27th April, 2022

A session on Massive Open Online Course(s) [MOOCs] was organized by the management of St. Teresa's Institute of Education on 27th April 2022 for the students of F.Y.B.Ed. The coordinator for this session was Dr. Joan Lopes Ma’am and the speaker for this session was Prof. Mandar Bhanushe. The webinar took place via Google Meet. Sir began the session with a brief introduction on the topic of MOOCs, i.e. Massive Open Online Courses, which are developed as per the current pedagogical styles. He explained to us how each word of MOOC is radiant in order to reach out to various people of India and the world.

Following the four quadrant approach consisting of video, text, self assessment and learning more. He introduced the various MOOC platforms such as SWAYAM, edX, Coursera, MOODLE and Course Networking (www.theCN.com) to us. He elaborated the functions of these platforms along with its merits. Sir encouraged the students to enroll and take up a course in any of such platforms which holds a lot of value. Sir further explained that MOOCs are learner-centric where the learner builds interaction lines on various domains, there is discussion + peer interaction reflection quiz; content is reflected; activities are thereby performed through feedback; and there is assimilation quiz – as illustrated in the picture above.

The session was highly engaging. He asked various questions to the participants, gave time to ponder, considered the answers and then he reflected on the same with solid facts. In this way, he enlightened the students with statistics stating the growth of MOOCs across all these years. In conclusion the session was highly insightful and comprehensive. It threw light on many areas which were new to the learners. As Daphne Koller says “High quality education provided by MOOCs can be a significant factor in opening doors to opportunity – even among the college-education”, thus, the one hour webinar by Sir Mandar Bhanushe acted as an ocean of knowledge.