2 IIT-Bombay courses to feature on global online platform soon

Two courses from IIT-Bombay will make their way to edX, a popular Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform, next month. MOOCs offer people access to information free of cost via the web, and it is for the first time that courses from India will make it to the global platform.

Co-founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University in May 2012, edX offers high quality varsity level online courses from across disciplines free of cost. Currently, 47 global institutes, corporates and non-profit organisations are associated with the edX initiative to bring learning to everyone who has access to a computer. IIT-Bombay is the only institute from India involved in edX, which offers 176 courses online to 2.1 million users.

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The courses from IIT-Bombay — one on ‘introduction to computer programming’ by Prof Deepak B Phatak from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and another on ‘thermodynamics’ by Prof Udau N Gaitonde — will go live on edX on July 28, sources said.

India is also looking to tap into MOOCs. The University Grants Commission has set up a committee under former IIT-Kanpur director Prof S G Dhande to assess the possibility of MOOC-based learning in India. The HRD Ministry is also looking at ways to set up a platform similar to edX.