'Excessive regulation poses risk to India's education system'

New Delhi, November 7: Yale University former president Richard C Levin today said excessive regulation poses a threat to India's education system as it has the propensity to disrupt the flexibility in the process of learning. "Danger in India is that there is too much regulation in the country which tends to disrupt the flexibility of learning," he said.

However, Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Skill Development Pawan Aggarwal said: "In the country it is necessary for someone to control quality of education so we have regulatory bodies." Levin, who is currently the CEO of Coursera Inc, was addressing a Ficci Roundtable on 'MOOCs and the future of higher education'.

MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses is a platform which provides online courses from different universities across the world. In addition to traditional course materials like video classes, reading and problem sets, it provides an interactive forum for teachers and students. "MOOCs is industry oriented and caters to the demand of the market. It makes a person job ready.

After graduating from a particular university or a college, a student will have a degree but he may not be job ready, MOOCs trains him to get the job," Levin said. Coursera Inc is a leading MOOCs platform providing company in the world with 1.1 million active learners, 7 per cent of whom are from India.

Inputs from PTI