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| Photo: Usha Albuquerque |
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| Photo: Chandigarh Tribune |
On your phone 24x7? Now use it to increase your knowledge, pick up a skill and even get a degree or diploma. Today digital technology has taken learning to another level. Online learning, or e-learning — the process of learning using various types of media that deliver text, audio, images, animation, and streaming video — diffuses knowledge and learning without borders.
Practically every professional course and skill can be learnt through online education nowadays.
There are diploma and certificate programmes in accounting, computer networking, cyber law, creative writing, disaster management, mass communication and journalism, fashion design and merchandising, data analytics, E-commerce etc. There are even distance learning courses in poultry farming and bee-keeping.
What’s more, this phenomenon is enabling individual students from any part of the world to access Ivy league content and the best-in-class education taught by top faculty at top universities like Stanford, Harvard, MIT and others, for free, or nominal charges.
Under the massive open online courses (MOOCs) system, such courses cover a wide variety of subjects and careers from business management, economics and all the sciences to professional courses in teaching, law, library science, journalism, computers, biotechnology, agriculture and linguistics, hotel management and so on.
So today you can as easily pick up a course in commerce and history for enhancing your educational qualifications, as you can on Chinese architecture, war in the Middle East, life beyond the planets, or genomic medicine, for further widening your horizons.
Many of the courses provide students with course materials, contact classes, and often multimedia facilities through classrooms without walls. Such courses can also help students with enhanced classes for supplementary learning of school and college subjects, like Salman Khan of Khan Academy has demonstrated so ably.
However, it is too early to predict the course or influence of MOOCs in India especially but it could be valuable for many students who want to save on the cost of an international higher education degree or for those who simply want to experiment with different academic courses before applying to a foreign university.
Here are some websites that you can browse to look for MOOCs of your choice :
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Source: Chandigarh Tribune
