Today’s era of learning is encircled with technological revolution. The revolution that has enlivened online education with a more active, open and plausible course called MOOC (Massive Open online Course), accessed via web. Crafted meticulously with interactive and engaging elements, MOOCs are free online courses which provide a gateway to situate and strengthen higher education.
MOOCs are the thoroughgoing reform in India’s higher education system that reduce costs, upgrade learning and multiply access. With the aim of academic democratisation, many prodigious educational institutions in the country have started adapting the MOOC format to meet the exponentially increasing thirst of knowledge of today’s technology-savvy students. In effect, a MOOC movement has been activated setting a trend in the higher education system of the country! On one hand where thousands of learners are attending MOOCs to enhance knowledge in their areas of study, educational institutes on the other hand are proffering participants and teachers of the course with: an easy access to internet, a developed platform to host online sessions, collaborative learning and a great user experience, more than ever.
Many renowned educational institutes, like IITs in India are endeavouring to trend MOOCs by undertaking initiative like NPTEL (National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning), a project funded by the government. In the midst, the new Prime Minister Narendra Modi too proposed to launch an India-focused MOOC platform: Swayam. It will host three distinct courses, in collaboration with popular MOOC platform OpenEdX. Business schools and independent educators have also followed the trend with popular MOOC platform like WizIQ.
No matter how well-prepared one is, in the absence of a right platform, no MOOC can survive. Thus, there is a need of unique platform that entertains live teacher-to-students (vis-à-vis) interaction with synchronous learning.
In lieu of the call, WizIQ comes forth with the best driving solution. Offering a wide range of exclusive features like interactive whiteboard, text chat, polling tools, full-screen video and breakout rooms amongst others. Be it maintaining students’ attendance reports or proffering them with course certificates, it gives weightage to every meticulous requirement of teachers and students on its safe, credible and easy-to-use education platform.
Moreover, to make live classes more interactive and impactful, the multi-way audio and real-time video streaming are made easily accessible to all the participants; which unfortunately, other big institutes or leading online education portals fail to provide. In a nutshell, all in all, WizIQ seamlessly conducts both synchronous and asynchronous MOOCs with avant-garde features to actively promote digital learning.
For more, you may drop an email to: academics@wiziq.com or speak to Kalyan @ +91-9915-701-494.
conventional challenges
For the past few years, MOOCs have been one a wave, a movement in digital learning. Though start-up like edX; project like NPTEL; or big educational institutes have taken up the charge of MOOCs, still its execution has been a challenge on several grounds. To exemplify some of the conventional challenges:
1. Infrastructural Requirements: To create video courses, every institute may not be able to bear the cost of having a soundproof studios as most of the IITs have!
2. Certification: Offering certificates to the number of learners (which is expected to be ‘massive’) is still a challenge in most of deliverances.
3. Easy Access: Many MOOC facilitating platforms have complex methods to host and attend online classes, which eventually calls for special training sessions for both teachers and students.
4. Reports of Attendance: Quite often, many institutes skip to keep the track of students’ attendance report in the course. This not only keeps them oblivious of the progress of learners, but their own performance as well.
5. Live Instructor Involvement: The self-paced MOOCs conducted on many online education platforms don’t involve live instructors. It eventually narrows the scope of live student-to-teacher interaction, which is the part and parcel of collaborative learning.
