Fabulous critical talk on MOOCs by Janesh Sanzgiri. In 2013 MOOCs were
suggested as the silicon valley salvation of education, including the
developing world. But the reality is that most MOOC participants are not
the underprivileged class, not really
open anymore (movement to pay for assessment and so on). More importantly the
current research is heavily skewed to Northern regions. The voice of the global
south is being missed in research.
NPTEL (http://nptel.ac.in/
)was first an OER platform. In India the most privileged universities put their
content online in 2006, mostly stem and technology courses. Another Indian
platform is SWAYAM (https://swayam.gov.in/Home
) a government initiative to support the remote universities with MOOCs for
credit. In india lack of infrastructure, lack of university systems to cope
with the demand for educators. Looking at MOOCs is a way to look at high
quality formal education beyond the high brow universities, who do not have
access to many high quality professors and institutes. Challenges for
accreditation, up to 20% of all the credits can be done via SWAYAM. The western
elite institutions create content for the global south. But the fact that many
countries are providing MOOCs to create solutions within their country and
educational challenges.
Digital literacies and skills are needed for lower economic
learners of these countries. Despite the increase of MOOCs, the South will work
out solutions with supply and demand of MOOCs. MOOCs are not solving the poor
and down trotted, therefor there is still the lowest layer of socio-economic
society that is not reached, although more people are reached.
Question why a lack of voices from the South? Answer: combination of issues, academic system in India is different, and journal issues (many Indian journals, but not always meeting the mark), global cohort is difficult to make transparent in terms of data, Indian MOOCs do not have access to the costly learning analytic options the North has.
