Hyderabad: Education system in India is going through revolutionary changes right now. The use of information technology has brought extraordinary improvement in access to education.
These thoughts were expressed by Mr. Naveen Mittal, Commissioner of Collegiate Education, Government of Telengana while speaking at the inaugural session of the one-day workshop on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) organised by the University Grants Commission at the Maulana Azad national Urdu University, Hyderabad.
He further noted that during the last one century huge strides were made in the fields of medicine, communication, transportation etc., but the method of classroom teaching remained largely untouched.
However, in the last few years, with the advent of information technology, many amazing changes are taking place in the process of teaching and learning as well. New methods of teaching and learning are being introduced.
UGC-sponsored MOOCS is one such methods through which a student can join a course of his choice from any location and obtain a certificate in it. The workshop was conducted to train college and university teachers about the MOOCS programme.
Dr. (Mrs.) Pankaj Mittal, Additional Secretary, UGC, gave a detailed introduction of MOOCS and its online platform, SWAYAM, to the participants. She said that it is important to introduce MOOCS to the college-level students so that more students can benefit from it.
Prof. Shakeel Ahmad, Pro-Vice Chancellor, MANUU, while welcoming the participants, thanked the UGC for choosing MANUU for conducting this workshop. Mr. Parmeshwaran N., Advisor to the Ministry of Human Resource Development, talked about the ways and means to promote MOOCS; while Mr. Abhishek Kumar and Ms. Mittal instructed the participants in how to prepare MOOCS courses.
The participants were also given a chance to put their queries to the experts from the UGC. Earlier, Dr. Pankaj Mittal inaugurated the Vertical extension of University’s Gulzar Girls Hostel.
Dr. Mohammad Aslam Parvaiz, Vice-Chancllor, Prof. Shakeel Ahmad, Pro Vice-Chancellor, Dr. M A Sikandar, Registrar and other officials were present.