By Maitri Sisodia:
There has been an incredible rise in the trend of offering and taking online courses in various disciplines, in the past 5 years. MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses, are offered on various online platforms by leading universities in every field you can think of. With this trend of taking online classes being on the rise, one question that naturally arises is whether the online courses are credible to the workplace or the educational institutions.
Coursera, Udacity, Saylor, Learnstreet, etc are the major players when it comes to offering online courses. One could be taking courses like song writing , doing poetry while being a math student and then an arts student could be learning how to code in java. Thanks to the several courses available on the internet, one can pursue any interest. But as magnificent as all of this sounds, the educational community has been voicing various opinions encircling the issue of accreditation of these courses and the reliability that the candidate has learnt all of it well.
An IIM-L student, Anupam Loiwal shared the experience of his interview before admission. Anupam had done a course in Introduction to Finance some ten months before the interview, which led the admission committee to ask him a lot of in-depth finance questions. That shows the expectations the evaluators will have when they come across online courses on your resume. Anupam made it to IIM-L but he admits that the interview would have been without any hurdles had he not mentioned the online course as he did not have time to refresh his learning from the course. In another contrary anecdote, Dishi Solanki who majored in Computer Applications for the undergraduate level and then got an admission in MBA at the University of Denver Colorado, says that the online courses like Organization Analysis developed her interest in those subjects and the admission committee happened to appreciate that.
These eclectic online courses are definitely very helpful when it comes to your interest and initiative to learn something that you missed out in college. But the way the employers and the admission committees see it differs from that of students. So when you are putting up the online course on your resume and are prepared to flaunt the certificate, make sure you know well and have revised your lessons because you might land up in undue trouble if you cannot answer well when asked about the same.
Online courses have reached out to millions of students on one platform and are becoming an eyesore for some private education organizations. A majority of academic officers keep online education in view when planning on a long term basis. All leading educational institutions have started providing online courses through different mediums. Hence it is absolutely established that MOOCs will prove to be a great source in helping a large number of learners but one also needs to be careful while intending to put them on the curriculum vitae.