational Technology Services Center (ETSC)25. Working with VHS video tapes and miles-long physical wires, ETSC created the first fully interactive remote learning scenarios. Further, Prof. Roy setup Center for Educational Technology (CET) at IIT Kharagpur in 1995 and launched ELNet-3 L: Electronically Networked – Life Long Learning [67] in 1997. During 1997–1998, CET also connected 15 studios with video labs at Kharagpur, Bhubaneswar, and Raipur26.
Later in 1998, few directors of IITs and IIMs and some MHRD officials visited Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), USA, to learn online learning initiatives by Prof. Paul Goodman who had established an entire University in Mexico functioning completely on the Online Learning model. Impressed by the CMU model, hectic activities started for online education in India and NPTEL was conceptualized in 2001, initially for engineering education. By 2003, NPTEL (Phase 1) led by IIT Madras and collaborated by IITM, IITKGP, IITB, IITD, IITK, IITG, IITRm and IISc started creating video (recording of teaching) as well as web courses (animation with text). It soon created 100 of each type. Further, 700 courses were created by NPTEL (Phase 2) staring 2006. In Phase 3, by 2009, NPTEL moved to HD quality video courses and was scaling up in numbers.
Notably, most of the efforts in this period were focused on creation of quality content and its dissemination to the interested learners. As the time progressed, naturally the quality of recording and editing improved, pedagogy was getting better tuned for online, and the dissemination mechanisms evolved from VHS tapes to VCDs to DVDs/ pen drives to downloadable media on the internet (streaming video was not easy yet27).
The initial growth phase for online and digital education was coming to an end and India was getting ready to launch herself at a national scale.
2.3 National Mission on education through information and communication technology (NMEICT): Initial period (2009–2014)
National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) [69] – the title says it all. The country ventured on a mission mode to impart education by leveraging technology. By the turn of the millennium, India had already been a superpower in ICT serving all across the globe. It decided to use ICT to serve its own educational needs. India committed to the three cardinal principles of Education for All: Access, Equity, and Quality, served by:
providing connectivity to all higher institutions,
providing low cost and affordable access-cum-computing devices to students and teachers, and
providing high quality e-contents free of cost to all learners in the country
The Mission encompasses all these elements and has three major components:
No talent of the country should be allowed to go waste
All the services of content delivery through Sakshat28 should be free
Freely available material on the web should be reused
Following its launch, NMEICT launched several projects and programs in the next 5 years (2009–2014) for the core purposes of
Content Creation: Course contents such as presentations, videos, assignments, and solutions; Contents for learning programming and Open Source Software (OSS); Contents for learning Robotics; and Contents for virtually performing experiments
Content Delivery: Online courses maturing to MOOCs; Tutorials for programming; Embedded Systems Kits for Robotics
Certification and Credit Mobility: This happened a few years later in 2016—on full maturity to MOOCs
Content Repository and Digital Library: Open and free repository of digital learning contents created in NMEICT or reused from other sources; Support for various digital library services
Support Infrastructure & Activities: Academic Cloud for high-volume computing; e-Governance for academic campuses; Plagiarism detection for quality research; Unique researcher IDs and database for academic networking; Clubs and competitions for robotics; Local chapters for MOOCs; and so on.
These have been summarized in Table 4 and put in the timeline in Table 3. In addition to the NMEICT fold of projects, National Knowledge Network (NKN) [71] was established in 2010 for high-speed backbone connectivity between 1500+ institutions to enable knowledge and information sharing toward ushering in a knowledge revolution in the country.
School, UG, PG, Teachers, Life-long learners, Working professionals.
Robotics Clubs, and Regional and national competitions. Delivering indigenous kits for robotics.
National Initiative for School Heads’ and Teachers’ Holistic Advancement.
National Digital Library of India.
Open and Distance Learning.
VIDWAN means learned, knowledgeable.
Thus, during 2009–2014, India got ready with a strong ecosystem to go the MOOCs way at the national scale [102]. As of 2023, the footfall to different major projects as reported from NMEICT [69] site are:
2.4 Massive open online courses: NPTEL-SWAYAM (2014-2023)
Though NPTEL has been offering online courses since 2006 in multiple forms, these have not been as complete as normal courses to be used for curricular requirements. Students loved NPTEL courses for Quality—the quality of the teachers, the quality of teaching, and the quality of contents. Yet, they could use these courses only for better understanding and leaning, but were not being able to use them for their curricular requirements. And many, naturally, wanted to.
2.4.1 NPTEL
So NPTEL decided to go the full-fledged MOOCs way and started NPTEL Online Certification [64] (NPTEL-NOC) in 2014. About 600 video and web-based courses came to the fold with a well-developed four-quadrant pedagogy (Table 5). A course in NPTEL got structured as follows:
A course has a duration of 4, 8, or 12 weeks.
Every week the student gets to download 5 modules for the week.
Each module is discussed in a 30-minute video with presentation and video transcription files.
Every week has an assignment which the student has to complete and upload within a stipulated time. It is evaluated and the performance is shared with the student. The model solution is also shared.
The students also connect to a discussion forum where doubts are discussed and clarified.
An interactive live session is conducted with the instructor once every 4 weeks.
At the end of the course, a proctored examination is conducted physically in multiple cities where the student can take the examination showing an official ID.
Finally, the student gets the grade based on the performances in the assignments and the final examination. Passing students get a certificate from NPTEL. There are further distinctions to earn for good performances.
The course is free to attend (including assignments), while the final examination has a nominal fee.
Quadrant-I is e-Tutorial:
Video and Audio Content in an organized form
Animation, Simulations, Video demonstrations, Virtual Labs, etc.
Quadrant-II is e-Content:
PDF, Text, e-Books
Illustrations, video demonstrations, documents
Interactive simulations wherever required.
Quadrant-III is Web Resources:
Related Links, Wikipedia Development of Course
Open source Content, OER
Case Studies, books including e-books, research papers, & journals
Quadrant-IV is Self-Assessment:
Problems/Solutions: MCQ, MSQ, SA, LA, Matching
Assignments and solutions
Live Sessions
Discussion forum and FAQs
Table 5.
Four quadrant pedagogy of NPTEL [64] and SWAYAM [83].
As of January 2023, NPTEL bears the following stats [103]:
1.6 Billion+ views
4.4 M+ YouTube subscribers
2500+ unique courses available for self study
2.07 Cr. + enrollments
23.8 Lakh+ exam registrations
5322+ LC colleges
4707 MOOCs completed
70+ Industry associates
60,900+ hours of videos English subtitles
Riding on the acceptability of NPTEL courses, NPTEL-NOC soon proved to be very popular. Thousands of students started learning from them. This led to two questions:
Should MOOCs be limited to NPTEL, that is, primarily in engineering and science?
How can a student transfer the earned credit from NPTEL to college/university transcript?
In response to the first question, SWAYAM [83] was born in 2016, and a while later a new regulation was passed in response to the second question.
2.4.2 SWAYAM
SWAYAM [83] is designed to cover all aspects and disciplines of education. To ensure that best quality content is produced and delivered, nine National Coordinators (NC) have been appointed with respective focus areas:
AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education) for Self-paced and International courses
NPTEL for Engineering
UGC for Non-technical post-graduation education
CEC (Consortium for Educational Communication) for Under-graduate education
NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training) for School education
NIOS (National Institute of Open Schooling) for School education
IGNOU or Out-of-school students
IIMB (Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore) for Management studies
NITTTR (National Institute of Technical Teachers Training and Research) for Teacher Training program
The NCs have the mandate to drive SWAYAM within its specified guidelines [104]. While SWAYAM follows the same four-quadrant pedagogy (Table 5) like NPTEL, depending on the diversity of levels of education, requirements, and discipline, it follows multiple different course delivery and evaluation structures. In 2019, Singh [34] studied the working of the SWAYAM platform in respect of navigation, content management, interactions & communications, and assignment management from the responses of the faculty who have been developing MOOCs. Many of its recommendations got adopted over time.
As of October 2022, the major stats of SWAYAM have been as follows:
9.5 M+ Total registered Users
9 National coordinators: Operated by AICTE, NPTEL, UGC, CEC, NCERT, NIOS, IGNOU, and NITTTR
8000+ Total number of Courses hosted so far
2 M+ Exam registrations over 7 years
2.6 M+ July 2022 Semester enrollments
2.4.3 Credit mobility of MOOCs
UGC soon followed up with the regulation Credit Framework for Online Learning Courses through SWAYAM [105, 106] in 2016 and allowed (limited) credit mobility [107]. Credit Mobility has given a real boost to MOOCs as a strong supplementary arm of education is India which can play a deep curricular role. We discuss the details in Section 3.1.
2.4.4 Institutional MOOCs
While MoE led the country with the umbrella of NMEICT for MOOCs and related online education initiatives, there have been other efforts by institutions on specialized MOOCs. Year 2014 saw the emergence of three pioneering programs—IIMBx [81] from IIM Bangalore, IITBombayX [80] from IIT Bombay, and mooKIT [79] from IIT Kanpur. These are summarized in Table 6.
Connect with IIT Kanpur for 150+ courses in India and abroad having 2,00,000+ learners from 160+ countries.
School, UG, PG, Teachers, Life-long learners, Working professionals.
Offers Hybrid MOOCs with flipped classrooms, online lectures, and live sessions in multiple flavors—EduMOOCs (as extension courses), SkillMOOCs (vocational training), TeachMOOCs (for teachers), LifeMOOCs (for working professionals).
Offers MOOCs on SWAYAM, edX and IIMBx (open edX).
Developed by Coimbatore Institute of Engineering and Technology (CIET) and NCERT.
Developed by CIET & NCERT. Besides contents, students participate in exhibitions, contests, workshops; teachers /educators participate in research, and parents can learn to nurture creative talent.
A high-speed backbone connectivity for knowledge and information sharing between 1500+ institutions.
A PPP model between the GoI (through AICTE) and the EdTech companies of India. Selected companies showcase products on a national portal for the learners to purchase.
MeitY (through IITG) provides Financial Assistance to Set up Electronics and ICT Academies.
: First digital university of India—will operate as a hub for flexible online education.
Many other MOOCs or other online platforms are studied in Refs. [33, 41].
IIM Bangalore partnered with edX, a not-for-profit (at that time) online initiative of Harvard and MIT, to create IIMBx [81] platform for MOOCs in all areas of management—data and insights, economics, finance, marketing, people management, operations, and strategy. Apart from edX, the program offers courses on its own platform and SWAYAM for every kind of learner, ranging from first-generation entrepreneurs to college educators looking to teach better.
IIT Bombay, on the other hand, invested in IITBombayX Hybrid MOOCs Platform [80]. Its novelty hovered around its hybrid nature in the forms of flipped classrooms, online lectures, and live sessions. However, what stands out in this initiative is its the user-centric flavor where special MOOCs are designed and offered for Extension courses (EduMOOCs), Vocational training (SkillMOOCs), Training of teachers (TeachMOOCs), and Courses for life-long learner and working professionals (LifeMOOCs).
Last but not the least, IIT Kanpur offered mooKIT [79] with 150+ courses in India and abroad for 2,00,000+ learners from 160+ countries.
MOOCs started booming from the past 10 years.
2.4.5 Learning support systems
SWAYAM, NPTEL, and institutional MOOCs aside, there have been other efforts by ministries and departments of GoI to propel advances in this area (See Table 6). Notable among these are National Repository of Open Educational Resources (NROER) [77] in 2013 (with Video, Image, Audio, Document, and Interactive for schools with NCERT books in Flip book format) and e-Pathshala [82] in 2015 (with resources in English, Hindi and Urdu for teachers, students, parents, researchers, and educators on the web and the mobile). In 2017, Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge SHAring (DIKSHA) [85], a knowledge sharing platform for schools known as One Nation, One Digital Platform under PM’s eVidya initiative of Atma Nirbhar Bharat, started providing DIKSHA in NCERT Textbooks 36 Indian languages for learners and teachers of India.
2.5 National Education Policy: NEP 2020
The story of MOOCs in India reached out for a climax beyond MOOCs as India announced its much-awaited National Education Policy [87] in 2020 (NEP 2020) replacing NEP 1986 [110]. NEP 2020 outlines the vision of new education system of India. It is a comprehensive framework for elementary to higher education as well as vocational training in both rural and urban India. It targets to transform India’s education system by 2030 through National Educational Technology Forum [111] (NETF)—a platform for the free exchange of ideas on the use of technology to enhance learning, assessment, planning, administration. While the general response to NEP has been quite positive, there have been legitimate voices of concern [112] especially regarding its implementation.
NEP 2020 is structured in terms of multiple clauses in different sections covering different aspects of the education system. Highlights from clauses focusing on online digital education including MOOCs are given below:
Online Courses: apps, online courses, TV channels, online books, and ICT-equipped libraries (Cl 21.9, p. 52), Life-long learning (Cl 21.10, p. 52)
Digital Learning Contents: Digital libraries for contents and textbooks (Cl 24.4 (d), p. 59). Coursework, Games & Simulations, AR & VR. Textbooks (Cl 21.9, p. 52) (Cl. 4.32, p. 17)
Indian Languages: Education in all languages in India (Cl 22.19, p. 56)
Pedagogy & Teaching–Learning Process (TLP): Digital Pedagogy & enriched TLP with online resources, Technological interventions in TLP (Cl 23.5, p. 57). Teacher Education. Educational Software and Contents (Cl. 23.6, p. 57)
Smart Infrastructure: Digital classrooms with appropriate technology (Cl. 4.46, p. 20)
Equitable and Inclusive Education: Learning for All and in HE (Cl. 6, p. 24)
2.6 National Digital University
The establishment of National Digital University (NDU), as envisioned under NEP 2020 [87], has been announced [30] in the Union Budget 2022–2023. NDU [113] will be setup by Department of Higher Education, MoE, in consultation with UGC, AICTE, and other stakeholders. On this, Mr. Mayank Kumar, Chairman of the India Edtech Consortium (IEC)29 observes [92, 114]:
“NDU could be India’s next UPI30moment, making quality education more accessible and flexible.”
NDU will function in a hub-and-spoke model [116] where SWAYAM and Samarth [101] will be the hub and universities and higher educational institutions will collaborate as a network of spokes.
All government-funded institutions such as IITs, NITs, IIITs, and central universities (and a few private universities) would be a part of the network.
NDU will allow students to register for multiple courses at different institutions31, accumulate credits from them in Academic Bank of Credits (ABC) [31], and redeem these to get a certificate, diploma, or a degree.
Students will be awarded degrees by the university where they earned 50% of the credits. If the credits are thinly spread, NDU will award the degree.
There will be no quota of seats—any number of students can join, based only on the passage of the qualifying exam.
Union Budget 2023–2024 reiterated the plans for NDU [119] and announced [114] that courses will be offered from July 2023.
In summary, we have discussed the evolution of MOOCs, its ecosystems, and its synergy with digital and online learning over decades. We have also chronicled the milestones in a timeline while addressingRQ1(Section 1.2.1).
3. Innovations in and extensions of MOOCs in India
MOOCs have made significant impact in India through SWAYAM in general and NPTEL in particular. The early success of NPTEL (focusing on Engineering and Science) in the first decade of the millennium paved the way for SWAYAM with MOOCs in all disciplines, at all levels, and in multiple forms of education. Based on the learning from NPTEL MOOCs, SWAYAM/NPTEL continued to innovate in various programs [103, 120] to enrich the ecosystem on MOOCs to enhance its traction and effectiveness. We highlight a few key innovations that happened on the way.
3.1 Credit mobility
To understand the credit mobility, let us see how credit is computed.
3.1.1 Credit computation
Every 4 weeks’ course entails 14 hours of academic work for the student:
According to UGC norms [120], 14 hours of academic work is worth for 1 credit. Similarly, 8 or 12 weeks’ courses are worth for 2 or 3 credits, respectively. In addition, if a college wants to count the discussion forum, extra material, and more time for videos/assignments, 1 extra credit can be assigned to the courses.
3.1.2 Credit mobility and management
UGC allowed (limited) credit mobility [105, 106] in 2016 (Section 2.4.3). Under this an institution can allow up to 20% of the total courses in a semester through SWAYAM. Any regular/part-time student of any educational institution in India [121] can avail of the credit transfer. Credit mobility soon became popular and in 2021, the limit on credit mobility per semester [122] was increased to 40%.
Further, to facilitate easy management and mobility of credits, UGC has setup [123] the Academic Bank of Credits [31] in 2021. Institutions register to ABC and deposit credits earned by the students’ to their respective accounts. This helps to maintain the integrity, authenticity, and confidentiality of student credits, easy credit transfer in digital mode, and fast credit recognition.
Credit Mobility has given a real boost to MOOCs as a strong supplementary arm of education is India, which can play a deep curricular role. Recently, Singh and Kakkar [124, 125] have analyzed the impact of credit mobility to reveal that there has been a considerable increase in student enrollment (due to the mobility) but with extremely low certifications (We discuss this aspect in Section 5.2).
3.2 Certification
MOOCs usually have certificates for courses successfully completed. However, India has been desirous of creating certificates that will be credible and acceptable to all academic institutions and also define the scope of skills the student is certified for.
3.2.1 Credible certification
To add credibility to the SWAYAM certificates, NPTEL-NOC had introduced a physically proctored examination conducted in multiple cities where the student can take the examination showing an official ID. While weekly assignments, their solutions, and evaluations comply with the continuous learning principle of SWAYAM (MOOCs), award of final grade adequately weighted with the performance of the proctored examination mean credibility of the certification. Three levels of certifications have been created over a decade:
Course-level certificate (as in NPTEL-NOC) certifies skills in the course
Domain-level certificate (discussed below) certifies skills in a domain of specialization comprising multiple courses.
Degree-level certificate (discussed under Online Graduation) certifies comprehensive skills in a discipline—at par with what is obtainable from brick-and-mortar curricula.
3.2.2 NPTEL domain certification
NPTEL has been giving out course-level certificates since 2014 and there have been a lot of students doing multiple courses from NPTEL, which are not always connected. Hence, a need has been felt to link courses together for the foundations (core) and to define baskets of electives for further specialization. NPTEL Domain Certification has been created for this purpose. In this, NPTEL has grouped courses across 12 disciplines to help learners specialize in 51 domains. Completing a domain helps to gain expertise in a specific area [126]:
To gain expertise/foundations in an area of interest
To gain mastery to pursue Higher Education
To become more employable for jobs in the opted area
Every domain comprises Core course and Elective courses (to choose from a list). The learner has to complete the courses with at least 55% score in each and at least 60% in aggregate to get a domain certification.
3.3 Online graduation
Building up on online certification, which is for specific courses and domain certification, which is for a basket of courses from a domain, IIT Madras launched the world’s first 4-year Bachelor of Science (BS) Degree in Data Science and Applications [65]. This gives the students an opportunity to work toward an undergraduate degree/diploma from an IIT regardless of her/his age or location, and with a wide range of academic backgrounds.
This was launched in January 2021 as a BSc Degree in Programming and Data Science from IIT Madras. Keeping with the structure suggested by NEP 2020 [87] it is designed as a multi-entry and multi-exit Online Degree program where a student can earn certification at Foundational, Diploma, and Degree levels. Subsequently, IIT Madras launched 4-year BS in Data Science and Applications [65] and Diploma in Programming & Diploma in Data Science [127].
3.4 Partnering and networking
From the early days NPTEL, and later SWAYAM, have been built on a strongly participatory model between various institutions. These partnerships and networks have been designed for course creation, delivery, and certification. On way to NPTEL-NOC, NPTEL realized that the success of MOOCs as a large-scale model for affordable education needs the engagement of students and the colleges that the students attend. Hence, the concept of Local Chapters (LC), at the colleges partnering NPTEL, was born.
As the industry engages the skilled man-power, SWAYAM/NPTEL needs to have close collaboration with it. The Industry Associate Program thus created by NPTEL, helps employment and course monitoring for effective skilling.
3.4.1 NPTEL local chapters
Following the launch of NPTEL-NOC [64], NPTEL started setting up LCs in colleges to encourage more students to participate in it. Every LC is headed by a faculty member of the college, who acts as the Single Point of Contact (SPoC) between the college and NPTEL. The SPoC disseminates information about programs among the students, identifies suitable mentors for courses, ensures that the students are active in courses, clarify their doubts, and so on.
Local Chapter has been the most effective outreach for NPTEL. Over the past five years (2017-22), about 70 to 80% of total NPTEL registrations have taken place through the LCs [128]. States having more LCs have shown more engagements with NPTEL.
3.4.2 NPTEL industry associate (NIA) program
NPTEL partners with industry to bridge the gap between the academics and the industry and to create courses along with the industry to cross-skill and upskill the existing workforce. CSR initiatives are also welcomed as part of this association. A total of 79 NIAs [103, 120, 129] have signed up and facilitated in one or more areas:
Recruitment/Internship: NIAs are regular recruiters of NPTEL learners and are offering internships
Co-offer Courses: NIAs have collaborated in offering 170+ live sessions in NPTEL Special Lecture Series on Latest technologies, Skills or competencies for the industry, and Career opportunities
CSR Support: Through CSR, NIAs are supporting waivers for examination fees (∼1,20,000+ students benefited)
Soft/Digital Skilling: NIAs support to conduct soft skills training and digital skilling courses to learners in local chapters.
Upskill/Reskill Employees: Courses for working professionals to reposition in career.
3.5 Student connect and recognition
Students are the purpose of MOOCs. So keeping them encouraged, motivated, and engaged are critical for effective MOOCs at scale. NPTEL started this through various honor programs for students and also created opportunity for internship at academia as well as industry.
3.5.1 NPTEL star
To motivate learners to excel, NPTEL has introduced multiple honors32 under the NPTEL Star program. Starting the Jul-Dec, 2019 session, over 10,000 certificates have been awarded to stars in various categories in the past 3 years. This has proved to be quite motivational from the learners [130].
3.5.2 NPTEL internship
From 2018 summer, NPTEL has started offering internships to NOC examination toppers with the respective course instructors to provide an opportunity to toppers to gain rich research experiences. The internship is offered for 4, 6, or 8 weeks in summer and winter each year with a stipend of Rs. 5000/= for 4 weeks of internship. A total of over 200 students [103, 120, 131] took internship in summer and winter sessions of 2021 and 2022.
3.6 Extensional courses
NPTEL has also launched extensional courses for students (GATE), teachers (FDP), and industry professionals (NPTEL+) appropriately reusing the IP already created for NPTEL courses. It has high return on low investment.
3.6.1 NPTEL GATE project
To provide students with an integrated platform to prepare for the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE)33, NPTEL GATE Project was initiated with CSR support from Amadeus Labs, Bengaluru, India. This project supports preparations for GATE in multiple ways including in-video contents for [132]:
Video solutions to previous GATE questions: The video solutions are designed to be self-contained—starting from a quick recap of the basic concepts for solving the problem, followed by a detailed solution using fundamental concepts, and ending with smart tricks, if any, to solve the problems.
Video explanation of Subject Concepts: For easy access, all the topics of GATE syllabus are mapped and linked to the most relevant NPTEL lecture/s. These lectures, in turn, are mapped to various topics of the GATE Syllabus.
With solutions for 9 departments, 4191 videos, ∼420 hours of content, and ∼ 800 live mentoring sessions in 2 phases, 6500+ students have benefited [103].
3.6.2 NPTEL courses as FDP
In July 2018, NPTEL signed an MoU with AICTE for advanced NPTEL online certification courses [133, 134] approved for Faculty Development Program (FDP) by AICTE. About 4, 8, or 12 weeks courses are offered as 12, full or 112 FDP of 1 week. 2400+ FDP courses [103] have been offered during January 2021 to April 2023 with 66,000+ faculty applying for FDP during January 2021 to July 2022.
3.6.3 NPTEL+: Anyone, anywhere, anytime
NPTEL deviated from free paradigm of MOOCs and designed paid e-learning courses for working professional as NPTEL+ portal to expand the variety of offerings and for learner upskill. Three types of training programs are available [135]:
NPTEL courses in self-paced mode: These are self-paced courses where learners may progress through the course and complete assignments at their own pace. Learners may also choose to write a remote proctored online exam from the comfort of their homes and earn a certificate.
Short-term training programs from the IITs/IISc: Short-term training programs which might involve fully live lectures coupled with hands-on training or a blended mode of learning (recorded videos+live lectures) are planned.
Other programs: These are targeted toward specialized courses in an emerging technology or complementing the existing NPTEL courses with dedicated hands-on content to equip the learners to be industry ready.
With 200+ courses and 550+ professionals already qualified [103], NPTEL+ is leveraging the IPs of NPTEL MOOCs to add new value for the online courses. Extensions of these are offered for in-person lab certification through workshops:
NPTEL lab workshops: Typically offered during summer and winter, these in-person courses motivate students and faculty to get hands-on experience.
NPTEL+ workshops: These live and interactive workshops are offered through the year in online or in-person mode for half-a-day to a week. They cater to a wider audience including students, faculties, and professionals.
A total of 24 NPTEL+ course have been offered during August 2022 to December 2022 where 4000+ learners have participated [103].
3.7 Multi-lingual MOOCs
In India there are 22 languages [136], referred to as scheduled languages, and given recognition, status, and official encouragement. About 96.71% of the population in the country has one of the 22 scheduled languages as their mother tongue. Several students undergo their schooling in their regional language and may face challenges transitioning to English for technical education.
The MOOCs courses, however, are primarily in English. In the early years of development (2000–2010), this was not considered a bottleneck as MOOCs meant courses in engineering, science, and management where the teaching in classrooms are also only in English medium. However, with the widening of education with online and digital options, decision of using MOOCs at all levels (including school education, adult education, and life-long learning), and broadening of outlook in education across the Nation, it became imperative that skills in English cannot be a prerequisite for education through MOOCs. Hence, multi-lingual MOOCs have become a necessity for India. Given the diversity of disciplines and levels, and variety of languages, multilinguality is a major challenge. Yet, NPTEL had an early start which SWAYAM too is adopting.
3.7.1 NPTEL translation
NPTEL has initiated translation of course contents into 11 different languages—Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu. Translations are available as pdf transcripts, e-books, subtitled videos, scrolling text-on-videos, and audio files. So far, NPTEL has received 1500+ requests to provide the translation of course contents. With the help of LCs34, it has translated ∼300 courses in 11 languages having 40,000+ lectures for 10,000+ hours [103, 137]. These are freely accessible and downloadable.
Through this intuitive, SWAYAM/NPTEL has been supporting the need for education in all languages in India as envisioned in NEP 2020 [87] (Cl 22.19, p. 56).
3.8 Public-private partnership (PPP)
With the fast increasing need for skilling India’s workforce, huge resources are continually needed. A part of that is addressed by the structure and efficiency of MOOCs. Yet it is beyond government’s resources to satisfy all the need of skilling; and participation of the private sector is a dire necessity. Kaicker et al. [46] have drawn parallels between SWAYAM and edTech start-ups in India that offer online degrees in collaboration with difference universities to highlight the complementarity between private and public sectors in India in this space.
Keeping the above in view, under NEP 2020, EdTech companies and startups are provided with necessary guidelines and impetus to develop learning management systems, ERP softwares, assessment platforms, online labs, etc., for schools and universities. NETF, an autonomous body mandated by NEP 2020, is created to facilitate exchange of ideas on technology usage to improve learning [138]. Government is also experimenting with different mechanisms to make the PPP successful and effective. We highlight two recent initiatives.
3.8.1 PPP of NEAT
MoE has announced a National Educational Alliance for Technology [90] (NEAT) as a Public-Private Partnership Model between the GoI (represented by AICTE) and the EdTech companies of India. The aim of NEAT is to bring the best products in educational pedagogy on a single platform for the convenience of learners. Technology Products using AI for customized learning or e-content in niche areas having highly employable skills would be identified for showcasing on the portal. In September 2021, NITI Aayog35 partnered with Byju’s36 to provide free access to its tech-driven learning programs to engineering aspirants from 112 districts [89].
3.8.2 Electronics and ICT academy
In November 2014, MeitY37 launched Scheme of Financial Assistance for setting up of Electronics and ICT Academies38 for faculty/mentor development/upgradation in fast evolving areas in electronics and information technology. Under the Scheme, seven Electronics and ICT academies have been set up at seven premier academic institutions—NIT Warangal (Telangana), IIITDM Jabalpur (Madhya Pradesh), IIT Guwahati [108] (Assam), NIT Patna (Bihar), IIT Kanpur (Uttar Pradesh), IIT Roorkee (Uttarakhand), and MNIT Jaipur (Rajasthan). The scheme targets to train 92,800 faculties.
To addressRQ2(Section 1.2.1), we have discussed various process innovations in MOOCs in India either through the initiatives of the government or the MOOCs providers like SWAYAM/NPTEL. Some of these like credit mobility, domain certification, online graduation, local chapters, and multilingual support are proving to be game-changers and need to continue in the future roadmap.
NPTEL completes 20 years in 2023. This by itself is a strong corroboration of the impact it has been making in MOOCs-based education. Over the past decade, a lot has been written about the impact of SWAYAM/NPTEL by several researchers including Chauhan et al. [139], Jaganathan et al. [41], Haumin et al. [33], Varyani et al. [44], Pant et al. [43], Singh et al. [45], Mishra [15], EdNet [38], Sharma et al. [39], and Amit et al. [40]. Most of these cover more or less the same ground or discuss similar points. So we will not repeat them here, the reader may check the references. Rather, we will present a few representative impact points from NPTEL.
4.1 Quantitative and qualitative assessment of impact of SWAYAM/NPTEL
While earlier work highlight various positive impacts of MOOCs in India (primarily SWAYAM), data and analyses on different impact factors are not available for most of its programs (or, for IITBombayX/IIMBx/mooKIT) with the exception of NPTEL. Most programs in SWAYAM (except for NPTEL) started only in 2016. So with resource mobilization, content creation, and delivery, these have been on ground for a few years only. In contrast, NPTEL is a long running program having several data points. So we appraise the NPTEL experience.
4.1.1 Quantitative metrics of impact of SWAYAM/NPTEL
For quantitative metrics of impact let us consider the growth of courses, enrolments, and registrations for examination (Figure 3). We observe healthy steady growth in each except for a brief pandemic-induced slowdown at the end of 2020. It is also interesting to analyze the reasons behind choosing NPTEL (MOOCs). Learners of NPTEL are asked the reason/s for taking the courses and are given six options. The summary of the learners’ responses over five semesters from July 2020 to July 2022 are given in Figure 4 and are ranked from high to low:
To earn credit
To learn and update knowledge
To get job/internship
To empower for research
To prepare for competitive examination
To understand how MOOCs work
Figure 3.
Growth of NPTEL course offering: 2014–2022.
Figure 4.
Why do students study NPTEL courses and take certification examination?
So learners choose MOOCs for credit mobility (compensate for non-available or low-quality courses in parent institutes), to update knowledge (possibly driven by a large group of learners who are teachers of different colleges), and for better placement opportunity (that is, industry-appropriate skilling). Contrary to expectations, preparing for competitive examination (being NPTEL, the only major examination is GATE which is also taken for job opportunity in government) is a less favored reason compared to empowerment for research.
4.1.2 Qualitative observations on impact of SWAYAM/NPTEL
There have been some qualitative studies on the impact of NPTEL. Notably, a white paper from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras [140] and an interview with Prof. Andrew Thangaraj [141]. In summary:
Better education and learning
80% of the enrolment through NPTEL local chapters in 4000 colleges
Fills in gaps for lack of good teachers
Students and colleges value the certification from the IITs
82.9% colleges feel students gained confidence on technical interviews & technical assessments
Employment focus of NPTEL
Recognizes active learners as NPTEL stars
Provides free soft skills training to course toppers and stars
Conducts: Employability assessment, Online mock interviews, Live video sessions, and Personalized feedback session for improvement
Exam Preparatory: “NPTEL videos have been greatly helpful for cracking examinations such as the NET and GATE”—Mr. Sandeep Kumar, an Assistant Professor in Electronics and Communication in PSIT Kanpur
We do observe a strong alignment between the qualitative and qualitative assessment of impact.
4.2 Quora speak
The assessment of impact presented above are based on data from NPTEL team or analysis carried out with the direct involvement of NPTEL team members. So we wanted to explore independent public perspective from the Internet. For this we searched for questions asked on Quora about the credibility of NPTEL and the value of certificates earned from NPTEL. We observed several positive trails on a variety of questions. As indicative samples, we quote two responses each from two questions below:
Are NPTEL certificates good for a job and resume?39
S Chetan Pandit, Tech Evangelist, IIT Graduate, Works for Qualcomm. Sep 16, 2020
“I am in high tech industry for more than a decade now during this time I have worked with several top MNCs, done many fresh graduates (IITs/NITs/BITS/DCEs etc) campus hiring and also experienced (lateral) hirings. so let me give you a hiring manage perspective.
As an hiring manager, you would only look for skillset and gauge if the candidate has the relevant knowledge of the field, aptitude and softskills to fit in your engineering team and deliver.
If all matches then he/she is good to hire. therefore, look at NPTEL courses as an opportunity to acquire new knowledge (primarily), for sure certificate is also helpful but mainly to get you shortlisted and bring you to the interview table, beyond that only learning/knowledge will help. so according to me.
JOB = 20% Certificate + 80% Knowledge (learnt during Course)”
Abhinav Ankit, Entrepreneur, Trader, Investor, YouTuber. Oct 11, 2020
“Yes, of course, yaar it is NPTEL certificate. It adds an uncomparable value to your life.
But yes, This is absolutely right that you will not get the job only on this certificate but it 100% adds a special value in your resume and due to that you will get job first in comparison to your competitors for a particular job.
Ok, you do one thing, that I am leaving here one video link in which there is complete knowledge given about NPTEL and about its certification program and its value addition in any individuals life and this video contains every information which you want to know about NPEL.
So, You go through this video [142] and get rid of your all questions and confusions.”
Do certificates from NPTEL courses hold any value?40
Ashutosh Singh, Subject Matter Expert in CSE. Nov 19, 2021.
“Yes, if your score is more than 90%, you become very desirable.
It is relatively easy to get certified by NPTEL (scoring the minimum marks required for getting the certificate), but it is very tough to get more than 90% over all score. My highest score till date is only 83%.
Marks matter a lot! When it’s a matter of recruitment. A GPA of 4.5 from a tier-II engineering college is better than a GPA of 3.5 from a tier-I college.
Till date (starting from 2016) I have done 7 certificate courses in the discipline of Computer Science & Engineering from NPTEL (totaling to 60 weeks of course duration), for which I have recently been recognized and honored as NPTEL Discipline Star for Dec 2019.
… (images of certificates)
SWAYAM-NPTEL is perhaps the best thing done in Indian education system so far. Providing free and fair access to world class education to anyone, anywhere, who wants to learn.”
Yogesh SP, Product Evangelist at Guvi. Oct 5, 2018
“I am giving my perspective with respect to NPTEL certificates.
Currently, I had 2 NPTEL certificates one for IMAD and another one for Data Mining.
I am also appearing for two more exams. I had worked for MNC’s and startups before. The interviews I had seen considers skills more than your certificates.
Learning is a continuous process and it doesn’t end with a certificate.
NPTEL is a great learning ground so make use of it in your college days.”
A search for negative responses on NPTEL did not produce any credible and consistent trail.
4.3 Benefit to students, teachers, and colleges
The key benefits accrued to students, teachers, and colleges are:
Students are able to learn from good teachers; can take courses that are not available in their respective colleges or courses that do not have right faculty; can benefit from comprehensive learning material—presentations, videos, transcripts, and from internship and placement opportunities through industry partners
Several teachers have been attending NPTEL courses to learn how to teach different subjects well, how to set assignments, etc.
Colleges suffering from shortage of teachers are listing various elective and at times the core courses for credit mobility
Economies of scale in maintaining a good domain coverage. So NPTEL can offer courses across multiple domains even for less than 10 exam takers.
NPTEL model shows how to manage a multi-institution project without losing focus on the Open Learning agenda.
The affordability and accessibility of higher education is tackled by MOOCs in India. SWAYAM/NPTEL is supported by GoI while IITM BS Program [65] uses corporate philanthropy (by scholarships). Both of these programs have low entry criteria (none for NPTEL and Qualifier for BS program).
We point to various prior studies and present quantitative data and qualitative observations to show that MOOCs in India is having a significant transformational impact. This addressesRQ3(Section 1.2.1) from the output perspectives and partly from outcome perspectives. We discuss more about outcome in the next section.
While announcing the setting up of NDU (Section 2.6) during the Union Budget 2023–2024, Ms. Nirmala Sitharaman, Finance Minister, GoI has pronounced the country’s vision on MOOCs far and firm. We quote [92]:
“A digital university will be established to provide access to the students across the country for world-class quality universal education with a personalised learning experience at their doorsteps.”
We have long and strong tradition in MOOCs. We have been continually innovating to customize MOOCs and strengthen the ecosystem. We have made significant impacts. Next we need a roadmap to attain the vision and reap dividends from our demography. Understandably, there are challenges, challenges galore, on the way to the attainment. But, India has the will as well as the skills to conquer them. And the chief arsenal for this is technology—emerging technologies in which India is already one of the leaders.
We first review the recent use of technology in MOOCs and then map their use to address the imminent challenges of the space in India.
5.1 Emerging technologies for MOOCs
Technology has been contributing to various aspects of learning, specifically MOOCs [47], for a long time. Recently, Ahmad et al. [143] review the literature since 2014 to observe that the work on MOOCs is dominated by AI/ML (23%), Big Data (20%), Gamification (17%), Internet of Things (11%), Blockchain (9%), Metaverse (8%), and Digital Twin (7%). Mutawa et al. [144] also suggest strong integration of AI with MOOCs. Nunzio [145] feels “MOOCs can prove to be a good business decision,” if online content can be developed more affordably using AI. So, we take a walk-through of a few AI technologies in education.
MOOCs is the business of knowledge. Hence, Knowledge Graphs41 (KG) play a dominant role in its efficiency and effectiveness. Coupled with KGs, AI-powered MOOCs are facilitating aspects of delivery, management, and personalization.
5.1.1 Knowledge graph for MOOCs
Since 2007, knowledge graphs have been applied to education and many other disciplines [146]. In MOOCs, they help to solve varied range of problems including personalized recommendation, learning feedback, and learning path.
Building KGs for MOOCs: A KG for MOOCs is an organized collection of unified MOOC resources and course concepts for learners. It can be used to discover learning resource from several platforms and used for various research tasks. Consequently, several KGs [147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153] have been built in the last 5 years. The first large scale KG, MOOC-KG, has been built by Dang et al. [148] in 2019. It represents 28,591 instances with relations, includes 4 platforms42, 604 universities, 18,671 teachers, and 9312 courses. In 2021, Dang et al. [150] extend this to represent five classes, 11 kinds of relations, and 52,779 entities with their corresponding properties, amounting to more than 3,00,000 triples. Notably, 24,188 concepts are extracted from text attributes of MOOCs and linked directly with corresponding Wikipedia entries. In 2019, Liao et al. [149], also applied knowledge graphping in MOOC and SPOC (Small Private Online Courses).
Knowledge Extraction for KGs from transcripts and video captions: While most KGs are built by mining text information from course description and metadata, a lot of knowledge stays embedded in multimodal sources like course outlines, transcripts, and lecture videos. Fareedah et al. [154], in 2018, identify a concept dependency graph for a MOOC through unsupervised analysis of lecture transcripts. Das et al. [155], 2019 propose a system that performs topic-wise semantic segmentation and annotation of MOOC lecture videos. Later in 2020, using semantic similarity and contextual relationship between different concepts, they analyze [156] how the instructor changes concepts during topic change. In 2021, Huang et al. [157] propose a method for automatically constructing a course KG by extracting course concepts from video captions in the context frame of the course outline, and then embedding the concepts back to the frame.
Course recommendations using KGs: Course recommendations in MOOCs43 is inherently more complex compared to the traditional course advisory due to the self-driven nature, high flexibility, easy availability, and diversity of MOOCs. Hence, KG-enhanced recommendation systems are appropriate for addressing the course recommendation problem for MOOCs. Zheng et al. [147] use ML in 2017 to construct a high educational KG by crawling courses information from several MOOC websites and performing entity and relation extraction to help learners study easily from MOOC courses. In 2020, Wang et al. [159] propose a GNN44-based Attentional Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Deep Knowledge Recommender (ACKRec) that aligns learners’ interests in different concepts with concepts embedded in different courses to recommend courses to learners. Chen et al. [151] propose an automated construction method for course KG in 2021 by annotating the pre-knowledge of each course and calculating the similarity between courses and study learning path recommendation algorithms. Jung et al. [160] propose a framework in 2022 for Knowledge graph enhanced Personalized Course Recommendation (KCPR) where internal information of MOOCs is integrated with an external knowledge base through user and course-related keywords. KCPR also uses a level embedding module that predicts the level of students and courses for better recommendation. Zhang et al. [152] propose Knowledge Grouping Aggregation Network (KGAN) in 2023 that uses the course graph, having relations between courses and facts, to estimate learners’ potential interests automatically and iteratively.
Learning Feedback and Learning Path Planning using KGs: Besides being recommended on right courses, learners often need to assess how well are they actually learning the concepts in a course. KGs play a strong role in such learning feedback and path planning. Pan et al. [161], in 2017, propose to learn candidate concepts via an embedding-based method and rank them based on the learned representations. They evaluate the method using XuetangX and Coursera. Jiang et al. [162] present MAssistant, an interactive personal knowledge assistant for MOOC learners, in 2019. MAssistant helps users to trace the concepts they have learned in MOOCs by presenting important concepts as they watch the videos, to build their own concept graphs and explore them later. In 2023, Zhang et al. [153] design a KG with the visual search and display of knowledge points to provide learning feedback, to update feedback with the learning situation of learners, and to improve the learning efficiency through learning path planning.
(Missing) KG for SWAYAM/NPTEL: With the exception of [155, 156], none of the above work use the SWAYAM/NPTEL platform. This is surprising in a country like India which leads the world in various facets of AI/ML and emerging ICT. Interestingly, a number of initiatives like domain certification of NPTEL (Section 3.2.2) and extension courses (Section 3.6) like NPTEL GATE project, NPTEL FDP, and NPTEL++ have been built with manual analyses of course and content metadata. It is important to build KGs of SWAYAM through automated methods and use for addressing several integration and quality questions of SWAYAM.
5.1.2 AI-powered MOOCs
With the increased focus on online education, researchers started to study how AI can power MOOCs to scale with quality and yet remain financially sustainable. Yu et al. [163] consider issues and solutions for AI-powered personalization in MOOC learning. Fauvel et al. [164] present a survey in 2018 for the goings-on in AI-powered MOOCs with the following taxonomic classification of the papers (Table 7).
Learner Modeling
Improving Learning Experience
Learner Assessment
Modeling Learner Engagement
Modeling Learners’ Knowledge
Intelligent User Interactions
Community Building
Auto-grading
Peer Grading
Learning Skill Assessment
Table 7.
Taxonomic classification of the papers in AI-powered MOOCs, Fauvel et al. [164].
They identify Redefining openness in MOOCs (to provide open infrastructure for content creators besides content consumers), Complementing AI with human effort (human-in-the-loop systems), and moving from Engagement to Knowledge as some of the priorities for research. Jordan et al. [165] also provide a nice survey of studies over 2012 to 2022: The Decade of the MOOC.
The face of AI capabilities in education (and in several other areas) has been redefined from November 2022 with launch of ChatGPT45. With Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) for Large Language Models (LLM) being widely and publicly available, we can now build future generations of digital pedagogy with better elegance at ease. For example, Yilmaz et al. [166] present the framework for SMIT - a Smart MOOC integrated with Intelligent Tutoring. It is adaptive and dynamic, and is supported by learning analytics that aims to integrate Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). A new era of convergence and integration has started. Agarwal et al. [167] have developed a system for MOOCs for Lipreading which can be a great aid for the hearing impaired. Recently, Khan Academy has launched Khanmigo [168, 169, 170] as a personalized tutor for every student, a planner and assistant for every teacher, and a writing coach for all. Several more will follow soon.
We have immense opportunity for AI-powered MOOCs to address most of the challenges46 including Personalized and Adaptive learning, Adaptive assessments, Automated evaluations, Natural Language Processing (query answering, translation, etc.), Content Creation and Curation, Fraud Detection (plagiarism), Predictive Analytics, and Intelligent Tutoring Systems.
Finally, we analyze the challenges of MOOCs in India—as mentioned by researchers and and also as observed by the author as a MOOCs faculty for nearly a decade—and discuss the possible resolutions for the same using technology wherever possible.
5.2 Challenges and resolutions
The challenges of MOOCs in India have been noted and analyzed by several authors including Chauhan et al. [139], Jaganathan et al. [41], Haumin et al. [33], Varyani et al. [44], Sagar [36], Pant et al. [43], Mishra [15], EdNet [38], Sharma et al. [39], Amit et al. [40], Aldahmani et al. [21], and Saxena et al. [171]. Many of them have suggested possible roadmaps too. We present a summary of these (and others from the author’s experience and interactions) from the perspective of this chapter.
5.2.1 Digital infrastructure for MOOCs
The ecosystem of MOOCs relies heavily on the digital infrastructure for the learner, for the provider, and for the connectivity between the two.
Internet Connectivity for Learners:
A learner needs good internet connection to attend MOOCs courses.
Roads ahead:
To alleviate this issue, lecture videos are made available in multiple resolutions to allow for easy downloads even over weak connectivity.
Telecom in India is on a fast track with BharatNet [172] connecting villages at a fast rate. Its Phase 2 (of 3) is ongoing. Data services of Jio densely spreads across the length and breadth of India [173]. Thus, the number of Internet users in India is expected to grow [174] to 907 million (64% population) by 2023 from 398 million (29% population) in 2018.
Digital Devices for Learners:
A learner needs digital devices to attend MOOCs courses.
Roads ahead:
While the availability of computers is perceived to be limited mostly to tier 1 and tier 2 cities, India has a deep penetration of mobile phones. During pandemic, India heavily used online education, even in schools, which deepened the penetration. Thus, it is expected [174] that the number of mobile users will grow to 966 million (68% of population) by 2023 from 763 million (56% population) in 2018.
MOOCs providers should create contents in multiple form factors.
Infrastructure for Content Creation:
Institutions need good infrastructure comprising recording studios, trained manpower for recording and editing, and so on to create MOOCs content.
Roads ahead:
SWAYAM has already taken several steps to widen the network of content creators through 9 different NCs in diverse areas. It is on its track to attain its plans for inclusion of institutions at multiple levels.
5.2.2 Digital pedagogy
MOOCs (and several other forms of digital, online, or hybrid education) have led to the Digital Pedagogy47 where teachers create the courses, offer them to learners, and assess the performances of the learners in multiple levels of virtuality. Thus, teachers become their digital twins48 under MOOCs, instructing the learners in virtual tutoring modes. Naturally, the success of this pedagogy depends heavily on the adaptability of all the stakeholder including teachers, learners, and teaching assistants; on the quality, diversity, and multilinguality of contents (lecture videos, transcripts, reading notes, assignments & solutions, and so on); on the efficiency and efficacy of virtual tutoring and instructional processes; and on the quality of assessment, and evaluation. MOOCs all across the world, including in India, fall shorts on all of these aspects.
Adaptability by the Stakeholders:
Teachers: The teachers of MOOCs record courses in the absence of the learners (lecturing merely to virtual learners). So most teachers, skilled in face-to-face and interactive pedagogy of delivering lectures fail to incite the excitement in their videos and often miss out to properly embed the necessary learning-by-example stubs. Further, the teachers are not trained to look into the camera and they get little eye-contact with the observer (learner). Also, most courses are recorded with presentation slides with the teacher sitting in a chair which eliminates the communicative body language of the teacher and makes it difficult to develop concepts step-by-step.
Roads ahead:
All course creators need to abide by the Guidelines for SWAYAM [104], 2017. This standardizes the course plans. KGs of courses in SWAYAM and an AI-driven intelligent checker can improve compliance to the guidelines.
While the guidelines are strong in terms of lecture and course planning, it does not talk about the presentation and communications. Listener bots or bot-learners may be created for feedback on these aspects.
A MOOCs course on MOOCs Pedagogy should be created by the experts to train all teachers (could be an FDP) who offer MOOCs.
Learners: The learners of MOOCs watch the lecture videos in the absence of the teacher and the peers. They interact with the teacher, the teaching assistants, and the peers only in written form (using course forum—a virtualized textual model of teachers, assistants, and peers). This leads to the feeling of isolation, inadequate opportunity for honing skills of verbal and interpersonal communication, depends heavily on the self-motivation of the learners (which many may lack), and leads to overall digital fatigue49. Adoption of technology itself can be a challenge for some of the learners.
Mithun Mohan et al. [175] examine the key factors that influence the behavioral intention to use MOOCs among 412 university PG students. They report that 41% students feel that lack of time from academic schedule is the key barrier50 to MOOCs, while 33% felt that MOOCs are less effective compared to classroom teaching. Technology barrier (16%) and monotonous nature of MOOCs (10%) are the other factors.
Roads ahead:
SWAYAM/NPTEL address these through online course forum (for discussions with the teachers/TAs and/or peers), local chapters (SPoC in colleges to mentor students), weekly live tutoring sessions by PMRF scholars, and monthly live sessions with the teachers.
Alarmingly these measures are becoming less effective with time.
In Jul 2022, 96% courses in NPTEL had <100 learners on forum [103].
Most courses are getting few students on live sessions.
Pass percentage in several courses is low even for LC students.
Is digital fatigue starting to cripple MOOCs in India? In-depth research is needed to understand the learners and their learning behavior better.
Personalized bots like Khanmigo [169] can greatly improve engagement.
Quality, Diversity, and Multilinguality of Contents:
Quality of Content: Quality contents need highly skilled teachers, good infrastructure, and trained support man-power. At India’s scale MOOCs, these are stiff barriers and solutions should constantly be sought with AI.
Roads ahead:
Guidelines for SWAYAM [104] should be followed by all contents. Absent compliance-check or audit process51 can be put in place using KG and AI.
Quality Reference Framework for MOOCs (QRF) [58] has been released in 2018 to analyze the needs and demands for MOOCs, to design, develop, and implement new MOOCs, and to evaluate and improve existing MOOCs. It consists of three dimensions: Phases, Perspectives, and Roles; and provides the QRF Key Quality Criteria and the QRF Quality Checklist for designing and developing MOOCs. SWAYAM guidelines and processes should be strengthened with the adoption of QRF.
Diversity of Content: MOOCs in India have piggybacked on NPTEL which focused on engineering domain, relied on the expertise from IITs and IISc, and performed several techno-social innovations to bring MOOCs in India to its present state. As SWAYAM diversifies MOOCs to other domains, to broader sections of learners, and wider academic levels, the need for diverse contents (subject matter as well as form) becomes a priority. This is a huge challenge given the weak institutional bandwidth in various domain areas.
Roads ahead:
A possible resolution may focus on and grow with public-private partnership in edTech some of which are already underway [89, 90, 91, 111].
Generative AI may be used to create selective contents for some subjects.
Multilinguality of Contents: With 22 scheduled languages (and several more practiced ones) and deep diversity of culture, Indian MOOCs need to strongly support Indian languages besides English.
Roads ahead:
As discussed in Section 3.7, NPTEL has started this translation process with the help of LCs. Nearly 300 courses in 11 languages having 40,000+ lectures for 10,000+ hours [103] are available.
With the advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Indian languages (especially Hindi), automated translation (like Google Translate), automated transcription and captioning, and Knowledge Graphs (see Section 5.1.1), accelerated automated processes should be setup for translations of the languages of the videos and transcripts.
Beyond the (translated) language of the contents, the overall process of engagement in MOOCs needs to be made multilingual.
Efficiency and Efficacy of Processes:
MOOCs are created by digitally aided record-deliver-evaluate processes with focus on creating digital equivalents of physical systems of learning. If often does not ensure if the virtual tutoring and instructional processes are efficient and effective from the socio-psychological aspects of learning and learners. For example, the completion rate is taken as the metric of success and not the outcome of learning.
Roads ahead:
While MOOCs advocates increased Self Regulated Learning (SRL) capability of a learner, the NPTEL model shows how processes (Weekly Release, Deadlines, Grading that permits flexibility) along with group/external regulation helps in increasing uptake of online courses.
“By strategically aligning the technology and processes, we can really attempt to solve the larger issues of learner diversity and sustainability (of learning) at scale.” – Dr. Jayakrishnan M, Senior Scientist, NPTEL
Stickiness of learners52 (at ∼85% retention) is ensured in IITM BS program [65] with a team of instructors and a dedicated operations team.
Deep research in digital pedagogy and use of AI are needed to obtain the desired outcomes (Section 5.1.2).
MoE has launched NEAT [90] as a PPP model (Section 3.8.1) to showcase Technology Products using AI for customized learning or e-content in niche areas having highly employable skills.
Quality of Assessment and Evaluation:
Assessment and evaluation is one of the weak areas of MOOCs (and many forms of online education). The assignments and examinations are based on Multiple Choice (MCQ), Multiple Select (MSQ), Short Answer (SA), and Fill-in-the-blank questions. This limits the ability to test the breadth and depth of the understanding of the learners. For example, in a programming language course offered by the author for over last 8 years, actual programming assignments could never be part of the evaluation process. This also is a major hindrance for various social science courses including law where descriptive answers are a necessity as a learning measure. Overall, MOOCs provide only a few assessments and little feedback. Hence, it is not possible to assess knowledge for cognitive skills beyond mere information retrieval or to handle abstraction or to take complex decisions, and so on. Marks scored in assignments have very low credibility due to rampant plagiarism53. Hence, proctored physical examinations are needed for credible evaluation. This limits the scaling of MOOCs and with only one such proctored examination in a course, the students do not get the required learning practice.
Roads ahead:
Major MOOCs platform use multiple technology-driven strategies to address the problem of plagiarism. These include remote proctoring by humans invigilators (or smart machines?), and use access to microphone and camera of student’s computer to make random recordings during examinations (and screen using surveillance software) during exams. IoT may provide some solutions in future.
Research and interventions are needed to improve the processes of semi-automated/automated evaluation to scale MOOCs with quality.
Robust, complete, scalable, and flexible processes for assessment and evaluation are possible today with AI (Section 5.1.2). LLMs with course KGs and pre-trained transformers may be built to evaluate subjective answers and provide feedback.
Digital Pedagogy in India is still in its infancy. And success of MOOCs in the longer run and national scale critically depends on it.
5.2.3 MOOCs in principle—Not on paper
Retention/Completion Rate:
MOOCs in India usually have high enrolment but low retention/completion of the courses. In NPTEL only about 10% of the students (Figure 3) who enroll actually go on to complete the course [103, 120]. In 500+ SWAYAM courses through the CEC, UGC, and IGNOU till 2019, only 30–40% students who took the examination actually passed and completed the course (Table 8 in [43]). While this is a global phenomenon (e.g., Chiappe and Castillo [176] report completion rate of MOOCs between 5 and 15%), India needs to address it effectively to improve the effectiveness of its investments. At 10% does MOOCs in India remain Massive or is it simply Large?
At this point, may we question how should the retention/completion rate be estimated? Five distinct measure points have usually been considered by the researchers. We compute various ratio metrics using the data of NPTEL [103, 120] during Jan-Apr 2019 to Jan-Apr 2022 in Table 8.
Metric
%
Remarks
nOneWeek/nEnrol
=
35%
65% students leave within a week
nRegister/nOneWeek
=
35%
Further 65% students leave between 2nd week & registration
nRegister/nEnrol
=
12%
88% students leave between enrolment & registration
nAppear/nRegister
=
85%
15% students register, but do not appear. This is higher, yet commensurate with non-MOOC courses
nPass/nAppear
=
75%
25% failure rate is not particularly high
nPass/nEnrol
=
8%
This is alarming
nPass/nOneWeek
=
22%
This is better, yet too low
Typical metrics or measure points as used in Table 8 in [43, 103, 120, 176]
nEnrol
=
# of students enrolled
nOneWeek
=
# of students who completed the first assignment, that is, 1 week
nRegister
=
# of students who registered for the final examination
nAppear
=
# of students who appeared for the final examination
nPass
=
# of students who passed the course
nFail
=
# of students who failed the course = nAppear – nPass
Table 8.
Retention rate for NPTEL: 2019–2022.
There are three large losses in the table: (a) nEnrol→nOneWeek=65%, (b) nOneWeek→nRegister=65%, and (c) nAppear→nFail=25%. (a) may be ignored—it is the check-out time expected in any open flexible system. These are students who did not even get engaged to complete the first assignment. (c) is not alarmingly high. It can improve only with the quality of the courses and offerings—a slow process. (b) needs specific attention:
These students left the course at some point after completing the first assignment. So did they take the decision to discontinue after getting the evaluation of the first assignment? To understand this, it is necessary to track how many of them submitted the second assignment. Those students should also be clubbed with (a) and ignored.
So the students who left the course after the second (or third, or later) assignment/s, may have done so for the reasons outlined in Section 5.2.2 in terms of various shortcomings of the digital pedagogy including lack of engagement with the teacher, lack of self-motivation, lack of English language, skills, digital fatigue, and so on. We need to know.
Roads ahead:
An in-depth analysis for the case (b) for SWAYAM/NPTEL is necessary.
Declining enrollments in MOOCs worldwide is leading to MOOCs 2.0 [43] to explore freemium54 models (like NPTEL+), offering a mix of free and paid courses. MOOCs in India should check out as well.
Several innovations mentioned in Section 3 including interactive forums, local centers, and live sessions are targeting to improve retention.
In the IITM BS program [65], a team of instructors along with a very capable operations team helps to ensure near 85% retention. It is exploring Peer-Learning and Peer-Support models for sustenance.
AI-driven solutions discussed in Section 5.1.2 including personalized tutor, TA-bots, and explainer tutorials can improve retention. For example, Sharma [177] apply learning analytics on NPTEL data to build a model to predict dropouts (and hence, design measures to reduce it). Dalipi et al. [60] use sentiment analysis of students’ feedback on MOOCs for understanding dropouts. More such studies are needed.
Learning Outcomes:
While under the Guidelines for SWAYAM [104], every course needs to specify the learning outcomes of the course a priori, there has not been any study on the a posteriori learning outcomes for the finishers of the courses. In a related question, Sharma et al. [39] asks for a direct comparison of MOOCs credits to classroom credits. She argues if two students earn the same set of credits—one from an institution with payment and the other from NPTEL-NOC—will the former be able to differentiate herself from the latter. If not, Tragedy of the Commons55 will occur where, moving forward, no learner will be willing to pay for the course anymore. Singh and Kakkar [124, 125] show that while credit mobility draws more students to SWAYAM, the certification rate is poor and SWAYAM fails in its desired outcome goals.
Roads ahead:
Specific studies should be instituted to understand the learning outcomes of various SWAYAM/NPTEL courses in different domains.
KGs of SWAYAM courses should be build with models of learning outcomes by concepts for a detailed analysis to improve outcomes. Employment history should also be tracked in this regard.
Gender Gap:
Sharma et al. [39] report gender disparities in the enrollment rate of MOOCs by quoting other researchers. However, no data is provided to support the claim. An indirect indicator of this gap can be observed in NPTEL [103] where since 2016, 15–25% more male students have registered for examinations compared to female students. So, while MOOCs in India is Open by structure, is it only partially so under societal dynamics?
Roads ahead:
Specific studies should be instituted to understand the gender disparity, if any, in various SWAYAM/NPTEL courses in different domains.
Thus, restructuring of the MOOCs platforms, using emerging technology for better ecosystem, is needed to match the changing needs and requirements of our students’ present and future demands.
We have presented a brief survey of key emerging technologies that can immediately benefit MOOCs. We then explore various challenges of MOOCs in India with quantitative data and qualitative observations. For every challenge we outline possible resolutions using adoption of technology, processes, standardization, collaborations, and innovations. This addressesRQ4(Section 1.2.1). Further, we stitch the vision with the challenges and resolutions in a flow to present a roadmap for MOOCs in India for a decade and addressRQ5(Section 1.2.1).
We have taken a deep look into MOOCs in India starting with an evolutionary review of the last 50 years (1974–2023) on how MOOCs not only started and grew, but is fast becoming a leading education system in India. This evolution and emergence of strength has been possible due to a number of unique innovations that have resulted in huge impacts—mostly positive—which we have assessed from primary and secondary sources. We have also elucidated the challenges with pointers to possible resolutions from various studies by researchers coupled with the first-hand experience of the author with multiple MOOCs. We finally outline a roadmap with the immense possibilities of development and growth in both quantitative and qualitative terms using AI-powered MOOCs.
Pandemic catalyzed rapid growth and adoption in the space of MOOCs. While schools and colleges shut down for several months, India continued to learn in domains where MOOCs had presence. Sagar [36] argued in 2021 that MOOCs would be the future of education in India. As open and free models of MOOCs started to crumble in parts of the world with major players like Coursera and edX turning commercial [178], SWAYAM stood a ground of strength with the escalated support of NEP 2020 at a national scale. In 2022, Shah et al. [118] predicted a powerful wave as 60+ Indian Universities started offering about 500 degrees online degrees and Amit et al. [40] emphasized on the need of deeper use of technology for engaging academic materials through animation, illustrations, and video descriptions to MOOCs reach to its potential in target markets.
The most recent shot in the arm has been wider public availability of powerful LLMs and GPTs over the last few months with private free players like Khan Academy [168, 169, 170] coming out with innovative personalization of online learning. India has inherent strengths in software, AI, innovation, and start-ups. With focused research to power MOOCs with AI, India can alleviate several of the current challenges within the next 5 to 10 years. Thus, it can emerge as a leader in the balanced blend of MOOCs and traditional systems of education for its young global workforce.
Before we close, let us note what ChatGPT has to say on “What is the future of MOOCs in India for the next decade?” (Figure 5). Ironically, it humbly does not (cannot) predict the strong role it itself is expected to play in the process.
Figure 5.
Responses from ChatGPT on “what is the future of MOOCs in India for the next decade?”
The author deeply appreciates the support of Dr. Jayakrishnan M, Senior Scientist, NPTEL, Ms. Bharathi Balaji, Senior Project Officer, NPTEL, Mr. Shib Shankar Das, Senior Manager, NPTEL and Prof. Andrew Thangaraj, Professor, IIT Madras and Principal Investigator, NPTEL for sharing data on NPTEL and for providing continuous support in the development of this chapter through in-depth discussions. He is also indebted to Dr. Jayakrishnan and Mr. Srijan Bandyopadhyay, Course Development Manager, AshokaX, Ashoka University for painstakingly reviewing earlier versions of this chapter.
Digital Library (in Library and Information Sciences)
DTH
Direct To Home
ERNET
Education and Research Network
ELNet-3 L
Electronically Networked – Life Long Learning
ET
The Economic Times
FICCI
Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry
FOSS
Free and Open-Source Software
FOSEE
Free/Libre and Open Source Software for Education
GATE
Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering
GER
Gross Enrolment Ratio
GIAN
Global Initiative of Academic Networks
GoI
Government of India
GPT
Generative Pre-trained Transformers
HE/HEI
Higher Education/Higher Education Institution
ICT
Information and Communication Technology
IGNOU
Indira Gandhi National Open University
IIT
Indian Institute of Technology – IITM (Madras), IITKGP (Kharagpur), IITB (Bombay), IITD (Delhi), IITK (Kanpur), IITG (Guwahati), IITR (Roorkee)
IIM
Indian Institute of Management – IIMA (Ahmedabad), IIMB (Bangalore), IIMC (Calcutta), IIML (Lucknow)
INFLIBNET
Information and Library Network Centre
ITS
Intelligent Tutoring Systems
JNU
Jawaharlal Nehru University
KG
Knowledge Graph
LLM
Large Language Models
LMS
Learning Management System
MCQ
Multiple Choice Questions
MSQ
Multiple Select Questions
MHRD
Ministry of Human Resource Development
ML
Machine Learning
MoE
Ministry of Education
MOOC
Massive Open Online Course
NAD
National Academic Depository
NCERT
National Council of Educational Research and Training
NDLI
National Digital Library of India
NDU
National Digital University
NEAT
National Education Alliance for Technology
NETF
National Educational Technology Forum
NEP
National Education Policy
NIOS
(The) National Institute of Open Schooling
NITTTR
National Institute of Technical Teachers’ Training and Research
NKN
National Knowledge Network
NLP
Natural Language Processing
NMEICT
National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology
NOC
NPTEL Online Certification
NPTEL
National program on Technology Enhanced Learning
OER
Open Educational Resource
PDS
Plagiarism Detection Software
PIB
Press Information Bureau
PTI
Press Trust of India
PPP
Public-Private Partnerships
SPoC
Single Point of Contact (in NPTEL)
SPOC
Small Private Online Courses
SLM
Self Learning Material
STEM
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
SWAYAM
Study Webs of Active–learning for Young Aspiring Minds
TLP
Teaching-Learning Process
ToI
Times of India
UGC
University Grants Commission
V-C
Vice-Chancellor
VC
Video Conference
VCTEL
Virtual Centre for Technology Enhanced Learning
VSNL
Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited
WOTEL
Workshop On Technology Enhanced Learning
References
1.UNFPA. 8 Billion Lives, INFINITE POSSIBILITIES the case for rights & choices, UNFPA State of World Population (SWP) Report 2023. p. 167. Available from: http://surl.li/gmzky
2.Countdown 2047: How demographic dividend can become a demographic curse, ET. Aug 14, 2022. Available from: http://surl.li/kqmoj
3.Unlocking India’s Demographic Potential. Dec 24, 2022. Available from: http://surl.li/finkm
4.Demographic transition: India can reap rich dividends with right policy focus, The Hindu BusinessLine. Dec 20, 2022. Available from: http://surl.li/fijzg
5.India Skills Report. 2022. Available from: http://surl.li/fikgq
6.India Skills Report. 2023. Available from: http://surl.li/gwplx
7.India Skills Reports. 2014–23. Available from: http://surl.li/hgsty
8.Higher Education in India: Vision 2030: FICCI Higher Education Summit. 2013. Available from: http://surl.li/fihzo
9.15 Years of Journey: FICCI Higher Education Committee 2004–2019. 2019. Available from: http://surl.li/kpcxv
10.Shah D. A decade of MOOCs: A review of stats & trends for large-scale online courses in 2021. Dec 28, 2021. Available from: http://surl.li/fidnx
11.Ghonge MM, Bag R, Singh A. Indian education: Ancient, medieval and modern. In: Waller S et al., editors. Education at the Intersection of Globalization & Technology. London, UK: Intech Open; Oct 2020. Available from: http://surl.li/herna
12.Destruction of the Indian System of Education by British. In: Mystery of India. 2015. Available from: http://surl.li/hezof
13.IGNOU Act 1985: Indira Gandhi National Open University Act, 1985. Sep 2, 1985. Available from: http://surl.li/hlyqv
14.IOP Portal: IGNOU Online. Available from: http://surl.li/fnvhk
15.Mishra MK. Are Moocs galvanizing the higher education In India? Elementary Education Online. 2021;20(4):3555-3568. Available from: http://surl.li/fuolj
16.Coursera. Commercially available in 40 languages. 2012. Available from: http://surl.li/apdet
17.edX. Commercially available in 14 languages. 2012. Available from: http://surl.li/waou
18.Udacity. Commercially available in English. 2012. Available from: http://surl.li/bctst
19.FutureLearn. Commercially available in English, French, Dutch, Spanish, & Chinese. 2012. Available from: http://surl.li/waoe
20.McGill Association of University Teachers (MAUT). A Brief History of MOOCs. 2015. Available from: http://surl.li/fihwg
21.Aldahmani S, Al-shami SA, Adil H, Sidek S. A review paper on MOOCs development stages, types, opportunities & challenges. Systematic Reviews in Pharmacy. 2020;11(12):172-179. Available from: http://surl.li/gzpmo
22.Shah D, Pickard L, Ma R. 20 massive list of MOOC platforms around the world in 2023. In: Class Central. Apr 10, 2022. Available from: www.classcentral.com
23.India. NPTEL. Freely available in English for STEM subjects at university-level. 2014. Available from: http://surl.li/focpm
24.India. SWAYAM. Freely available in English. 2016. Available from: http://surl.li/focql
25.China. Xuetang X. Commercially available in Chinese & English. 2013. Available from: http://surl.li/hfjly
26.Italy. EduOpen. Freely available in Italian. 2016. Available from: http://surl.li/hfjpj
27.Israel. Campus-il. Freely available in Hebrew, Arabic & English. 2018. Available from: http://surl.li/hfjpy
28.Mexico. MéxicoX. Freely available in Spanish. 2015. Available from: http://surl.li/hfjsh
29.Thailand. ThaiMOOC. Freely available in Thai & English. 2017. Available from: http://surl.li/hfjty
30.Sharma K. What is a digital university, how Modi govt plans to set it up and what are the challenges. In: The Print. Feb 7, 2022. Available from: http://surl.li/hkryq
31.ABC: Academic Bank of Credits. Available from: http://surl.li/hmsix
32.Agarwal S. Why Swayam portal’s a dampener for Modi govt’s online learning dream. 3 cr signed up, 4% finished. In: The Print. Jan 11, 2023. Available from: http://surl.li/hktob
33.Haumin L & Madhusudhan M. An Indian based MOOC: An overview: In: Library Philosophy and Practice. Apr 2019. Available from: http://surl.li/fidwx
34.Singh N. SWAYAM – Indian MOOCs: An insider’s perspective. Journal of Distance Education. 2019;14(1):47-55. Available from: http://surl.li/hiede
35.Agarwal S. MOOCs – An overview: Indian context. In: Proc. XXI Annual Int’l Conf. On “Achieving Excellence in Higher Education”. Jan 2020. pp. 86-91. Available from: http://surl.li/gzqgm
36.Sagar RP. How e-learning & MOOCs would be the future of education. May 17, 2021. Available from: http://surl.li/fuodh
37.Hooda M, Dahiya P. Accessibility of MOOC in Indian higher education: A review report. Turkish Online Journal of Qualitative Inquiry. 2021;12(1):2763-2770. Available from: http://surl.li/gzqtm
38.EdNet. The rise of MOOCs and their utility. Jun 2022. Available from: http://surl.li/fieey
39.Sharma R, Sharmiladevi JC. An overview of Indian MOOCs. In: Annual Res. J. of SCMS 10, Pune. 2022. pp. 31-42. Available from: http://surl.li/kqsph
40.Amit S, Karim R, Kafy A. Mapping emerging MOOC markets before and after COVID 19: A comparative perspective from Bangladesh and India. Spatial Information Research. 2022;30:655-663. Available from: http://surl.li/fiejz
41.Jaganathan GS, Sugundan N, Sivakumar S. MOOCs: A comparative analysis between Indian scenario and global scenario. International Journal of Engineering & Technology. 2018;7(4.39):854-857. Available from: http://surl.li/fidwe
42.Thakur K & Kumar V. National Level Initiatives for MOOCs: A Comparison of India and China. In: Research Gate. May 2019. Available from: http://surl.li/fjkmp
43.Pant H V, Lohani MC, Pande J. MOOCs in Higher Education: Current Trends in India and Developed Countries. 2021. Available from: http://surl.li/fiegu
44.Varyani H, Navaneeth MS. The past, present & future of e-learning. International Journal of Policy Sciences and Law. 2020;1(1):99-118. Available from: http://surl.li/fidyi
45.Singh A, Sharma A. Acceptance of MOOCs as an alternative for internship for management students during COVID-19 pandemic: An Indian perspective. International Journal of Educational Management. 2021;35(6):1231-1244. Available from: http://surl.li/gzysn
46.Kaicker A, Mathur P, Jawed S. Higher education in India through MOOCs & Online Courses. International Journal of Research -GRANTHAALAYAH. 2022;10(3). Available from: http://surl.li/gzytw
47.Ledwon H, Bowden P. 20 Most Cited Research Papers on MOOCs. In: CC. Mar 1, 2022. Available from: http://surl.li/guvmq
48.Liyanagunawardena TR, Adams AA, Williams SA. MOOCs: A systematic study of the published literature 2008-2012. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. 2013;14(3):202-227. Available from: http://surl.li/gzpir
49.Bozkurt A, Akgün-Özbek E, Zawacki-Richter O. Trends and patterns in MOOCs: Review and content analysis of research on MOOCs (2008–2015). International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. 2017;18(5). Available from: http://surl.li/gzppf
50.Zawacki-Richter O, Bozkurt A, Alturki U, Aldraiweesh A. What research says about MOOCs: An explorative content analysis. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. 2018;19(1):242-259. Available from: http://surl.li/gzpnz
51.Al-Rahmi W, Aldraiweesh A, Yahaya N, Kamin YB. MOOCs: Systematic literature review in Malaysian higher education. International Journal of Engineering & Technology. 2018;7(4):2197-2202. Available from: http://surl.li/gzyox
52.Pradhan P. India’s MOOC research during 2007–2018 as reflected in web of science (WoS): An analysis. INFLIBNET Newsletter. 2019;26(4):133-138. Available from: http://surl.li/gzpvu
53.Zhu M, Annisa R, Sari AR, Lee MM. A comprehensive systematic review of MOOC research: Research techniques, topics and trends from 2009 to 2019. Educational Technology Research and Development. 2020;68:1685-1710. Available from: http://surl.li/gzpqe
54.Shah D. By The Numbers: MOOCs in 2021. Dec 1, 2021. Available from: http://surl.li/fidpf
55.Jibril M. MOOC for higher education and professional development. A Literature Review. Jan 2021. eBook. Available from: http://surl.li/gzyqv
56.Meet RK, Kala D. Trends and future prospects in MOOC researches: A systematic literature review 2013–2020. Contemporary Educational Technology. 2021;13(3):ep312. Available from: http://surl.li/gzprn
57.Stracke CM, Trisolini G. A systematic literature review on the quality of MOOCs. Sustainability. 2021;13:5817. Available from: http://surl.li/gzrou
58.Stracke C M, Tan E, Texeira A, Pinto M, Vassiliadis B, Kameas A, Sgouropoulou C & Vidal G. Quality Reference Framework (QRF) for the Quality of MOOCs. 2018. Available from: http://surl.li/hidyj, http://surl.li/hidyo
59.Shah J, Khanna M, Patel H. Technology adoption and continuance of MOOCs: A systematic literature review, synthesis and future research agenda. Journal of Content, Community & Communication. 2021;14:106-132. Available from: http://surl.li/gzrka
60.Dalipi F, Zdravkova K, Ahlgren F. Sentiment analysis of students’ feedback in MOOCs: A systematic literature review. In: Frontiers in AI. 4, Sep 2021. Available from: http://surl.li/gzptz
61.Zhu M, Sari AR, Lee MM. Trends and issues in MOOC learning analytics empirical research: A systematic literature review (2011–2021). Education and Information Technologies. 2022;27:10135-10160. Available from: http://surl.li/hgxee
62.Cheng J, Yuen AHK, Chiu DKW. Systematic review of MOOC research in mainland China. In: Library Hi Tech. Jul 2022. Available from: http://surl.li/gzpst
63.Despujo I, Castañeda L, Marín VI, Turró C. What do we want to know about MOOCs? Results from a machine learning approach to a systematic literature mapping review. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education. 2022;19:53. Available from: http://surl.li/gzpjx
64.NPTEL: National program on Technology Enhanced Learning. Available from: http://surl.li/focpm
65.IITM BS: World’s first 4-year Bachelor of Science (BS) Degree in Data Science & Applications, IIT Madras. Available from: http://surl.li/focih
66.IGNOU: Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi. Available from: http://surl.li/fnupu
67.ELNet-3L: Take a big leap with IT courses designed by IITKGP, ToI. Jul 28, 2001. Available from: http://surl.li/fidiq
68.e-Yantra: e-Yantra Portal. Available from: http://surl.li/focgm
69.NMEICT: National Mission on Education through Information & Communication Technology. Available from: http://surl.li/focor Overview of NMEICT http://surl.li/fjkqj
70.Virtual Labs: Virtual Labs Portal. Available from: http://surl.li/focrb
71.NKN: National Knowledge Network. Available from: http://surl.li/fnrjw
72.Baadal. Baadal: An Academic Cloud. Available from: http://surl.li/fnqrx
73.FOSSEE: Free/Libre & Open Source Software for Education. Available from: http://surl.li/fochi
74.Spoken Tutorial: Spoken Tutorial Portal. Available from: http://surl.li/focqg
75.VIDWAN: Expert Database & National Researcher’s Network. Available from: http://surl.li/fnjzv
76.Shah D. Capturing the Hype: Year of the MOOC timeline explained. Feb 4, 2020. Available from: http://surl.li/fihgr
77.NROER: National Repository of Open Educational Resources. Available from: http://surl.li/fnqzz
78.NDLI: National Digital Library of India Portal. Available from: http://surl.li/focjr
79.mooKIT: mooKIT Platform, IIT Kanpur. Available from: http://surl.li/gkgzg
80.IITBombayX: IITBombayX Hybrid MOOCs Platform. IIT Bombay. Available from: http://surl.li/fnqqx
81.IIMBx: IIMBx Platform. IIM Bangalore. Available from: http://surl.li/fnqqp
82.e-Pathshala: e-Pathshala Portal. Available from: http://surl.li/fnrgb
83.SWAYAM Central: Study Webs of Active-Learning for Young Aspiring Minds. Available from: http://surl.li/focql
84.SWAYAM Prabha: SWAYAM Prabha — 34 DTH channels — India. Available from: http://surl.li/focqu
85.DIKSHA: Digital infrastructure for knowledge sharing. Available from: http://surl.li/hmnqc
86.NDLI Project Portal. Available from: http://surl.li/foclp
87.NEP. National Education Policy 2020. 2020. Available from: http://surl.li/cqfjw
88.NISHTHA: National Initiative for School Heads’ & Teachers’ Holistic Advancement Online on DIKSHA. London, UK: Intech Open. Available from: http://surl.li/fnjwb
89.ET Bureau. NITI Aayog ties up with BYJU’S to provide study material to schools, The Indian Express. Sep 17, 2021. Available from: http://surl.li/fvojr
90.NEAT: National Educational Alliance for Technology. Available from: http://surl.li/foclx. NEAT: Overview http://surl.li/focnu
91.Explained: What is NEAT, the govt scheme that seeks to bridge digital inequality? The Indian Express. Jan 14, 2022. Available from: http://surl.li/fidfb
92.Prasar Bharati News Services. How Digital University will change education in India? UGC Chairman explains. In: YouTube. 2023. Available from: http://surl.li/hmfnp
93.Bowden P. Beginners Guide to MOOCs. Jun 3, 2021. Available from: http://surl.li/fjalf
94.IGNOU. In: Wikipedia. Available from: http://surl.li/foisq
95.NDLI Newsletter: Revisiting Pedagogy in Digital India. June, 2019. Available from: http://surl.li/ficfp
96.Internet: Ramani S. The story of how the Internet came to India: An insider’s account, News 18. Aug 14, 2015. Available from: http://surl.li/gkcot
97.e-ShodhSindhu: e-ShodhSindhu: Consortium for Higher Education Electronic Resources. Available from: http://surl.li/fnqov
98.eGyanKosh: eGyanKosh: Digital Learning Contents from ODL Institutions. Available from: http://surl.li/fnqtb
99.e-PG Pathshala: e-PG Pathshala Portal. Available from: http://surl.li/fnjwl
100.ShodhShuddhi: Access to Ouriginal Plagiarism Detection Software (PDS). Available from: http://surl.li/fnqpw
101.Samarth: Samarth eGov: Building future ready digital campuses. Available from: http://surl.li/focpv
102.Devgun P. Prospects for success of MOOC in higher education in India. International Journal of Information and Computation Technology. 2013;3(7):641-646. Available from: http://surl.li/fieiw
103.NPTEL SPoC workshop: Jan 2023. YouTube: http://surl.li/hgptb
104.Guidelines for Development & Implementation of MOOCs/SWAYAM AICTE, MHRD. Jun 1, 2017. Available from: http://surl.li/fidte, http://surl.li/gvmzi
105.UGC (Credit Framework for online learning courses through SWAYAM) Regulation 2016. Jul 20, 2016. Available from: http://surl.li/hahsh
106.AICTE (Credit Framework for online learning courses through SWAYAM) Regulation 2016. Aug 22, 2016. Available from: http://surl.li/hahsr
107.ET Bureau. A MOOC boost for higher education, ET. Jul 26, 2021. Available from: http://surl.li/fieku
109.Shagun: School Education Shagun. Available from: http://surl.li/fnrey
110.NEP. National Education Policy 1986. 1986. Available from: http://surl.li/hgnth
111.NEFT: National Educational Technology Forum (NETF). Available from: http://surl.li/fvorg
112.D’Souza R. The coming disruption in higher education in India. The India Forum. May 12, 2022. Available from: http://surl.li/fvuof
113.Digital University. In: PIB. April, 2022. Available from: http://surl.li/hksbg
114.Parthasarathy A. New Academic Year May See Launch of a NDU, Will Allow Students To Mix And Match Courses From Different Institutions Online. In: Swarajya Mag. Jan 12, 2023. Available from: http://surl.li/hmfkj
115.Blog. What is a Digital University & is it the future of Indian Higher Education? Full Facts & Updates 2023. In: College Vidya. Jan 30, 2023. Available from: http://surl.li/hmflr
116.Gohain MP. To witness launch of India’s first digital university. In: Times of India. Jan 1, 2023. Available from: http://surl.li/hmfhg
117.Hardaha R. UGC allows students to pursue 2 degree courses simultaneously. Apr 12, 2022. Available from: http://surl.li/fwhro
118.Shah D, Patra S. 500+ UGC-Approved Online Degrees from India’s Top Universities. Sep 7, 2022. Available from: http://surl.li/fidpu
119.Sharma K. Budget 2023: Digital University, announced by Sitharaman last year, to begin classes this July. In: The Print. Jan 26, 2023. Available from: http://surl.li/hksae
120.NPTEL SPoC workshop: Jun 2022. YouTube: http://surl.li/hgpub
121.UGC (Credit Framework for online learning courses through SWAYAM) Regulation 2016. (First Amendment). May 8, 2017. Available from: http://surl.li/kpcpr
122.UGC (Credit Framework for Online Learning Courses through SWAYAM) Regulations, 2021. Mar 25, 2021. Available from: http://surl.li/hahsw
123.UGC (Establishment & Operation of Academic Bank Of Credits in Higher Education) Regulations, 2021. Jul 28, 2021. Available from: http://surl.li/hahta
124.Singh A, Kakkar KB. Program inclusive, credit-based SWAYAM MOOCs in higher educational institutions of India: A review. The Online Journal of Distance Education and e-Learning. 2022;10(4):529-536. Available from: http://surl.li/kmvpg
125.Singh A, Kakkar KB. Program inclusive, credit-based SWAYAM MOOCs in higher educational institutions of India: A review. International Journal of Educational Development. 2023;97:102-727. Available from: http://surl.li/kmvpg
126.NPTEL Domain Certification. Available from: http://surl.li/fvbcd
127.IITM Diploma: Build a Career in Programming/Data Science with a DIPLOMA from IIT Madras In 8 months, IIT Madras. Available from: http://surl.li/focje
128.NPTEL Local Chapters. Available from: http://surl.li/fvaxs
129.NPTEL Industry Associate Program. Available from: http://surl.li/fvclo
130.NPTEL Stars. Available from: http://surl.li/fvbjo
131.NPTEL Summer/Winter Internship. Available from: http://surl.li/fvcfn
132.NPTEL GATE Project. Available from: http://surl.li/fvddf
133.NPTEL-AICTE FDP Portal. Available from: http://surl.li/fvcar
134.MoU between AICTE & NPTEL (for FDP). Jul 3, 2018. Available from: http://surl.li/fvbyv
135.NPTEL+: Anyone Anywhere Anytime. Available from: http://surl.li/hahxd
136.8th Schedule: Languages. Constitutional provisions relating to Eighth Schedule. Available from: http://surl.li/fvcva
137.NPTEL Translation. Available from: http://surl.li/fvctm
138.NDTV. New Education Policy Moots Formation of National Education Technology Forum. Jul 30 2022. Available from: http://surl.li/fvohg
139.Chauhan J, Goel A. An overview of MOOC in India. International Journal of Computer Trends and Technology (IJCTT). 2017;49(2):111-120. Available from: http://surl.li/fidvq
140.Ranjani S. NPTEL Eases GATE Exam Preparation & Increases College Placement Rate, HSS IIT Madras. May 11, 2021. Available from: http://surl.li/fvtzc
141.Verma V. Students find value in NPTEL courses as IITs offer certification: IIT Madras prof interview. In: Shiksha Talks to Prof. Andrew Thangaraj, SWAYAM-NPTEL. IIT Madras; Jun 4, 2021. Available from: www.shiksha.com
142.The Corporate Buzz. What is NPTEL? How we get Certificate from IIT & IIM? How to register in NPTEL online courses 2020, YouTube. Sep 13, 2020. Available from: http://surl.li/fvuig
143.Ahmad I, Sharma S, Singh R, Gehlot A, Priyadarshi N, Twala B. MOOC 5.0: A roadmap to the future of learning. Sustainability. 2022;14:11199. Available from: http://surl.li/hfvmx
144.Mutawa AM. Perspective chapter: MOOCS at higher education – Current state and future trends. In: MOOCs – Current Practice & Future Trends. 2023. Available from: http://surl.li/hfvgc
145.Nunzio Q. Is there a future for MOOCs? Jan 17, 2022. Available from: http://surl.li/fuofk
146.Mao Y. Summary & evaluation of the application of knowledge graphs in education 2007–2020. In: Comp. & Mod. Of Eco. & Fin. Complex Sys. Sep 2021. pp. 12-18. Available from: http://surl.li/gzpge
147.Zheng Y, Liu R, Hou J. The construction of high educational knowledge graph based on MOOC. In: 2017 IEEE 2nd IT, Networking, Elect. & Auto. Control Conf. (ITNEC), Chengdu, China. Vol. 2017. pp. 260-263. Available from: http://surl.li/gzijh
148.Dang F, Tang J, Li S. MOOC-KG: A MOOC knowledge graph for cross-platform online learning resources. In: 2019 IEEE 9th Int’l Conf. On Elect. Inf. & Emergency Comm. (ICEIEC), Beijing, China. Vol. 2019. pp. 1-8. Available from: http://surl.li/gziip
149.Liao Y, Huang Q, Wang C, Zuo Z, Wang Y, Yu Q. Knowledge graph and its applications in MOOC & SPOC. In: 2nd Int’l Conf. On Cont. Ed. & Eco. Dev. (CEED 2019). 2019. pp. 301-305. Available from: http://surl.li/gzilr
150.Dang F-R, Tang J-T, Pang K-Y, Wang T, Li S-S, Li X. Constructing an educational knowledge graph with concepts linked to wikipedia. Journal of Computer Science and Technology. 2021;36:1200-1211
151.Chen H, Yin C, Fan X, Qiao L, Rong W, Zhang X. Learning path recommendation for MOOC platforms based on a knowledge graph. In: Qiu H et al., editors. Know. Sc., Engg. & Mgmt. (KSEM 2021). LNAI 12816. Cham: Springer; 2021. Available from: http://surl.li/gzomy
152.Zhang H, Shen X, Yi B, Wang W, Feng Y. KGAN: Knowledge grouping aggregation network for course recommendation in MOOCs. Expert Systems with Applications. 2023;211(C). Available from: http://surl.li/gzosp
153.Zhang B & Si H. Learning path planning based on knowledge graph on MOOC platform. Open Journal of Social Sciences 11 (3), Mar 2023. p. 457–465. Available from: http://surl.li/gzimu
154.Fareedah A, Assma B, Chase G, Hari S, Cheng Xiang Z. Mining MOOC lecture transcripts to construct concept dependency graphs. In: 11th Int’l Ed. Data Mining Soc. (EDM), Raleigh, NC. Jul 2018. Available from: http://surl.li/gzozz
155.Das A, Das PP. Automatic semantic segmentation and annotation of MOOC lecture videos. In: Proc. of 21st Int’l Conf. On Asia-Pac. Dig. Lib. (ICADL 2019), KL, Malaysia. Oct 29, 2019. pp. 181-188. Available from: http://surl.li/hlpnt
156.Das A, Das PP. Semantic segmentation of MOOC lecture videos by Analyzing concept change in domain knowledge graph. In: Proc. of 22nd Int’l Conf. On Asia-Pac. Dig. Lib. (ICADL 2020), VC. Nov 26, 2020. pp. 55-70. Available from: http://surl.li/hlpqp
157.Huang C, Li Q, Chen Y, Zhan D. An effective method for constructing knowledge graph of online course. In: 4th Int’l Conf. On Big Data & Ed. (ICBDE 2021). Feb 2021. pp. 12-18. Available from: http://surl.li/gzoeg
158.Class Central. Class central: Find your next course. Available from: http://surl.li/focel. The Report. Available from: http://surl.li/fidrx
159.Wang S, Gong J, Wang J, Feng W, Peng H, Tang J, Yu P S. Attentional graph convolutional networks for knowledge concept recommendation in MOOCs in a heterogeneous view. In: arXiv. Jun 2020. Available from: http://surl.li/gziok
160.Jung H, Jang Y, Kim S, Kim H. KPCR: Knowledge graph enhanced personalized course recommendation. In: Long G et al., editors. Adv. in AI. LNAI 13151. Cham: Springer; 2022. Available from: http://surl.li/gzovm
161.Pan L, Wang X, Li C, Li J, Tang J. Course concept extraction in MOOCs via embedding-based graph propagation. In: Proc. of the 8th Int’l Jt. Conf. On NLP. Vol. 1. Nov 2017. pp. 875-884. Available from: http://surl.li/gzopv
162.Jiang L, Hu S, Huang M, Wang Z, Yang J, Ye X, et al. MAssistant: A personal knowledge assistant for MOOC learners. In: Proc. of the 2019 EMNLP and the 9th IJCNLP, HK, China. Nov 2019. pp. 133-138. Available from: http://surl.li/gzpcb
163.Yu H, Miao C, Leung C, White TJ. Towards AI-powered personalization in MOOC learning. npj Science of Learning. 2017;2:15. Available from: http://surl.li/guvch
164.Fauvel S, Yu H, Miao C, Cui L, Song H, Zhang L, et al. Artificial intelligence powered MOOCs: A brief survey. In: 2018 IEEE Int’l Conf. On Agents (ICA), Singapore. 2018. pp. 56-61 http://surl.li/guvfe
165.Jordan K, Goshtasbpour F. JIME virtual special collection – 2012 to 2022: The decade of the MOOC. Journal of Interactive Media in Education. 2022. Available from: http://surl.li/guvlc
166.Yilmaz R, Yurdugül H, Yilmaz FGK, Sahin M, Sulak S, Aydin F, et al. Smart MOOC integrated with intelligent tutoring: A system architecture and framework model proposal. Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence. 2022;3. Available from: http://surl.li/gvxqi
167.Agarwal A, Sen B, Mukhopadhyay R, Namboodiri V, Jawahar CV. Towards MOOCs for lipreading: Using synthetic talking heads to train humans in lipreading at scale. In: 2023 IEEE/CVF Winter Conf. On Apps. Of CV (WACV). 2023. pp. 2216-2225. Available from: http://surl.li/guvrp
168.Khan S. How AI could save (not destroy) education, TED talk. 2023. Available from: http://surl.li/hmaxn
169.Khan Academy. Khanmigo, your AI guide. Available from: http://surl.li/guvoz
170.Khan S. Khan Academy announces GPT-4 powered learning guide. YouTube. Apr 2023. Available from: http://surl.li/guvpg
171.Saxena A, Saxena A, Gupta S. Factors affecting the effective implementation of MOOCs in India. Global Journal of Enterprise Information System. 2022;12(4):10-20. Available from: http://surl.li/hktmb
172.BharatNet. BharatNet Project. Phase 2 of 3. 2016. Available from: http://surl.li/gvmwk
173.Jio 3G /4G/5G coverage map, India. Available from: http://surl.li/gtowc
174.CISCO. India’s internet user base to cross 900 million by 2023: Cisco. In: PTI. Aug 20, 2022. Available from: http://surl.li/gkcpi
175.Mithun Mohan M, Pallavi Upadhyaya P & Rajasekharan Pillai K. Intention & barriers to use MOOCs: An investigation among the post graduate students in India. In: Ed. & IT. 25, May 2020. pp. 5017-5031. Available from: http://surl.li/hlzfp
176.Chiappe A, Castillo BDL. Retention in MOOCS: Some key factors. Ensaio: Evaluation and Public Policies in Education. 2021;29(110):112-134 Available from: http://surl.li/gvqml
177.Sharma A. A review on various developments in MOOCs for prediction of dropouts to form a basis for prescriptive framework to reduce dropout rate. Think India Journal. 2019;22(17):372-384
178.Shah D. 2U + edX Analysis: Win for 2U, Risk for edX, Opportunity for Coursera. Jul 5, 2021. Available from: http://surl.li/fidrf
Notes
Demographic Dividend is the economic growth potential that can result from shifts in a population’s age structure, mainly when the share of the working-age population (15–64) is larger than the non-working-age share of the population (< 14 and > 65). https://www.unfpa.org/demographic-dividend
25% population is in the age group of 0–14 years, 18% in 10–19 years, 26% in 10–24 years, and 68% in 15–64 years, and only 7% above 65 years [1].
This quoted figure is for employability of men. It is 52.80% for women in 2023. Interestingly, India has had higher employability for women for many years
Ministry of Education (MoE) launched several programs – NPTEL in 2001, e-Yantra in 2003, and NMEICT & Virtual Lab in 2009. We discuss in depth in Section 2
Erstwhile Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) from 1985 to 2020
Much like the universities today
Owing to the dominance of the Muslim rulers
“I propose that we replace her (India’s) old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation” – Lord Macaulay’s Address to the British Parliament on February 2, 1835
“The beautiful tree of education was cut down by you British. Therefore today India is far more illiterate than it was 100 years ago.”—Mahatma Gandhi, Round-table conference in 1931
Brick-and-Mortar education occurs at a physical school, as opposed to a virtual environment
IITs (1950), RECs (1959), ITIs (1950), IIMs (1961), AIIMS (1956), Law & Medical Colleges, Kendriya Vidyalaya (1962), etc.
ODL is a system wherein teachers and learners need not necessarily be present either at same place or same time and is flexible in regard to modalities and timing of teaching and learning as also the admission criteria without compromising necessary quality considerations.
Digital learning is defined as any type of learning accompanied by the use of technology, or instructional practice that makes use of technology
In Remote Learning the student and the educator, or information source, are not physically present in a traditional classroom environment
Mishra [15] points to the Clark taxonomy of variants of MOOCs.
Primarily fuelled by Tsinghua University and MOE Research Center for Online Education
This may be due to skewed sizes of corpus between these two studies.
The author has created three courses in NPTEL [64] that are regularly offered every semester / year. Since 2011, he has been a part of the core team to create and offer IITM’s BS in Data Science [65].
Artificial intelligence
Machine learning
Generative Pre-Trained Transformers
A detailed four-page table is available from the author on request.
In terms of plans and policy projections
Pedagogy of ODL needs in-depth end-to-end planning, detailed explanations for everything, clear assignments and solutions, and so on
https://etsc.iitd.ac.in/
Internet started in India with Education & Research Network (ERNET) project in 1986 and on August 15, 1995, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) launched public Internet access [96]
The first popular video streaming site, YouTube, was founded in 2005
SAKSHAT: A One Stop Education Portal, launched on October 30, 2006, was a precursor to NMEICT to facilitate lifelong learning for students, teachers and those in employment or in pursuit of knowledge free of cost to them. https://www.education.gov.in/technology-enabled-learning-1
https://www.indiaedtech.in/
India’s Universal Payments Interface (UPI) has transformed the digital payments system in the country and is extremely popular.
In April 2022, the UGC approved simultaneous dual degrees, in both physical and online modes [117]. Also, there are 500+ UGC-approved online degrees from India’s top universities [118]. With NDU as hub for everything online, it is not clear how this will be integrated.
GATE is an examination conducted in India that primarily tests the comprehensive understanding of various undergraduate subjects in engineering and science for admission into the Masters Program and Job in Public Sector Companies. GATE is a Computer-Based Test (CBT) organized by IISc Bangalore, IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi, IIT Guwahati, IIT Kanpur, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Madras, and IIT Roorkee, on behalf of the National Coordination Board – GATE, Department of Higher Education, MoE. GATE 2023 is coordinated by IIT Kanpur.
Over 3500 translators and 200+ curators from nearly 1500 LCs have been contributing
The NITI Aayog (Policy Commission or National Institution for Transforming India: https://www.niti.gov.in/) serves as the apex public policy think tank of the GoI
Byju’s (https://byjus.com/) is an Indian multinational educational technology company, headquartered in Bangalore, India. It was founded in 2011 and as of March 2022, it is valued at US$22 billion and the company claims to have over 115 million registered students.
Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology: https://www.meity.gov.in/
Knowledge Graphs organize data from multiple sources, capture information about entities of interest in a given domain (like courses, lectures, learners, instructors, or platforms), and forge connections between them via linking and semantic metadata. KGs provide a framework for data integration, unification, analytics, and sharing.
Coursera, EDX, XuetangX, and ICourse
For example, the Find your next course service at Class Central [158] is based on simple metadata (subject, university, provider), keywords (from course titles, abstracts), filters (duration, language, level), or manually curated guides. This does not consider course interrelationships, preparedness / ambition of the learner, etc.
Graph Neural Network
A large language model trained by OpenAI based on the GPT-3.5 architecture
This list is accumulated from three regenerated responses from ChatGPT on “How can AI improve MOOCs in India?”
Digital pedagogy is the study and use of contemporary digital technologies in teaching and learning. It may be applied to online, hybrid, and face-to-face learning environments.
A digital twin is a digital representation of a physical object, process, service, or environment that behaves and looks like its counterpart in the real world.
Digital fatigue (aka, screen burnout) is a state of mental exhaustion brought on by the excessive use of digital devices.
It may be noted that this study was carried out in 2019 before the credit mobility was implemented across HEIs to alleviate exactly this specific issue.
Digital quality guarantee processes, however, are conducted on all videos and transcriptions.
Learners taking courses consistently in subsequent semesters after the initial exposure
As the NPTEL team observed in [103], in July 2022 courses, many students had high average assignment marks scored only less than 10% marks in final examination.
Freemium is a business model in which a company offers basic or limited features to users at no cost and then charges a premium for supplemental or advanced features.
The tragedy of the commons refers to a situation in which individuals with access to a public resource (called a common) act in their own interest and, in doing so, ultimately deplete the resource.
Written By
Partha Pratim Das
Submitted: 11 May 2023Reviewed: 12 May 2023Published: 24 September 2023
Open access peer-reviewed chapter
