Along with a few close friends, I was interviewed as a teenager who was using online resources to learn software engineering for popular Indian national newspaper Mint.
Quotes from Will these four technology trends change education in India?
Seventeen-year-old Harsh Deep from The International School Bangalore (TISB) credits MOOCs with changing his life. Deep was nine when he started learning how to program. His journey began when he took Michael Hartl’s tutorial Ruby on Rails, a website development backend framework that allows developers to build databases and other backend functions.
A few years later, he decided to give Harvard’s CS50x a try to learn computer science fundamentals, and in Class XI, signed up for the University of Washington’s Machine Learning track.
Deep even used what he had learned in his IB school extended essay and thinks that it was his self-learning that led to great internships, one of which was a remote internship for a photography firm in the US that specialized in 360-degree panorama footage. The self-learning also helped him get into University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, which is ranked fifth in the US for its computer science undergraduate programme.
Deep is sceptical about Indian universities opening up to the MOOC culture: “Universities abroad give significance to the overall value of a candidate and what they do outside, instead of just schoolwork. I feel that India’s processes don’t do that at all and are only based on grades.”
Deep is not sure about schools aligning themselves with this trend either. “In my previous school, they tried implementing this online learning program for math. It was made by a high-profile company, but it was not effective and had many bugs. The teachers did not know how to use it too well. The system was rather poorly designed and didn’t really reflect the same things the students were learning,” he says.
Deep says, “That is how the first wave of technology adoption comes.”
The biggest complaint against MOOCs is that people don’t complete the courses. Deep has a different take on it.
“Completion rates don’t matter when you got what you wanted from MOOCs. For example, I am not the sort who finishes a MOOC, but I take the sections that give the right amount of background and intuition on the topic that allows me to put it in practice,” he says. “It might be disheartening for a MOOC teacher to see numbers decline towards the end of a course but there are people who enormously benefit from it and whose lives and career paths change because of it.”