The MOOC Racket

A massive open online course (MOOC) is an online course aimed at large-scale interactive participation and open access via the web. Does the above sentence isnt clear? Let me ask, how it would be when you cant understand a topic/subject by classroom teaching despite of your awareness that those are very important in an engineers life, Which means you need another means of learning addition to the college. Here comes an another education revolution, Online Education with the advent of Internet in students life many things have been changed. Why cant the boring classroom teaching!! Yes, it is going to change..! . Professors from the world class Universities like Harvard, MIT, Stanford will teach your college subjects and also there will be weekly home works and assignments. There are also courses for Programming and Electronics where you can do experiments in the virtual laboratory. We can call them as Online Universities where students from anyplace of the world, whoever they may be and how old they may be they can access the Education where ever they want with the help of Internet, and at no cost, absolutely FREE!!!

One of the foremost step was taken by Dr. Anant Agarwal professor of EECS department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011 to start an online course on Circuits & Electronics with a name as MITx which caught the attention of students from all over the world, I was also enrolled in the that course Circuits& Electronics and passed in A grade. Ive also got a certificate as a token of accomplishment. As a part of that course there were weekly home works, Labs, Circuit simulations. The experience was incredible. After the success of this initial step many famous Universities like Harvard and University of California formed as a collaboration with MITx and formed as EDX. (www.edx.org)

There are so many courses available like, for Mechanical there is a course on Strength of Materials, for Computer science students there are programming courses .There so many courses from various fields of Education. These are the websites (I can say theyre the Online Universities..) which provide you lot of courses: www.edx.org www.coursera.org www.udacity.org www.venture-lab.org Even if you are not clear about what Im saying just go to the above websites, Youll discover yourself a new world.

M. Sai Praneeth, III year, Mechanical Engineering.