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Connected learning gains ground

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CIOL Bureau
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Suresh Kumar, an engineer with a leading IT company gets set to take his exams. Seated comfortably in his favorite chair at home, he tackles the questions one by one on his laptop. He takes a break to have a light snack and then continues the test.
 
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Sounds strange? Kumar is just one of the many candidates who has signed on for an MBA course with Universitas 21 Global, a company that offers distance education courses online.
 
The Internet has blurred distant geographies and today, it is possible for a person in Hyderabad to interact with a professor in Harvard University. E-learning company U21 Global has tied-up 19 globally renowned universities to offer courses in Master in Business Administration (MBA), Master of Management in International Business, MSc in Travel and Tourism Management and short certificate courses.
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Some of the affiliated institutions include McGill University, University of Glasgow, University of Virginia and University of Edinburgh to name a few.
 
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“The process is entirely through the Net. Teaching is asynchronous across different time zones,” said Girish Rangan, country manager, India, U21 Global.
 
Webinars are held once a month. The courses are created for working professionals and those interested in taking up courses that allow for flexibility. A typical MBA course would take 2.5 years to finish, but U21 allows a student to extend it to five years according to his or her convenience. 
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About 75 per cent of each student’s score is dependent on the degree of participation and interaction while the rest of the marks are determined by an “open book, open web” exam. The exam is made available for 72 hours. Once a student downloads it, he has to submit the answers in 24 hours.
 
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This kind of flexibility has attracted the attention of corporates like Wipro and Satyam, who want to offer their employees room for growth by sponsoring management courses and also a means to reduce employee attrition.
 
The program is gaining popularity in India. This can be gathered from the fact that 50 per cent of the students who have enrolled for courses are from India. Customized courses are also offered depending on a company’s requirements.
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However, e-learning has not caught on here as it has in the West. Indian companies like 24x7 Learning, Tata Interactive Systems and Hurix Systems have been doing successfully in the e-learning outsourcing business. However, their business interest in India is mostly limited to corporates and a few engineering colleges. Within a few years, they expect the education segment in India to open up.
 
Today, most management schools listed on the B-school rankings have made it almost de facto for students to have laptops and are unwiring their campuses.
 
Engineering and management colleges in India are also waking up to the potential of the web. Webinars and video-conferencing is slowly catching on in some places. In Karnataka, the Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU) started transmission of live sessions through ISRO's satellite Edusat across its 100 affiliated colleges in Karnataka.
 
Lectures can be stored as a computer file or copied on a compact disc that can be accessed by the students. This is viewed by many as a starting step towards adoption of technology in professional education.
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