New Delhi: Macquarie University has announced the second edition of the Big History International Student Undergraduate Scholarship which is available to all international students who apply for any undergraduate course at Macquarie and have verified completion of the Big History: Connecting Knowledge MOOC available through the COURSERA® platform.

The scholarships will cover all tuition fees up to $50,000 AUD per year for an undergraduate degree of 3-4 years duration, depending on the program of study. This represents a value of 2.5 million or INR 25 lakhs per yearfor a total value of 10 million rupees, or INR 1 crore.

Indian students who enrol in the MOOC and finish the six week course will be eligible for selection; with the deadline to apply is 30 June 2017. After June 30, all applications would be considered for the 2018 scholarship.

Since the launch last year, nearly 3000 students from India enrolled in the Big History MOOC on Coursera. Last years’ inaugural recipient of the scholarship was Shvetha Suresh from India.

Speaking about the scholarship, Mr Andrew McKenna, Executive Director of the Big History Institute at Macquarie University said: “The response from students across the globe to the first edition of the Big History International Undergraduate scholarship has been extremely encouraging. It is great to have the scholarship in place, and I am sure we will see more Indian students enrolling in our ground-breaking MOOC to take full advantage of this fantastic opportunity.”

Launched in December 2015, Big History: Connecting Knowledge features 20 academics from across Macquarie University. A six-week program, it is a unique and epic trans-disciplinary journey that begins 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang and traverses time to the present exploring how our universe and our world has evolved from incredible simplicity to ever-increasing complexity and discover the important links between past, current, and future events.

The Big History: Connecting Knowledge MOOC has won rave reviews from across the globe. In a short span of one and half years, more than 33,200 learners from 150 countries have enrolled in the course with India constituting 8.7 per cent of the total enrolled students, surpassing the United Kingdom, Spain and Germany, coming only third in line after the USA and China.