Arvind Subramanian aided online course on economy may give HRD’s Swayam the much-needed push

NEW DELHI: Largely unnoticed months after its soft launch, the Human Resource Development (HRD) ministry’s online course portal ‘Swayam’, is set to get a legup from India’s chief economic advisor Arvind Subramanian.
He will conduct a 40-hour course on the economy, focussing on major economic trends, possibly even the demonetisation issue, which will subsequently be hosted online on Swayam, ET has learnt.
The course, tentatively titled ‘Trends in Indian Economy’, will be conducted by Subramanian at IIT-Delhi in the form of a ten-day lecture series and is scheduled for late May and early June 2017.
Around a hundred economics professors from reputed Indian institutes, including St Stephen’s College, Sri Ram College of Commerce, Lady Shri Ram College and Hindu College among others, will be attending the lecture series.
This will be video recorded and converted into a Swayam- MOOC (Massive Online Open Course), ET has confirmed. Pitched as a ‘summer course for economists’, this series is already proving to be quite a draw.
The HRD ministry, however, has extended invitations only to the faculty of select institutes on a firstcome-first- serve basis. They will also offer accommodation for visiting scholars at IIT Delhi.
Subramanian, an alumnus of St Stephen’s College and IIM Ahmedabad, took his M Phil at the University of Oxford and taught at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and at Johns Hopkins’ School for Advanced International Studies.
Counted among the world’s top 100 global thinkers in 2011 by the Foreign Policy magazine, Subramanian has been the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development.
Part of the plan to get Subramanian on board with Swayam is to develop the government initiative’s brand value at a time when global MOOC platforms like edX reign strong.
Swayam is essentially an indigenously developed IT platform to bridge the digital divide. It hosts courses by the best of faculty which can be accessed free of cost by anyone, anywhere, anytime.
These courses cater to students from class 9 till post-graduation level. While over 300 courses are already live on the portal, the plan is to have Swayam host over 2,000 courses and 80,000 hours of learning covering school, undergraduate, post-graduate, engineering, law and other professional courses. Over three lakh students are expected to enrol on Swayam courses in the next three years.