IITs To Go Virtual?

Saw this news report that the India Institutes of Technology (IIT) are in talks with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to help setup a virtual IIT. On the one hand it is a great forward looking move that deserves to be commended. It could certainly help tackle the problem of faculty shortage. On the other hand, one could easily argue that the IITs are further diluting their brand value. Having increased the number of IITs lately, there are bound to be plenty of challenges associated with doing justice to these institutions. Unless care is taken to ensure the continued high quality of IIT graduates, there could be a negative impact to the overall IIT brand. Are the IITs spreading themselves too thin by attempting too many ambitious projects? Hopefully, they can address the challenges of the new IITs, while continuing to explore new ideas like virtual IITs.

IIT Mumbai takes the lead

IIT Mumbai will be making their courses available via satellite as per this news report in TOI. This is a great step forward. MIT’s Open Courseware and UC Berkeley’s courses on Youtube are already available on the Internet. Sounds like Education is well on its way to becoming “OpenSource”. This move towards open source in Education does raise some interesting questions.

• Are faculty members signed up to teach a class or to teach the world at large?
• How do faculty members feel about their relatively private classrooms being broadcast to the world?
• Are other universities going to follow suit?
• Is Education going to be the next big use for Youtube?
• Do student get to see videos of Prof. before the decide to sign up for a class?
• Is teaching going to become more of a sales pitch?
• Are we going to see competing lectures on the same topic from different universities?
• What is in it for the university? Are they trying to educate the world from the goodness of their heart or simply marketing their services!