This is how the learning landscape of Pakistan is changing

Over the last decade, distant learning has played a vital role to promote free education for all. However, popularity of distant learning in south Asia especially Pakistan have got a recent increment with the advent of modern MOOCs.

MOOCs or Massive Online Open Courses are a place for getting learnt or audition of courses you wouldn’t learn otherwise, with self-pace study materials and free of cost most of the time.



This culture was well established in west in pace with the advent of MOOCs, however people from Eastern countries, and especially underdeveloped and developing countries are more interested in getting advantage of such opportunities, Pakistan is one of them.

Edx for instance, is providing high quality courses from top notch universities of worldwide ranking, most of them located in America, especially Ivy Leagues’. Most of the students are off shore located and a large amount of them are signing up for course certification as well.

Other platforms like Simplilearn, Springboard, Udemy, Udacity, Coursera provides skills and training based learning programs. That’s why they are not as popular as a distant learning tool like Edx.

OCW from different universities are not behind in this cause. For example, only OCW from Pakistan is provided by Virtual University of Pakistan. It provides all of its courses free of cost which includes semester long University programs free of cost except that of certification fee (< $40).



Another platform which just as a startup is UpSkill from Pakistan. It provides courses on a model of Udemy. Most of the audience is student body, but professionals are also getting conscious about improving their skills. A recent increment of professionals like developers, engineers and writers have been seen on such forums.

PHOTO: TECH IN ASIA

In an interview by MIT Tech Review Pakistan with Anant Agerwal, the CEO Edx.org has shown interest in working with collaboration with Pakistan based bodies to promote MOOCs.



He said, “I had met some of Pakistan’s key leaders in education at Davos. I also know many of the leaders of your universities and one of them is Umar Saif, Vice Chancellor of Information Technology University (ITU) Lahore. Yes of course, we will be interested in collaborations with Pakistani universities.”

Anant Agerwal have also revealed that Edx is in collaboration with a developer team at Lahore, and they are interested to extend their collaboration to Universities in Pakistan. If it happens, it will open a new gateway to distant learning for Pakistan and South Asia based students.

However, that will be exceptional. Because Edx is already working with University departments of some universities in Asia such as China, Hong Kong etc. Collaboration not only engages affiliation with top universities but also the students in that geographical limits to learn from them.



On the other hand, e-Learning is also promoted by a government based project namely e-Learn Punjab. Courses for high, secondary schools as well as intermediate are taught with exceptional e-Learning tools. The consequences are expected to be much better then very traditional ways of learning in Pakistan.

This article originally appeared on Tech in Asia.