An Ivy education is now possible
India has 568 universities, and thousands of autonomous degree granting education institutions- but only a few dozens of the myriad institutes are renowned for providing quality education.
The majority of the population is enrolled in degree mills that churn out a massive number of graduates while imparting little to no valuable benefits to the students in terms of skills. Some estimate that only 50,000 of the 300,000 plus engineering graduates India produces are actually employable.
The Indian IT sector is still one of the fastest growing in the world. The industry began with the outsourcing of menial tasks and BPOs, and then followed software services outsourcing. Today India has become the back-office of the world, but we should not be content with that. Every year more MNCs are moving their research and development divisions to India, and software start-ups have started mushrooming all over — driving the next big growth of the technology industries in India.
In terms of investment, reenumeration of lecturers and facilities, Indian institutes are unable to match the universities of the world. This was long considered a self-perpetuating cycle that students find themselves trapped in; but now an alternative has appeared that could change the way education works in India. Courses from the best universities in the world are now available online for free.
The trend was started by MIT Opencourseware, which shared some of MIT's internal course materials to the general public. The two biggest players today, Coursera (www.coursera.com) and Udacity (www.udacity.com) deliver tailored courses by the world’s top universities designed to be taught exclusively over the web.
The average Indian would not be able to afford these courses on campus but any person who can afford a reasonably good internet connection can study online from the best professors in the world.
Both Coursera and Udacity were designed for computer science courses. Udacity still retains a heavy focus on quant heavy programming courses, but Coursera has expanded to include courses as varied as artificial intelligence, history, economics and music- all from top schools in the respective fields — Stanford, Yale, CalTech and the Berklee school of music.
The biggest bottleneck Massively Online Education faces is simply the lack of interest or poor time management skills by the students. For the motivated student, however, all the knowledge in the world is now his or her oyster.
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