Soon, Delhi University may introduce several online courses on various subjects

With the Central government’s push to popularise internet-based learning under the Digital India scheme, the Delhi University may see a launch of a slew of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) by early next year. The Institute of Lifelong Learning (ILLL), the University centre to develop e-learning contents, plans to starts 40 MOOCs and the proposal to that effect was sent to the Ministry of Human Resource Development early this year. MOOC provides short-term online-based courses accessible to all for free.

 “The 40 courses will be in the nature of certificate courses open to everyone for free. Things have been moving on this front. Hopefully, the beginning of the next year could see launching of these courses,” Amrit Kaur, academic secretary, ILLL.

“Earlier in February, ILLL had started a nine-week MOOC course in English called Renaissance and Shakespeare. The English course incorporates video lectures, interviews with global experts, panel discussions and performances of scenes from Shakespeare’s plays by students of the University of Delhi and questions on all modules,” added Kaur.

The ILLL has been entrusted with the responsibility by the University for creating MOOCs in different disciplines. It is currently implementing a National Mission in Education through ICT (NME-ICT) project under which e-content are being prepared in the disciplines of History, Economics, Commerce, Mathematics, Zoology and Botany. Apart from this, the Virtual Learning Environment website of ILLL also provide free access to e-learning materials for various undergraduate courses. “So far we have uploaded around 1,900 chapters of different subjects and have reached more than 3 lakh hits on our website,” said Kaur.

It must be noted that the University had in January 2015 launched a web-based short-term course named ‘India in the 21st century’. The course was a lectures’ series given by the former vice-chancellor Dinesh Singh.

The University’s move is in sync with the Central government’s aim to popularise online platform for learning. The HRD Ministry had launched SWAYAM which aims to provide 2,000 online courses for school levels to post-graduate levels. The University Grants Commission had also notified UGC Credit Framework for online learning courses through SWAYAM Regulation, 2016 to facilitate rolling out of online courses in India.