Dive Brief:
- Data on visits to the major MOOC sites between November 2012 and August 2013 indicate that visits from India have doubled.
- Karan Khemka writes that MOOCs could be transformative in markets where demand exceeds capacity for higher education, such as India.
- Khemka compares the idea to developing countries bypassing landline telephones for mobile phones and says MOOCs could help developing countries leapfrog bricks-and-mortar higher education.
Dive Insight:
The analogy with mobile phones seems spot on. Building a university — like building a landline telephone network — requires a lot of original investment. It's true that broadband would be necessary for MOOCs to function efficiently, but that bandwidth could also be used for other purposes, effectively allowing the MOOCs to piggyback on that development.