India is the permanent next big thing in education exports, with more talking than doing – excepting Curtin U.

The university has a new agreement with India’s National Council for Educational Research and Training to provide online courses as part of NCERT’s plan to train 3.2m of the country’s 8m teachers. VC Deborah Terry says this is “a natural progression for the university,” with Curtin providing on-line teacher training via Open Universities Australia. It’s MOOC, ‘analytics for the classroom teacher” is one of 24 it offers via edX.

Digital delivery has big potential in India with 1.2bn mobile phones and 80 per cent of online content consumers using them.

This is classic Curtin, recognising a market and finding a way to service it without a bunch of bureaucracy. Last year Prime Minister Turnbull said India needed to train 400m people by 2022 and that Australia “can help them achieve that goal, both here and in India,” (CMM April 10 2017). And India is said to need 70 000 new trainers to do it every year, ( CMM August 10 2016). Curtin U people clearly recognise an opportunity when they see one.