Massively empowered classrooms

MOOCS (Massively Online Open Courses) have taken the world by storm. They enable the best teachers at top universities to reach a global student audience and democratize education. While MOOCs have received enrolments from motivated self-learners worldwide, institutional adoption of MOOCs has been slow. This may be mainly due to lack of any role for teachers in the adopting institution. We propose an alternate model called MECs (Massively Empowered Classrooms), which retains the benefit of massive online collaboration during learning, while empowering teachers in adopting institutions.

Our motivation for MECs came from talking with educators in India, where there is a great disparity in the quality of education, and difficulties associated with scale. We focus on undergraduate engineering education in India as our main scenario, and speculate on applications and other parts of the world towards the end of this document.