Skip to main content

Indian universities, you have competition

Coursera is one of those new sites that offer education on the internet - in my view, the best use of the internet is learning and sharing. For an auto-didact, the internet is perhaps the best thing to have happened.

Coursera offers the kind of offers, your local university cannot dream of offering. Okay, I take that back. Surely, they can dream of offering - but the way Indian universities are structured and constrained, it is highly unlikely that something like this can come through.

Until a few months ago, it was never concern that they will disrupt our well entrenched system. But here it comes. Coursera now offers signature courses - that means, for a fee, you can get a certificate from the university that offers the course. How cool is that?

This is a real disruptor to the university- especially those that do not innovate and bring out something new. But the best part is that universities need not fret - they can join the others and offer a course from their area of expertise. But will they step out? Or be comfortable in their shells?

More on this later..

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

And the unconference happened

 Most conferences have an agenda. No, not the stated agenda, but an agenda of marketing, airtime to sponsors, ensuring the past and future customers are invited, of ensuring that the "stars" of the industry are invited and attention showered of them. All in all it is a your scratch my back, I scratch your back syndrome. Some of these become cliques and claques and therefore the real point behind a conference is lost. And then there is the unconference - organised and run by the alumni of the ISABS ODCP program. And as the name suggests, this is truly an un-conference organised by the alumni, for the alumni. No funders - except the alumni themselves. No sponsors. Just the team.  I havent seen a more tastefully organised conference (yes, its an unconference).  To begin with - the location - not a typical star hotel, but an outdoorsy place. The food - simple. The welcome - personal. It was like a homecoming. The setting was warm and welcoming. It was a smaller conference. Ju...

The power of jotting down ideas

 Long long ago, I always used to carry a small letterpad with me. To jot down ideas that might occur. Over the years, it has changed from a notepad to evernote to google keep, but the power of jotting down ideas is immense.  Small ideas go into keep.  Anything to be quickly typed goes into whatsapp as a self message.  Bigger or better formed ideas go into Google docs A few are still written, but I manage to copy them into a digital format sooner rather than later.  But the power of jotting down is immense. My google keep is an encyclopedia of ideas - most of which may never get implemented. 

No conferences

Decided not to attend any conferences this year. Atleast not the typical ones I have often ranted about here. Will be both choosy and intentional about which ones to attend.  The ones to attend are the ones put up by practitioners of a craft. The rest is marketing one way or other.