IIMBx to launch 12 free MOOCs this academic year

IIM Bangalore (IIMB) recently launched a new initiative, IIMBx’s Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), to make management and business education accessible to all.

To roll out these courses, IIMB has partnered with EdX, a not-for-profit learning enterprise founded by Harvard and MIT that offers free online courses from top professors and universities to anyone in the world with Internet access. With this, IIMB is the only Indian management school to offer free online management and business education.

It will launch the ‘Statistics for Business’ course by Dr Shankar Venkatagiri on July 7, ‘Innovation and IT Management’ by Rahul De on July 21 and ‘Introduction to Operations Management-I’ by B Mahadevan on August 18. “We will launch 12 courses this academic year, eight by December and the rest by March 2016,” said Dr Sushil Vachani, Director, IIM Bangalore.

One month after the launch of MOOC courses, IIMBx has received overwhelming response from the participants. Vachani said “we have received 10,000 registrations from 100 countries within a short span. The response to these courses will be carefully monitored and analysed so that we not only improve the design of future MOOCs, but also use our learning from MOOCs to enhance the educational experience of our students enrolled in on-campus programmes.”

“These courses will come in handy to achieve the ‘Make in India’ programme, where we have to upgrade the skills of the vast majority of workers,” he added.

Talking about the social impact, the IIMB director said: “The vast Indian talent pool has traditionally been handicapped by the physical capacity constraints of premier educational institutions. Only the very best would qualify to partake of such knowledge, while an equally deserving majority are deprived of it.”

He added that: “Today, our first promise is that of massive reach. Associated with that promise is an enormous opportunity for social impact. We want to reach out to the masses and make the power of technology accessible to everyone by highlighting the quality and design of the courses to make them easily deliverable to all. We also plan to introduce various regional transcripts to reach various kinds of learners in India”.

“As IIMBx, we will leverage new technologies and deliver education via MOOCs. Handpicked courses taught by some of our eminent faculty will be offered free of cost as MOOCs through the EdX platform. One of the many benefits of a MOOC is continuous learning made convenient in every form through the various gizmos we use today,” he explained.

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