India-US Discussion On Online Education

As we know India-US collaboration for Educational purposes has become quite stronger these days. Yet, again India-US have discussed about the Online Education and over the issues in Visas too.

On Tuesday, India promoted the Online Education such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC's) and co-operation in community colleges with the US while the latter stressed on jointly working towards increasing skills of students.

US secretary of State, John Kerry said "We need to make that next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs have the skills and training".

Based on the contribution of the educational partnership between the two nations, the US State Department announced the eight institutional partnership projects for the second round of Obama-Singh 21st Century Knowledge Initiative awards.

In the meanwhile, HRD Minister M.M.Pallam Raju had visited US last Month for forging linkages and collaborations in the field of Higher Education.

Both India and US signed four agreements where each project will receive an award of approximately $250,000 that can be utilized over a three year period, with the objectives of cultivating educational reform, fostering economic growth, generating shared knowledge to address global challenges, and developing junior faculty at Indian and US higher educational Institutions.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Barack Obama announced the Obama-Singh Initiative in November 2009 as an affirmation of their commitment to building an enhanced India-US partnership in education.

Know about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC's):

A massive open online course (MOOC) is an online course aimed at large-scale interactive participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as videos, readings, and problem sets, MOOCs provide interactive user forums that help build a community for the students, professors, and teaching assistants (TAs). MOOCs is a recent development in distance education.

Early plans and discussions often emphasized that MOOCs could open up higher education to anybody in the world, especially to underserved populations. As of 2013, the range of students registered appears to be broad, diverse, and non-traditional, but is concentrated among English-speakers in rich countries.

During its first 13 months in operation, ending March 2013, Course registered about 2.8 million learners with 27.7% from the United States, 8.8% from India, 5.1% from Brazil, 4.4% from the United Kingdom, 4.0% from Spain, 3.6% from Canada, 2.3% from Australia, 2.2% from Russia, 41.9% from the rest of the world.