Massive open online courses (MOOCs) in education — A case study in Indian context and vision to ubiquitous learning

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have emerged as one of the most potential tools in proffering quality education and massive training to a huge domain of audience worldwide. On one hand it reaches a global domain of learners, and on the other hand promulgates knowledge in an efficient digital platform, besides intertwining a huge network of students, scientists, professors, scholars, teachers and different stakeholders related to education. Despite intensified advantages and efficiency, people accessing MOOCs from the developing countries (especially India) do not count to a significant number. India being a promising abode of education too offers a prospective area to MOOCs for large scale implementation. But several factors and constraints like low digital literacy and lack of massive digital infrastructure hinder this process of extensive implementation of MOOCs. Even after all the prevalent constraints India leads the developing nations in terms of MOOCs enrollment. The authors have discussed some key issues of MOOCs especially in Higher Education system besides popularizing it extensively to utilize the potential education market of India to its fullest. The authors have also tried out to work with several possible way outs to extensive implementation in a virtual learning environment pertaining to an Indian perspective, besides viewing MOOCs as a route to ubiquitous learning.