Online Education in India – Going the Right Way

Technology in education is creating a disruption in the higher education sector globally. Heavy textbooks and notebooks are paving the way for technology led means of learning like interactive videos and virtual live learning sessions. Online reading devices, mobiles, tablets, laptops, multiple digital tools and applications are revolutionizing the learning habits of the student community.

According to the Docebo report of July 2014, the global market for self-paced e-learning is growing very fast in the developing economies of the world – the highest being 17.3% in Asia, followed by Eastern Europe (16.9%), Africa (15.2%) and Latin America (14.6%).

Online education has the potential to bridge the gap between the education provider and a student by providing a more engaging, interactive and mass reach platform. Features such as live instructions, video conferencing, remote test administration and peer to peer networking equip online education to complement the brick-and-mortar classroom training. At the same time, innovation will be required to overcome the challenge of low engagement and high dropout rate on the student side and lack of edtech adoption on the faculty side.

Within India, there has been a steady growth in the adoption of blended or hybrid learning models and even complete online delivery models. Institutions in the country like the Indian School of Business and the Indian Institute of Management are experimenting with direct to desktop models for providing executive education while Indian Institute of Technology (Mumbai) has successfully delivered courses on edX. Government and private institutions such as Acharya Nagarjuna University, Annamalai University, Dr. BR Ambedkar Open University, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies and Amity University have launched their distance degree programs in online mode. Many training companies have launched courses in areas such including Digital Marketing, Big Data, Healthcare, Law, Finance and more. There has been an emergence of online assessment companies who are supporting these online learning programs by providing rigorous assessment tools.

With new government initiatives such as the Digital India Initiative to drive up the internet penetration and the launch of Swayam (the MOOC Platform), more companies emerging in the space and a very favorable demographic dividend, you can expect to see a lot of action in the field of online education in the coming years!

About the Author:

 Ishan Gupta is the CEO of EduKart.com, an Indian online education platform. 

Disclaimer: This is a contributed post. The statements, opinions and data contained in these publications are solely those of the individual authors and contributors and not of iamWire and the editor(s).

Source - http://www.iamwire.com/2015/03/online-education-india/111949