Faculty modifies a cooking course to suit Indian students’ needs.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: India is the second-highest country when it comes to enrollment in online courses offered by Harvard.
The Harvard student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, released the statistics of enrollment for Harvard’s online course branch, called Harvard Extension School. Out of the 519,307 applicants for the courses, Indians numbered 50,900, representing just under 10% of the total applicant pool.
Americans made up the largest percentage by far — 43%, or 223,302 registrants — while Canada was under India at number three with 19,975 applicants (roughly 4%).
Harvard Extension School offers a wide array of online courses for students to enroll in who may not be able to actually attend Harvard itself for various reasons. Applicants are held to the same high academic standards that Harvard is renowned for, with the age range going from teens to some in their 80s.
The courses offered by the Harvard Extension School online program range from hard sciences like engineering, to humanities classes and arts. Course registration tended towards the arts side — “The Letters of the Apostle Paul is the most sought-after class with nearly 7,000 registrants — it is important to note that registration and applicant numbers do not equal the number of student who will ultimately enroll in these courses.
Harvard Extension School research fellow Sergiy Nesterko credits the sheer size of India’s population as well as the fact that India has a fairly large number of English speakers relative to other countries where English is not the predominant language, for the high enrollment.
One of the Harvard Extension School online classes — “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science — was so popular with Indian students that the faculty modified the syllabus to make the dishes cooked in the class easier to make for students in India, who often don’t have conventional ovens like most houses in the US do.
The full list of Harvard Extension School classes offered for the 2013-2014 school year can be seen here.
[This story was updated on 9/11/13 and 1/25/13.]
To contact the author, email to deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com