"Massive Open Online Course" (MOOC) are a huge part of education and they have been gaining popularity with students as well as universities.

Catching up with the trend of MOOC, the Oxford University has announced its maiden online course in partnership with top US online university network.

Oxford University is going to provide an online course on economics partnered with online platforn edX , set up by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The emergence of Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) courses in recent years has been a major phenomenon in higher education, particularly in the United States.

Providing online courses will make them more affordable and accessible say the supports of MOOCs.

Some also doubt that the teaching and the exchange of ideas in seminars could be replicated on the internet. They also warned that MOOCs increase the drop-out rates resulting in students not getting a full degree.

Oxford has offered many resources online, including through the iTunes U service and also its department for continuing education. But until now it has not engaged in the type of MOOC courses offered by the big online networks, such as edX and Coursera in the US and FutureLearn in the UK.

For this course, Oxford has announced that it will begin to enrol students anywhere in the world starting February 2017, the course is called "From Poverty to Prosperity: Understanding Economic Development".

The course will be available on the online platform, edX which has a whooping 9 million students registered and offers more than 900 online courses from various universities including Harvard, MIT, Berkeley in the US, Peking in China and Sorbonne in France as well as Edinburgh and Imperial College London in the UK.

About the course:

The course "From Poverty to Prosperity: Understanding Economic Development" will examine the role that governments play in boosting economic development and will be led by Sir Paul Collier, professor of economics and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government.

The course will examine the role that governments play in boosting economic development and will be led by Sir Paul Collier, professor of economics and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government.

Ngaire Woods, Blavatnik's dean, said the online course would be "an effective way to expand access to knowledge beyond the classrooms of Oxford".

Prof Woods said the school was dedicated to improving government and that depended on "better educated public officials, teachers, entrepreneurs, journalists and citizens".

Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX and Professor at MIT, said: "We are honoured to welcome the University of Oxford, a world- leading centre of learning, teaching and research and the oldest university in the English-speaking world, to the edX global consortium.

"We are excited to partner with Oxford to further our shared mission to improve lives and increase access to high quality education for learners everywhere," Agarwal said.

Inputs from PTI