Webinar: MOOCs and Openness – The Case of MOOCs in India |

Our net Webinar will be on Wednesday 2nd October, 4pm UK time. The speaker is one of GO-GN’s own researchers, Janesh Sanzgiri. I was one of Janesh’s supervisors, so I know how interesting this topic is, and recommend you all drop in and give it a listen, even if MOOCs aren’t your main focus. Janesh has given us the following description of the talk:

MOOCs and Openness – The Case of MOOCs in India

As MOOCs become increasingly commercialized and pivot towards corporate training and skills development, it is worth considering where MOOCs fit in the broader open education movement. While MOOCs were initially touted as the democratizing providers of high-quality education to learners around the world that lack access to resources, changes in business models coupled with research on who is actually benefitting from MOOCs suggests that MOOCs are deepening rather than widening access to education.

In this webinar, I will outline the main funding, monetization and accreditation strategies used by the major global MOOC platforms, and compare the same with the case of India, and the unique ways in which the Indian government is attempting to use MOOCs to not just provide access to courses from the most prestigious institutions in the country, but also try and leverage some of the affordances of MOOCs to improve the quality of higher education across India. Using the findings of my PhD research that compared Indian learners’ experiences on an Indian MOOC platform (NPTEL) and a UK-based platform (FutureLearn), this webinar discusses the unique challenges faced by MOOC learners in a Global South context, and to what extent does the openness of the platform influence the demographics, motivations and experiences of learners.

Lastly, having recently passed my viva, this webinar will reflect on my PhD experience, both the ups and the downs, and the role that GO-GN and other PhD groups played in maintaining my sanity and getting me through to completion!

This webinar too place on Wednesday 2nd Oct 4pm and a recording is shown below: