NPTEL Local Chapters: Facilitating Mainstreaming of MOOCs in Higher Education

The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) providers have been adopting various strategies to popularize them and each country is slowly trying to integrate them into their academic curriculum through various policy initiatives. The National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) is an initiative by a collaboration of premier science & technology institutions in India to provide access to quality higher education in India. The NPTEL Online Courses (NOCs) is the MOOC initiative under the programme that started in 2014. NOCs utilize the concept of Local Chapters (LCs) to facilitate seamless integration of MOOCs into the academic structure of science and technology institutions across the country. The activities in NPTEL-LCs are coordinated by a single point of contact (SPOC), who is a faculty or staff from the institution, who also help in the selection of faculty mentors from the institution for helping the learners engage in the MOOC. This paper tries to examine effectiveness of scaling NOCs through NPTEL-LCs by evaluating it along the dimensions of Spread, Depth, Sustainability and Shift in reform ownership.