Developing countries and MOOCs: Online education could hurt national systems.

"Time zones away from the quads of Cambridge, Mass., and Palo Alto, Calif., there’s a curious educational evolution happening. Though the modern massive open online course movement (MOOCs) originated in North America, two-thirds of their users live abroad—in places like Rwanda, China, and Brazil. Foreign users are adapting the courses produced at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to fit their local communities and cultures. And in the process, they’re creating an entirely new education model. Instead of toiling at MOOCs alone with the dim light of a laptop, communities around the world are combining screen time with face time. In these small-group, informal, blended-learning environments, students work with the support of peers and mentors and compete online on a level playing field with the new elite of the world. 'It gave me a taste of what is first world education,' said Alejandra B., a 21-year-old studying business at a Catholic university in La Paz, Bolivia, and a MOOC participant in such a setting, told me.  In the United States—where public universities are hurting for funds, tuition and debt levels are growing, and graduation rates are stagnant—debate has focused on whether MOOCs represent a necessary innovation or the deplorable cheapening of elite university education. The question is: Could the hybrid, small-group model that’s evolving abroad also provide a needed alternative for underserved American students? ... Each platform offers hundreds of courses in partnership with dozens of prestigious institutions. MOOCs follow a rough template of short video lecture chunks, readings, and assignments, some of which are automatically graded. Other assignments are assessed through a process of “calibrated peer review.” Discussion forums may be moderated by a teaching assistant or peer moderator, but largely the participants are left to their own devices.  Sixty-eight percent of Coursera’s users come from outside the United States, with India, China, Brazil, and Mexico all in the top 10. In these countries, enrollment in tertiary education is growing by leaps and bounds. Public systems aren’t equal to the demand, and private for-profit options are seen as offering a subpar product. MOOCs are being welcomed as a free resource and adapted to local contexts, whether for a single course or for entire degree programs, some of which charge tuition. Here are a few examples ... All of this activity aimed at extending access to learning is encouraging, but it’s important not to be so carried away by techno-exuberance that we lose sight of some of the potential opportunity costs involved. The danger in overreliance on global MOOCs is that they don’t build local capacity for education, research or knowledge creation in the education sector ..."