Teenage applicants from as far afield as India and Mongolia are catching western colleges’ attention by taking “massive open online courses” designed for older students.
Schoolchildren taking Mooc courses on their own initiative account for about 5 per cent of the 800,000 students at edX, the online venture founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Amol Bhave, a 17-year-old from Jabalpur, India, learnt last week that he had been accepted to MIT after scoring 97 per cent on edX’s circuits and electronics course. He received the good news on March 14 – or “pi day”, as he put it in a Skype conversation with the FT.