Friday 21 October 2016

#ic_moveme Janesh Sanzgiri on Critical reflections on MOOCs in India @janeshsanzgiri

Fabulous critical talk on MOOCs by Janesh Sanzgiri. In 2013 MOOCs were suggested as the silicon valley salvation of education, including the developing world. But the reality is that most MOOC participants are not the  underprivileged class, not really open anymore (movement to pay for assessment and so on). More importantly the current research is heavily skewed to Northern regions. The voice of the global south is being missed in research. 

In India MOOCs are used by 15% of Indian learners, MOOCs provided by North.

NPTEL (http://nptel.ac.in/ )was first an OER platform. In India the most privileged universities put their content online in 2006, mostly stem and technology courses. Another Indian platform is SWAYAM (https://swayam.gov.in/Home ) a government initiative to support the remote universities with MOOCs for credit. In india lack of infrastructure, lack of university systems to cope with the demand for educators. Looking at MOOCs is a way to look at high quality formal education beyond the high brow universities, who do not have access to many high quality professors and institutes. Challenges for accreditation, up to 20% of all the credits can be done via SWAYAM. The western elite institutions create content for the global south. But the fact that many countries are providing MOOCs to create solutions within their country and educational challenges.

Digital literacies and skills are needed for lower economic learners of these countries. Despite the increase of MOOCs, the South will work out solutions with supply and demand of MOOCs. MOOCs are not solving the poor and down trotted, therefor there is still the lowest layer of socio-economic society that is not reached, although more people are reached. 

Question why a lack of voices from the South? Answer: combination of issues, academic system in India is different, and journal issues (many Indian journals, but not always meeting the mark), global cohort is difficult to make transparent in terms of data, Indian MOOCs do not have access to the costly learning analytic options the North has.