| |19 19 October 2020HIGHERReviewAn alumnus of Management Development Institute, Saket Kumar Dwivedy has specialties in HR Business Partnering/ HR Generalist, HR Analytics, HR M&A, Change Management, and many more. Currently working as Head of HR in Bharti Airtel, Saket holds prolifi c experience in HR management priorly working with MX Player, Times Internet, upGrad and Glenmark Pharmaceuticals.Saket Kumar Dwivedy, HR Head - Engineering, Bharti Airtelis increasing rapidly in the past five years. But interna-tional education is still not accessible to the majority of our population. These online courses also have the pow-er to bridge that gap, by giving people access to infinite knowledge from across the world, by partnering with the world-class institutions and helping students access knowledge at the tip of their fingers.While these platforms do offer many advantages, the question remains whether the actual learning or educa-tion is effective? To address this issue the virtual courses do provide a platform for healthy interaction between the instructors or professors and the students. Most of these platforms use the Learning Management System (LMS) which makes the processes effective for the instructors as well as the students. Using this, instructors can upload the course material such as PowerPoint presentations, ar-ticles or lectures, track student progress, conduct quiz-zes, monitor attendance and many more. Students, on the other hand, can access this for documentation, course tracking, submitting research or assignments, completing examinations/assignments and much more.There are also synchronous sessions that require scheduled attendance through online chatting and con-ferencing. Platforms like LMS also provide opportunities for peer to peer learning. While the course work remains the same between online courses and traditional media, there are certain challenges in online learning like com-plete dependency on technology, instilling students with self-motivation, building a community sense among the learners and the test-taking process. To tackle some of these, at times learners might be required to take the assessments at physical centres under supervision. This ensures credibility, both from the instructor’s and stu-dent’s side.To sum it up, these courses do provide an incredible alternative to traditional education and would go a long way in the skill development of our workforce. Having said this, traditional education is also all set to see a rapid increase. With the recent inclination towards online and international education, due to the flexibility, diversity and quality it provides, there would be an increasing in-ternationalism of education. With both institutes from India opening campuses in foreign countries and with the Government opening up FDI in the education sec-tor, one would see a potential increase of international institutes penetrating the Indian market as well. Online course providers can also tap onto this market opportu-nity, to bring these international classrooms at the door-steps of the Indian students, thereby catering to their specific needs and requirements, as the education system becomes more sophisticated and self-centric. And with that, higher education institutes will also have to realise the growing need for quality education and innovate ac-cordingly, to cater to the growing working population, and to get them ready for the next big bang in the higher education sector. The virtual courses do provide a platform for healthy interaction between the instructors or professors and the students
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