The Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia has announced the introduction of a massive open online course (MOOC) on Life Skills for Engineers, which will commence in May 2018
The Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia has announced the introduction of a massive open online course (MOOC) on Life Skills for Engineers, which will commence in May 2018.
In preparation, the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA) hosted a workshop on November 27, 2017 at the Indian Institute of Technology of Kanpur in order to finalise content design, coordinate faculty management and create the course calendar.
Dr Balaji of COL and Professor Prabhakar of IITK facilitated the interactive workshop, which was coordinated by Dr Panigrahi of CEMCA and attended by senior faculty staff from various institutions who will conduct the MOOC.
The course will be offered in two phases and will be directed by Professor Ivaturi from the University of Hyderabad, India.
Professor Jirli and Professor Verma, whose own MOOC reached around 57,000 learners, explained the usefulness of the MooKIT platform to the Life Skills for Engineers MOOC at the workshop.
MooKIT is a course management system that enables courses to reach a large number of learners in a cost-effective and customisable way.
Developed by IITK with input from COL, it will be used to capture analytic data throughout the duration of the course, which will allow mid-course alterations to be made and so help create better learning opportunities for course participants.
COL has partnered with IITK to develop a number of massive open online courses as part of its efforts to promote open and distance learning within a sustainable development framework.
They combine COL’s expertise in agriculture and sustainable development with IITK’s expertise in computer engineering.
The aim of each course is to provide skills development and training that can be applied to solve issues at a local, regional and national level, particularly with regards to sustainable development.