Rethinking a framework for contextualising and collaborating in MOOCs by higher education institutions in Africa
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Date
2021
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Journal of learning for development
Abstract
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are online courses that are open to anyone with
Internet access. Pioneered in North America, they were developed for contexts with broader access
to technology and wider access to the Internet. As globally networked learning environments
(GNLEs), MOOCs foster collaborative communities and learning in ways not conceived as feasible
until recently. The affordances of MOOCs, such as the ability to access learning beyond one’s
immediacy, exemplify their benefits for open and distance learning, especially in developing
countries that continue to consume rather than produce online courses. However, the globality of
MOOCs and their delivery mode pose a challenge of contextualising learning content to the local
needs of educational institutions or individual students that choose to use the courses. This
theoretical paper used a desk-research approach by revising literature to investigate and propose
ways of contextualising MOOCs to the African higher education setting. It applied the principles of
reuse and repurposing learning content, while suggesting the use of mobile learning as a
technological delivery solution that is relevant to the local context. The paper also suggests a
framework for inter-institutional collaboration for higher education institutions to guide future
efforts in the creation and sharing of credit-bearing MOOCs.
Description
This paper investigates the phenomenon of MOOCs from the
standpoint of open and distance learning, and within the framework of Open Educational Resources
from an African perspective. The purpose of the paper is to suggest solutions to the challenges
experienced by higher education institutions in contextualisation of MOOCs to meet the local learning
needs, exploring pedagogical implications of MOOCs, identifying inter-institutional collaboration
frameworks on MOOCs for higher education institutions in Africa, and exploring methods of
contextualising MOOCs for Africa’s local learning contexts
Keywords
Connectivism, Contextualisation, Higher education, MOOCs, Sub-Saharan Africa, Online learning