Unless you have been living on a Himalayan mountain top - and if you were, what are you doing on theinternet? - you must have heard of this new phenomenon called the MOOC. MOOCs are massive open onlinecourses offered by the worlds best universities and supported by the worlds best companies. Ever sinceSebastian Thrun (then at Stanford and Google and now at Udacity) and Peter Norvig (then, as now, atGoogle) decided to put their Stanford AI class online and found themselves teaching 160,000 studentsinstead of the usual 160, theres been this intense frenzy over online higher education.

Thrun and Norvig were soon joined by two of their Stanford colleagues, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, whostarted Coursera. Their East Coast colleagues, or should I say, competitors, at MIT were not far behind; EdXopened its online doors soon after Coursera and Udacity. For a while, everyone thought that massive onlinecourses would be the savior of the unwashed. Heres a quote from Daphne Koller:

high-quality education provided by MOOCs can be a significant factor in opening doors to opportunityevenamong the college-educated. Daphne Koller

Heres another from her East Coast competitor, Anant Agarwal:

So we are applying these blended learning pilots in a number of universities and high schools around theworld, from Tsinghua in China to the National University of Mongolia in Mongolia to Berkeley in California all over the world. And these kinds of technologies really help, the blended model can really help revolutionizeeducation. Anant Agarwal

Now we know better. Students who do well in MOOCs are richer, better educated and more likely to be menthan students as a whole. In other words, a technology that was supposed to help the poor and the oppressedis a great boon for her exact opposite. Theres nothing wrong with technology that brings benefits to the Indianmiddle class; its great if smart people everywhere have access to high quality knowledge. However, weshould be careful about creating new inequalities in the name of reducing inequality. In education as ineverything else, information economies are of the winner-take-all kind. Where there were hundreds orthousands of providers, we might be left with one or two or ten. A diverse online education ecosystem is betterfor all of us.

An Indian geek like myself is left between two hard choices:

A future thats much like the past, with a few good colleges floating in a sea of mediocrity orA future controlled by a few global higher-ed providers catering to the relatively well off.

The first is choice is intolerable. India is a young country and its youth deserves good education. The second

MOOC Statistics

Beyond the MOOC

will lead a tri-level hierarchy, where the certifiably smart or rich get to an IIT or an MIT, the next level hasaccess to blended learning platforms run by the Courseras in partnership with Indian colleges and then youare left with people who dont have access to any kind of quality. Surely theres an alternative. India poses amajor challenge and a major opportunity for innovation in higher education. Indians are the second largestusers of MOOCs after the US, but like students everywhere else, we are not completing the courses forwhich we sign up by the million. We need to think beyond the MOOC. Technology mediated learning can go along way in meeting the gap between supply and demand in higher education. I can think of two models thatcould work in India.

The first is the Wipro-Infosys model. I once had lunch with a founder of one of those companies - I am notgoing to tell you which one - and he said that the goal of his company was competence, not excellence. Inother words, he hired and trained people to do a good job at a competitive price. Dont knock that model! Infyand Wipro know how to acquire and train people at industrial scale. Their relative competence is much betterthan the abysmal quality we see in most Indian colleges.

Someone needs to figure out a similar scalable higher-ed model in India. I dont mean NIIT; thats skillstraining. I am thinking of real higher-education that translates into livelihood and dignity. Here, scale has clearadvantages. Centralized content creation and all-India distribution could lead to a good compromise betweenquality and personalization. Such experiments are being tried in Latin America, where courses are taught froma central campus but the teachers travel routinely to campuses elsewhere. The central campus is attractive tohigh quality faculty who can combine teaching with research. The peripheral campuses are much moreattractive to students who come from smaller towns and cities. This is a capital intensive model and can onlybe achieved with deep pockets.

The second is a more Jugaadu model, combining aggregation and localization. I am thinking of an online cumphysical platform which combines courses from different MOOC providers, provides hands on assistance vialocal teaching assistants and also combines skills and subjects that are India specific. For example, amachine learning course from Coursera combined with India specific data sets that leads to businessanalytics in the Indian context. I think such a platform could be created in Bengaluru and replicated in Delhi,Chennai, Mumbai, Pune and a few other cities. By its very nature it will be decentralized and may haveproblems achieving scale, but it will create really strong centres of learning where it takes root.

If one of these two is made to work, we can hope for a third, more ambitious system: one which combinesresearch and training in a distributed network and that can solve Indian problems at a scale no one had seenbefore. We are still a ways from there, but the demographic time bomb is ticking and we cant afford to sit still.

Let me end this piece with a reminder about the ethics of higher education. All of us know that higher-ed inIndia is full of third-rate colleges started by fly by the night operators, people with political connections andlocal goons. Since demand for good education far outstrips supply, education is a thriving business. A lowtrust business at that. The cynicism about education bothers me more than anything else.

Schools and colleges are the places that form us; if they fulfill our needs, we enter the world with a readiness

Two Alternatives

The Ethics of Higher Education

to contribute our share. If they are exploitative, we enter society with an ingrained belief that institutions arentworthy of trust. That lack of trust permeates our interactions with other citizens throughout adulthood. I hope anew generation of entrepreneurs can solve the problem of providing solid, trustworthy and creative educationat scale. Its a monumental task, but I believe we are up for the challenge.