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 Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) available through the COURSERA® platform.  The deadline to apply is 30 June 2017, all applications afterwards will be considered for the 2018 scholarship.

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 year for 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. Since the launch last year, nearly 3000 students from India enrolled in the Big History MOOC on Coursera. Last year's 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 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 MOOC to take full advantage of this opportunity.”

Launched in December 2015, Big History: Connecting Knowledge is a six-week program which features 20 academics from across Macquarie University. The curriculum begins with the Big Bang and traverses time to the present. In one and half years, more than 33,200 learners from 150 countries have enrolled in the course with India constituting 8.7 percent of the total enrolled students, surpassing the United Kingdom, Spain and Germany, coming only third in line after the USA and China.