Rising to the occasion, Madras varsity mulls launching new online courses

CHENNAI: Keeping in mind the changing social and economic dynamics in post-Covid scenario, University of Madras plans to offer online courses which will be in demand after the pandemic and ensure job opportunities to students.

The university has planned to launch novel online diploma, degree and certificate courses, which are more viable and enhance skills of the students. “Due to the lockdown, the university faced hiccups in processing and launching courses. These innovative online diploma, certificate and undergraduate courses will be rolled out soon,” said vice-chancellor S Gowri.

The vice-chancellor said under Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for the SWAYAM platform of Ministry of Human Resources Development, the varsity is already offering four online subjects on credit system. Subjects like data structure, operating system, database management and software engineering are quite popular too. Looking at the demand, the varsity plans to offer tailor-made courses in different streams like commerce, legal studies, economics, Hindi, physics, chemistry and psychology. It also has plans to launch courses on data science, machine learning, cloud and forensics-related courses. 

“Amid this pandemic, the usage of data has increased manifold so there will be a great demand for subjects related to big data and data structure. Similarly, health and pharmaceutical-related subjects like psychology will also assume significance. Taking note of the changing scenario, new courses have been chalked out,” said an assistant professor of the varsity.

The university has signed an MoU with UGC’s Consortium for Educational Communication, which facilitates collaboration between the institutes for developing credit-based courses to be offered online. Besides, CEC also has a treasure of digitised education content which will be immensely beneficial for the varsity. The admission process of the varsity is on, however the V-C hinted that they are planning to extend the last date of the process for different courses due to the lockdown and many students not being able to fill in their forms on time.