The MOOC point

Nistha Tripathi

Growing number of engineers who apply to graduate schools abroad are facing a massive challenge. With engineering colleges sprouting in every corner, the quality of education and infrastructure has taken a huge beating. With barely qualified teachers, students lack any avenues to learn and get the kind of exposure that would make them competitive against their counterparts from China, Europe and USA. So how do these students learn when their colleges are offering so little?

Most of the engineering colleges are struggling to find qualified faculty. While the courses are being taught 'blindly', students are passing not by proving their knowledge but by last minute rote learning, copying assignments and solving previous year question papers. They say a true engineer never studies until the last two days before the exam! 

But this jugaad engineering falls flat at the first contact with professional world. After all, you need to know and do things when you show up at work. Similarly, when a student applies to universities abroad, they expect you to be not only conversant in the basic subjects but also exhibit mastery over some of them. And getting into these top notch universities is not about cracking an entrance exam, but impressing with your overall profile  - projects, grades, experience, scores etc. Poor Indian student realises that his jugaad is not going to work here.    

Enter the number of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). MOOCs are online courses targeting open access for student participation via Internet. In a world where everything is just one click away, why should education be left behind? Why do we need to be in a physical classroom for gathering knowledge? This was the sentiment when MIT and Harvard created edX in 2012 that hosts online university level paid and free courses. Soon, sites like Coursera, Udemy, Udacity and Khan Academy established their mark in the space by offering a large variety of courses for academic, professional and interest based learning. 

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Yasho Vardhan, an MIS applicant was feeling that his average GPA was putting him at a disadvantage in his applications. To further enhance his profile, he decided to take Introduction to 'Python for Data Science' on edX and 'R Programming' on Coursera. Since he was interested in Analytics which is growing much in popularity and competition, he felt that he needed something more than his academics and work experience to differentiate himself. Further, such courses were highly recommended by his seniors at University of Maryland, the place where he is heading to this September. 

When Sheelabhadra Dey, an Electronics Engineering student at NIT Trichy, started applying for MS in Computer Science (CS) programmes with an interest in Machine Learning, he knew that CS is one of the most competitive programmes. With a non-CS background, he needed to prove his mettle. So, he opted to complete online courses that would help him develop the CS skills that he could not in college. Now that he has admits from multiple reputed CS programs such as Texas A&M University, and University of Florida, he thinks his decision was a life saver. 

 With quality courses and online availability, an increasing number of students are resorting to taking such courses to augment their knowledge of popular subjects like Data Science, Basics of Computer Science and so on. If you are expressing an interest in Computer Security in your study abroad application and your college did not offer enough relevant electives, you can take such of courses on a MOOC provider. While MOOC grades might not be taken too seriously by the Admission Committee, it still shows enthusiasm on your part and gives additional credibility to your application. A few skills that can be advantageous during your hunt for on-campus jobs and assistantships are web development, perl scripting, excel modeling etc. Another popular online course is Machine Learning by Andew Ng.

Whether  you get a certificate or not is not the key factor here. The point is to gather the real skills. Besides, developing good projects these classes can be a great way to show you are a pro-active learner. These can also help to compensate for your low grades  or can fill in for lack of a formal education in the area you are applying for. 

— The writer is Founder Director of Scholar Strategy, a studying abroad mentoring service

Some top sites to access high quality free courses:

• Stanford Free Courses: stanford.edu/see/faq.aspx
• UC Berkeley Free Courses: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/
• MIT Free Courses: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
• Duke Free Courses: http://itunes.duke.edu/
• Harvard Free Courses: http://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative
• UCLA Free Courses: https://www.uclaextension.edu/r/search.aspx?c=free+courses
• Yale Free Courses:  http://oyc.yale.edu/
• Carnegie Mellon Free Courses: http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/
• ITunesU Free Courses: http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/