Response to "MOOCs as neocolonialism – Who controls knowledge?"

A colleague from INASP sent me a link to this article:

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2013120517525882

The author asks if students around the world are concerned about the American nature of MOOCs. He asks this because he is an academic whose field of research is education. Generally speaking, students are not like him: they don't get philosophical about education. They want to learn. They want skills, knowledge, jobs. And many students from the South want to go to the North.

MOOCs offer unprecedented opportunities for students in the South who want to make something of themselves and not be oppressed in a dull local education environment, which is unfortunately common (I'm speaking as an Indian). Telling them that MOOCs are not appropriate for them would be another kind of oppression. And anyway they won't listen!

I think the real issue is how universities in the South will respond to MOOCs. I don't think I've come across any positive or progressive responses such as integration of MOOCs in the curricula, providing local technological support for students to take MOOCs alongside classes, developing their own online courses inspired by MOOCs, etc.

I don't think MOOCs were created as part of a neocolonialist agenda. The author says as much near the end of his essay. But with essays such as this, I wonder if universities in the South are getting convinced, without good enough reason, that MOOCs are a form of neocolonialism and therefore consider them with apathy or scorn. I think this is already happening.

My interview with SciDev.Net

Last month I was at the World Social Science Forum in Montreal to speak about AuthorAID online courses in research writing for academics in developing countries.

Brian Owens, a reporter from SciDev.Net, attended my talk and interviewed me about our plans. His article has recently been published: http://www.scidev.net/global/education/news/authoraid-to-add-online-courses-for-social-scientists.html

Open access and academic blogging

Open access and academic blogging are two ways through which the outcomes of scholarly research can reach the public.

Last month, I tweeted on these topics from the World Social Science Forum in Montreal, which led to an invitation to write a post on BMJ Blogs.

An introduction to MOOCs for librarians in developing countries

A few weeks back I was invited to write a comment piece for LINK, the magazine of the ACU’s Libraries and Information Network, published by the Association of Commonwealth Universities.

LINK is available by subscription only, so I was delighted to receive permission to reproduce the comment on my blog. I have taken out the page containing my comment from the PDF newsletter (easy to do in Linux!), and here it is:

An introduction to MOOCs for librarians in developing countries

This article was originally commissioned for and published in LINK (Issue 18, October 2013), the magazine of the ACU’s Libraries and Information Network.

www.acu.ac.uk/publications

MOOCs are about students

MOOCs are sometimes covered in unlikely places, such as the Scholarly Kitchen, the blog of the Society for Scholarly Publishing.

A recent post, MOOCs and the cycle of hype, was refreshing because of the candor of the author, but once again it was about how traditional higher education can make sense of MOOCs. I made a couple of comments under the post, the second one fueled by a response to my first comment, and I thought I would put them together here:

I think MOOCs in computer science, statistics, and other quantitative disciplines present amazing opportunities for learning. I completed a rigorous 12-week edX MOOC in biostatistics early this year and it was better than pretty much any course I took at a Big Ten university as a graduate student of engineering.

I suppose I like to learn online. If MOOC providers figure out how to improve their completion rates and student engagement (I don’t think these are enormous challenges), more people might find that they like to learn online. It might simply be a better experience than attending classes—unless those classes happen to be on par with MOOCs. So while debates go on about whether online learning can ever be better than face-to-face learning, students—the consumers—might soon begin to do the opposite: wondering if it makes sense to go to university instead of taking MOOCs or MOOC-based degrees.

Employers want skills, not degrees. Unless someone has a degree from an elite institution globally or nationally, the degree itself doesn’t matter much. Students at elite colleges have great networking opportunities, but elsewhere students can bank only on their skills.

How many students around the world study at non-elite colleges? How many have no intention of studying beyond a bachelor’s degree? How many start getting anxious about finding a job well before they graduate? And when they start looking for jobs and interviewing, how many become frustrated that their university experience gave them few skills to work in the “real world”?

I think the answer to any of these questions is—the majority. And maybe the majority of students around the world would say yes to ALL of these questions. So this is a pretty large population of people who’re ready for change (MOOCs) and who might give up—I'm not saying today—what they’ve been used to (traditional degrees).

The key phrase in this argument is “around the world.” MOOCs have been for the world from the beginning. To take this a step further, Coursera has recently partnered with World Bank to make MOOCs more relevant for the developing world.

Paying for MOOCs: A problem for young adults in developing countries?

There's a great graphic on MOOCs at http://www.onlineschools.org/visual-academy/mooc-money/. It's called "How will the MOOCs make money?" (embedded below) and it reminded me of an email from a colleague in Somalia, whom I know through the AuthorAID project, about his disappointment upon learning that Coursera was going to charge for some courses. I'm given to understand that most people don't have credit cards in Somalia, so he can't pay for the courses although he said he can afford them. In my reply to him I said that a lot of young people in India also don't have credit cards. I got my first credit card in India when I was 29 (I had 5 in the US as a graduate student). Coursera allows PayPal payments, but the problem remains: young adults in developing countries may not have their own bank accounts.

Charging $30 or $50 for really high-quality courses, which many MOOCs are, is very reasonable, but I think this might make them inaccessible to many young, college-age adults in developing countries who are not quite connected to global financial networks.

Source credit: http://www.onlineschools.org/visual-academy/mooc-money/

Oral cultures and online learning

Some of my colleagues in Africa have told me that because they're from oral cultures they find it difficult to express themselves in writing, and this comes in the way of collaborating with people elsewhere. So when I began to work on introducing e-learning in the AuthorAID project, I was worried whether the participants, most of whom would come from Africa, would feel comfortable asking questions and sharing views through writing. We have been conducting workshops in Africa and other developing countries for more than five years, and we usually see a lot of lively interaction. Would the online medium suppress expression because people have to write and not talk?

After facilitating four AuthorAID online courses in the past year, I'm happy to say that has not happened. Instead, I see hundreds of posts in every online course and sometimes I find it hard to keep up!

Edith Wakida, a research administrator at the Mbarara University of Science and Technology in Uganda, was one of the most active participants in a recent AuthorAID online course, and a forum post of hers led to a recent post on the AuthorAID blog, which is read by many researchers in developing countries. Her advice on the importance of following grant instructions has thus reached not only her fellow participants in the online course but a great number of developing country researchers through the blog.

So I think the online learning format, far from suppressing interaction or sharing, can facilitate greater and fuller expression of ideas and experiences even when the participants are from oral cultures and don't have much experience with e-learning. But creating the right virtual environment for such interaction to take place can be a challenge.