IMPACT OF MOOCS FROM AN AFRICAN EXPERIENCE 1

LOOKING AT THE IMPACT AND FUTURE OF MOOCS FROM AN AFRICAN

EXPERIENCE

Jima Ngei Port Harcourt, Nigeria

IMPACT OF MOOCS FROM AN AFRICAN EXPERIENCE 2

Abstract

Many papers have been written about MOOCs, particularly the motivations, experiences and impact of taking MOOCs, but mostly from aggregated results of surveys conducted on MOOC participants. Almost none is written from the perspective of an actual MOOC participant, particularly an African MOOC participant. Also, none has been authored by an African MOOC participant whose only Higher Education learning was acquired exclusively through MOOCs. The number of people whose academic experience comprises solely of MOOCs is significant and growing, which is indicative of future trends in education where online learning and MOOCs will provide all or most formal learning. Using a critical reflection methodology, this paper will provide an exemplar of the transforming experience and impact of MOOCs on an African. I completed over 330 Coursera MOOCs between 2012 - 2015, the equivalent of five undergraduate degrees and one Wharton Business School MBA and partially completed over 400 MOOCs within the same period as reported by Coursera. The Chronicle of Higher Education published a Q&A with me in April 2015. On September 11, 2019, I received the Commonwealth of Learning, Excellence in Distance Education Award (EDEA) in Edinburgh, UK, at a conference co-hosted by The Open University, UK. Although, MOOCs have been thought of as having little impact on work, employability and future of education. In this paper, I reexamine those assumptions and arrive at new understanding through four impact areas of MOOCs in my life: formal/informal learning, work and employability, open education and the future of education. This reexamination led me to realize that I had acquired knowledge - both content and process knowledge - that can enable me to succeed in academia and contribute meaningfully to society through knowledge creation by launching from my MOOC learning experiences.

Keywords: MOOCs, EDEA, Africa, Learner revolution, Future of Learning

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Introduction In September 2012, I enrolled for my first massive open online course (MOOC) on Coursera. MOOCs were a novelty for me, the instructor and many of my fellow learners. We were offered a statement of completion signed by the Instructor; I completed that MOOC successfully and a second one by the end of December 2012. This I did from my bedroom in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Both MOOCs were from universities in the United States.; I had never travelled outside my country before. I had never heard of the universities before, and it was only later that I learned that both universities, Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania, were among the top-ranked universities in the world, on a list of top 1000 universities in which no university in my country was on. When I received my first two statements of accomplishment as the certificates were referred to, everyone was saying the certificates had no formal academic or employment value, and I quickly found this was true. However, for me, they represented the only academic documents that had my name on it. And it said I had successfully completed two Master’s level courses, and it had the name, title and university affiliation of the professor. It was the most important piece of document I owned at that point. Since after that statement of accomplishment (SoA), I have gone on to receive others, but it remains that they have no formal academic or employment value. Nevertheless, those SoAs had informal academic value, and as the world is transitioning in the 21st century. The lines between formal and informal certification are blurring (deLaski, 2019; Schleicher, 2018), but more than that, those SoAs and the learning they represent are having real-world academic and employment value, and have had a significant impact on my life. The purpose of this paper is to explore how MOOCs, as a form of online learning has had real-world impact in my life; and the potential for such learning to impact the lives of people at scale. Review of the Literature MOOCs began in the global north or western world in 2011 and like many other things in the modern age, quickly expanded to the global south. While the MOOC hype grew and quickly faded by 2014 in the western world (Bozkurt, Özdamar Keskin, & de Waard, 2016), MOOCs never became a hype in the global south where it continues to grow steadily as a form of distance/online learning. Even though the MOOC hype faded In the western world (Reich & Ruipérez-Valiente, 2019), the number of MOOCs and MOOC learners (MOOCers) continue to grow in the western world and globally (Dhawal, 2019). The point that MOOCs were once hyped in the global north and were never hyped in the global south creates an important difference in perspective on how MOOCs are seen in the global north and south. Whereas in the global north, a ton of effort is given to studying the hype, the fading hype and the current

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role of MOOCs. In the global south, much of the discussion about MOOCs is focused on the role of MOOCs as a source of learning (Bonk, Lee, Reeves & Reynolds, 2015). Currently, there is increasing convergence on the perspectives of MOOCs in the global north and south, as short credit and non-credit courses, professional certification and MOOC-based degrees (Young, 2018). The future of MOOCs also generates many discussions. Corbeil, Khan and Corbeil (2019) make four predictions. 1.) The name MOOCs will soon go away as MOOC providers differentiate their products and create their own brand names. 2.) MOOCs will unbundle higher education due to the introduction of nanodegrees and micro-credentialing. 3.) AI-Powered MOOCs will personalize MOOC learning. 4.) MOOCs will serve as catalysts for the learner revolution (Van Der Werf, 2014). The future of MOOCs is still an open question. Nevertheless, MOOCs are situated within the larger context of what Van Der Werf (2014) referred to as the Learner Revolution, “where traditional and nontraditional students have more control over how, when, and where they learn” (Academic Partnerships, 2018). Technology is “opening up new ways of teaching and of capturing and certifying learning” (deLaski, 2019) of which moving from the degrees to competence and experience is likely to have a leading role in how our work, learning and credentialing come together in the future.

Within the decade, all but the most exclusive learning providers, old and new, will compete for students at the competency and experience level rather than at the degree level. That is the principal paradigm shift of the Learner Revolution. (deLaski, 2019, p. 12)

Theoretical Background In discussing the personal impact of MOOCs on my life, we will consider two competing frameworks. Human capital theory and signalling theory. While human capital theory holds that education increases productivity and, therefore, earnings (Becker, 1993; Mincer, 1974), signalling theory holds that education signals the potential of a higher ability to employers (Spence, 1973; Stiglitz, 1975). Method This paper uses a Critical Reflection Model developed by Fook and Gardner (2007), a structured, two-stage process conducted over three sessions. The first session is an introduction that explores the theoretical underpinning and practice of critical reflection. The second session (stage 1) involves analysis of contexts and deconstruction of language and meanings of perceptions, expectations and assumptions. The third session (stage 2) is about the reconstruction of expectations, techniques and values that may be affirmed or changed.

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Discovery (Deconstruction and Reconstruction) During the years 2012 - 2015, when I completed (or passed) 330 Coursera MOOCs, and did not complete/pass another over 400 more Coursera MOOCs, I was not very thoughtful about the economic and social value of MOOCs. However, when I received the notification on July 2019, that I was going to be awarded the Excellence in Distance or Online Education award (EDEA) from the Commonwealth of Learning (2019), and given a travel grant to travel outside my country for the first time to Edinburgh, Scotland. I started reflecting on more than just the intrinsic but also the extrinsic social and economic benefits of MOOCs. Sitting in at presentations, getting recognized by people who had read the Q&A done on me by The Chronicle of Higher Education (2015), and being asked repeatedly, what was next for me? I dared to dream about what I could not before then - becoming a researcher. At that moment, my MOOC learning signalled to me what I could do. From that moment, using a critical reflection approach, I began to examine my assumptions, particularly those that indicated that without a formal degree, I could not create knowledge, conduct research and publish papers. Nor receive research funding, attend/present at conferences, hired by think-tanks or commissioned to conduct research. The expectations that I had to return to get a formal credential to become an academic in spite of receiving the equivalent of almost five undergraduate and one Master’s degree through MOOCs. It was time to begin to deconstruct and reconstruct my expectations and change my reality (Ngei, 2019). While taking MOOCs, I did not think I would do anything with it except just acquiring knowledge for personal development. Many fellow MOOC learners that I knew already had degrees, so they added MOOCs to give them an advantage, but I did not have any degree, and MOOCs did not stand alone as a person's exclusive qualification/certification. It was also difficult to encourage people such as young school leavers or adult learners, especially in my community, who did not have a degree to take MOOCs even though the learning was high quality and some of the best anywhere in the world. People were not interested because MOOCs had little real academic, that is, credit value or employment value, particularly if there were no existing degrees to back it up. After passing over 330 MOOCs and not completing another about 400 more between 2012 - 2015, I felt a very unique sense that I had all this knowledge, where I could discuss in a very informed way about most topics such as finance, law, sustainable development, humanities, biomedical sciences, computing, education and more. Talking not as a layperson but with an advanced and current understanding of the subject and yet because my learning was all through MOOCs without a formal certificate, I, for all practical employment or academic purposes, appeared unlearned. It was a very emotionally conflicting and cognitively dissociative experience.

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That is until, I attended the ninth Pan-Commonwealth Forum (PCF9) on Open Learning in Edinburgh, Scotland between September 9-12, 2019 co-hosted by the Commonwealth of Learning and The Open University, UK, which brought together 540 policymakers, practitioners and thought leaders from 61 countries with over 200 paper presentations. Considered one of the world’s leading conferences on open, distance and technology-enabled learning, as I watched presentation after presentation, speaker after speaker and panel after panel, I experienced a growing excitement. I could do this, I thought to myself. I could do what these speakers and presenters were doing. I understood what was being presented very well, and I could engage deeper with it. Up until that moment, though I was seated there to receive an award of excellence, I still felt that most of the recognitions I was receiving were based on the act of completing MOOCs. With all the press about low MOOC completion rates, my completing over 330 MOOCs was something remarkable, but the content knowledge acquired from those MOOCs was, in my opinion, not well recognized. I attended sessions at the PCF9 dedicated to publishing and the experiences of researchers. With each passing day at the PCF9, as I reflected on my perceived limitations on why I could not use my MOOC learning differently from the typical expectations, and I experienced a shift in my mindset. I will discuss my deconstruction and reconstruction of some of those key limitations in the following sections. Deconstructing and reconstructing formal and informal learning In deconstructing the meaning and difference between formal and informal learning and certification, particularly in a MOOC, Billet (2002) opines that there is mostly an artificial dichotomy between the terms formal and informal when applied to learning. My reconstruction is that there was no real difference between my MOOC acquired learning degree equivalents and a formal degree, and therefore no reason why I could not use my learning to its full potential. “The shimmery hope is that free courses can bring the best education in the world to the most remote corners of the planet, help people in their careers, and expand intellectual and personal networks” (Pappano, 2012). That shimmery hope for MOOCs is realized for me. Deconstructing and reconstructing work and employability through MOOCs One reality is that MOOCs generally do not provide employability as most employers do not value MOOCs as stand-alone sources of certification. In deconstructing this position, I recall that quite early in 2013, I became a community teaching assistant (CTA) on Coursera. I along with other CTAs were serving a large global body of learners from all demographics. It afforded me a deep sense of accomplishment, competence and recognition of my human capital. As the qualification to become a community teaching assistant was successful course completion and being high on the discussion forum leaderboard. It was work for me. It was

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unpaid, unrecognized and possibly under-valued but for me it recognized my learning and my ability. I reconstruct my understanding of work and employability through MOOCs to be that I can perform a very useful service to society. It might not be formal, might not be paid, might not even be recognized but it can be a valuable service to society. With this reconstructed understanding of my value and work, at the PCF9, I entered into partnership discussions with several researchers including some world-renowned researchers to collaborate in future research work. In the meantime, I could proceed to achieve my first presentation at an international conference. Deconstructing and reconstructing open in education I had always assumed that open in education was only about student learning, but now I realize that it is also about faculty, promotion and teaching. Having achieved some success as a student of open education, my expectations are currently focused on achieving some success through open education as an academic. Opening education in areas such as resources, funding, promotion and publication may be the future trend in education (Brown & Adler, 2008). Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Future of MOOCs and Learning One property of critical reflection methodology is that it can be used to analyze past, present and future scenarios and actions (Fook, 2002; Hickson, 2011). In this section, I turn to the future and interrogate assumptions and expectations of the future of MOOCs and learning. This will be shown in three areas: 1.) the name MOOC. 2.) the future work habitat/ecosystem. 3.) the implications from an African perspective. The Name MOOC Corbeil, Khan and Corbeil (2019) predict that the name MOOC will go away as MOOC Providers differentiate their products and create new brand names. From a global north perspective, MOOCs referred to a specific service in 2012, which metamorphosed into several different sub-services and brand names by 2019. From a global south perspective, all the different variants of MOOCs in 2019 refer to the same generic product/service. Kaplan & Haenlein (2016, p. 441) describes this product as “open-access online courses that allow for unlimited participation.” The Wikipedia entry for MOOCs describes it as an “online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web.” To the general public, an online course with open access and unlimited participation via the internet is a MOOC. This generic product name will continue to refer to all the different brands of MOOCs. Similar to the way, google refers to the different brands of search engines and has become a verb. So

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too will MOOC become the common noun MOOC, which is how MOOC is used in this paper. Future Work and Learning Ecosystem The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), as described by Schwab (2016) refers to a new revolution that fuses the physical, digital and biological worlds. One expectation of this fusion is in the area of ecosystem services. Ecosystem services refer to the benefits derived from the interaction between living and non-living things (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). Ecosystem services are categorized into four areas: supporting services such as pollination; provisioning services such as food, water and raw materials; regulating services such as waste decomposition; and cultural such as ecotourism and outdoor recreation. Currently, most ecosystem services are provided by nature. In the 4IR, many of our ecosystems services such as climate regulation, pest and disease control will depend on the work of humans using technology. New jobs will exist to generate/maintain new ecosystem services or leveraging these ecosystem services to provide more benefits for society. Implications for an African Future As long as resources have been physical or biological, they have been finite. The digital world introduces a new dynamic - infinite resources. As a 16-year-old, I wanted to get into the business of showing movies at cinemas, but the cinema owner I approached said he could not give me his cellulite movie reel because it was his only copy. In this age of digital streaming services, it is a different environment for making movies available to lots of viewers. As we add digital to our biological and physical resources, we would be able to provide products and services at scale. This includes many ecosystem services that will increasingly become a fusion of the biological-physical and digital worlds, or biofidy world for lack of a better word. In the case of technological leapfrogging, which is where one or more stages of development can be skipped, such as skipping from the 2nd to the 4th industrial revolution in Africa (World Bank & China Development Bank, 2017), one key driver is learning (Diop, 2017). As frontier technologies, that is emerging technologies, rapidly spread to and gain ground in Africa (Naude, 2017). Africa can leapfrog into a stable, more prosperous future (UN/DESA, 2018). I critically reflect on how MOOCs, itself a frontier technology, enabled me to leapfrog many stages in my personal development, positioning me to participate in a global academic experience today, and possibly into a future biofidy world. Africa can experience the same pathway, particularly through locally contextualized MOOCs (Patru & Balaji, 2016).

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Discussion and Looking Ahead While MOOCs and other technology-enabled forms of learning are opening up new ways of teaching and of capturing and certifying learning. A less focused on but equally important aspect of this learner revolution is that these new ways of learning are also opening up new ways of creating knowledge (Scardamalia, 2001) and this might be their most impactful contribution in the democratization of knowledge creation, acquisition and utilization. This is what we have to consider, could these new developments in learning completely turn around the way we think of learning in the future? This is yet to be seen. Considering that the majority of my higher education was from MOOCs, which initially did not appear to have much real value for employment as highlighted by the human capital theory, it is noteworthy of the recognition I have received by The Chronicle of Higher Education published a Q&A on me, and the Commonwealth of Learning awarding me its Excellence in Distance or Online Education award in 2019. These achievements signal the possibility of me achieving further distinctions within education in the future. I aspire to become a researcher through MOOCs and open education in a different kind of academic pathway in the learner revolution (deLaski, 2019; Ngei, 2019). Niehaus (2019) writes of this emerging possibility of a gig-economy scientist in the near future, saying, “the future asks us to be creative in how we build and exhibit our skills, our ideas and our connections with others. Each of us must cultivate a ‘brand’ from our personal and professional reputations.”

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Jima Ngei

Job Title: N/APaper Title: Looking at the Impact and Future ofMOOCs from an African ExperiencePaper ID: 10Organization: IndependentCountry: NigeriaSub-Theme: Emerging themes in higher education 3Time: 16:40 - 17:30Room: OrangeSession Title: MOOCs - Experiences, reflections andopportunities for African countries

BiographyJima Ngei lives in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Although he has not acquired a university degree,he has completed over 330 massive open online courses (MOOCs) through Courserabetween 2012 - 2015, the equivalent of five undergraduate degrees and one MBA. He is arecipient of the Commonwealth of Learning’s 2017-2019 Excellence in Distance or OnlineEducation award (EDEA). The Chronicle of Higher Education published a Q&A with him inApril 2015. Jima aspires to be a researcher through open education.