Premchand’s The Chess Players: A Comparative Analysis of YouTube and MOOC Platforms

Abstract

YouTube videos are being increasingly viewed as alternate educational resources by a large number of learners. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) also include video lectures from scholars of high-profile universities. This paper aims to give an insight into the question of whether just consuming videos on YouTube is enough to ensure proper learning or hour-long MOOC lectures are necessary to comprehend the nuanced and layered writings of great writers like Mushi Premchand. It presents a comparative analysis of a few video lectures of three Swayam MOOC courses on Premchand’s short story, The Chess Players, along with its various mass-market multimedia renderings on YouTube. While such popular renditions ensure a wide currency for the story, the academic discourse has critically analysed the story in terms of its narrative structure and its gendered power structure. This paper explores whether such analyses are inherently closer to the underlying message of the story. It also examines whether the YouTube videos can make up for a close reading of the text itself. It concludes that Premchand may best be understood in the original Hindi text, then consumed critically through MOOCs, and only much later, should he be watched on YouTube, if necessary.