A 16-year-old prodigy from Mongolia studying at MIT, an underprivileged young woman from Myanmar studying Economics at Yale, or a Bangladeshi young man who became a successful entrepreneur after getting a proper education — these examples can be pictured very easily, especially with the present-day technological capacities that make remote education possible. Online education provides people from the most distant areas of the world, from the most varied backgrounds, of any social standing, with the opportunity to attend the best courses at the world’s best universities and colleges. The only conditions are having a device with the Internet connection, a talent and a willingness to nurture it.
Today’s most powerful tool for online learning is massively open online courses (MOOCs), which are available on numerous platforms allowing students from all around the world to study from the comfort of their homes. The main benefit of those is flexible time for learning with the help of numerous tools: video materials, puzzles, quizzes, test assignments, projects, and more. The boom of MOOCs started in 2011, when Udacity gathered 160,000 students for an artificial intelligence course by a Stanford professor. Apart from Udacity, there are other popular platforms, including Coursera, Udemy, and Khan Academy.
Today, there are 11 million students on Coursera, the largest of the online education platforms. According to Daphne Koller, the president and co-founder of Coursera, one in every 3 students on the platform is from the developing countries. At the same time, 30% of students at Khan Academy and 60% at Udacity are non-Americans. This creates hope that education is becoming more and more available to young people from all over the world.
Still, there has been concern that online learning is not equally good for everyone. In 2013, Udacity and San Jose State University used a $150 grant from the Bill Gates Foundation to educate disadvantaged students. The experiment was not successful because the students’ performance was not as good as that of offline students. Among the possible reasons, there were limited access to computers and Internet. Another problem is that online courses are aimed at middle-class students who are mostly educated. For example, only 20% of Coursera students do not have a degree. At the same time, the biggest problems of the developed world include the lack of literacy and primary education. Unfortunately, online learning does not solve this problem, as using a computer or a mobile device presumes basic literacy.
There is a need to create more educational opportunities for the underprivileged groups of people from developing countries. In this case, cheap smartphones might be the solution. Many governments will be willing to invest in provision of such devices if there is quality educational content. This would be much cheaper than building the educational infrastructure from the ground up and spending significant resources on training the staff and maintaining the institutional structure. There is already an example where the underprivileged population groups learned basic literacy with the help of smartphones. Thus, phones have already proved effective with Saudi Arabian women who do not have access to any education, as opposed to men.
There are a lot of challenges that online education needs to address. The first of them is the way in which the basic literacy should be taught. The problem concerns instruments and their availability to the groups in question. While educated young men with the lack of financial resources can get enrolled in courses by the leading universities, those who need education the most remain unattended. This is yet to be solved in the nearest future, but the whole situation may as well lead to the abundance of educated young men in the environments where higher education is not that important as basic reading, writing, and numeracy skills.
References
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- Christensen G, Steinmetz A, & Alcorn B, et al. The MOOC Phenomenon: Who Takes Massive Open Online Courses and Why? 2013.
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