The potential of #MOOC for learning at scale in the Global South. Diana Laurillard y Eileen Kennedy @ResearchCGHE

Centre for Global Higher Education working paper series
The potential of MOOCs
for learning at scale in the
Global South
Diana Laurillard and Eileen Kennedy
Working paper no. 31
December 2017

Published by the Centre for Global Higher Education,
UCL Institute of Education, London WC1H 0AL
www.researchcghe.org
© Centre for Global Higher Education 2017
ISSN 2398-564X
The Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE) is the largest research
centre in the world specifically focused on higher education and its future
development. Its research integrates local, national and global perspectives
and aims to inform and improve higher education policy and practice.
CGHE is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), and is a
partnership based at UCL Institute of Education with Lancaster University,
the University of Sheffield and international universities Australian National
University (Australia), Dublin Institute of Technology (Ireland), Hiroshima
University (Japan), Leiden University (Netherlands), Lingnan University
(Hong Kong), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (China), the University of Cape
Town (South Africa) and the University of Michigan (US).
The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the
Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) is gratefully
acknowledged.

The potential of MOOCs for learning at scale in the
Global South
Contents
Abstract........................................................................................................1
Introduction .................................................................................................2
MOOCs in the context of global higher education............................3
Examining the potential of MOOCs in the context of global HE.................. 5
Why should learning at scale be feasible through technology?.....7
Characteristics of online and digital learning.................................................... 7
How digital technology can enhance learning ...............................................10
How digital technology can enable learning on the large scale.................11
How digital technology can support teachers supporting learners...........12
The potential for equity through learning at scale ........................... 13
Access to digital technology ..............................................................................13
Access to online courses....................................................................................15
Language and culture ..........................................................................................16
Gender.....................................................................................................................18
Location...................................................................................................................19
The learning experience.......................................................................................20
Realising the potential for learning at scale...................................... 23
What kind of assessment is feasible and valid?............................................24
Accreditation of learning at scale......................................................................25

Analysing the costs of scaled up learning.......................................................26
Conclusions – researching the potential of MOOCs..................... 29
References ............................................................................................... 31

www.researchcghe.org 1
The potential of MOOCs for learning at scale in the
Global South1
Professor Diana Laurillard is a CGHE Co-Investigator and Professor of Learning
with Digital Technologies at the London Knowledge Lab, UCL Institute of Education;
Dr Eileen Kennedy is a CGHE Senior Research Associate at the UCL Institute of
Education and a Senior Research Associate at the RELIEF centre at UCL.
Abstract
Massive Open Online Courses, otherwise known as MOOCs, could have the
potential to widen global access to higher education, particularly where higher
education is currently in short supply. Rather than requiring students to travel to
reach university (an option available only to the elite), MOOCs could bring the
university to students where they need it most, for example in the Global South. The
platforms that enable scaled up online learning have developed to the extent that the
model has become feasible in principle. Nevertheless, three issues remain to be
thoroughly addressed if we are to provide quality online learning at scale. Firstly, we
must be able to provide equitable higher educational opportunities to all. Secondly,
the higher education we provide must be high quality. Thirdly, we must achieve
efficiency of scale to ensure sustainability. Only when we achieve an acceptable
trade-off between equity, quality and efficiency, will MOOCs begin to fulfill their
potential to provide higher education at scale in the Global South. This paper
explores the relationship between the MOOC phenomenon and the context of global
HE before examining the possibility of achieving equity, quality and efficiency in
online higher education at scale.
1
This paper is based on a report for the IDRC-funded ‘Digital Learning for Development’ (DL4D)
project, led by Prof Lim Cher Ping, Education University of Hong Kong.

Introduction
Since the emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) there have been
many predictions about their likely effect on higher education. For example, Yuan &
Powell (2013, p. 7) characterised them as a disruptive innovation which promised ‘to
open up higher education by providing accessible, flexible, affordable, high quality
resources for free or at a low cost for learners who are interested in learning’. More
critical perspectives have highlighted the contrast between the massive enrolment
figures and low completion rates in MOOCs, and the limitations of the video-lecture
style pedagogy typical of many (Fidalgo-Blanco, Sein-Echaluce, & García-Peñalvo,
2016). So far MOOCs seem not to have caused any major disruption to higher
education, but neither have they proven to be a flash in the pan. Despite being
launched without a viable business model (Sharrock, 2015), MOOCs have endured,
developed and diversified. Significantly, they have remained ‘massive’ in the sense
that they attract and cope with often tens of thousands of participants in a course,
typically reaching >180 countries. This makes them worth our attention.
There are now many versions of MOOCs beyond those originally modelled on
university courses, with a growing number offered by corporations interested in their
capacity to train future employees. Some offer certification for professional
development and others offer credit for university courses (e.g. MicroMasters from
edX at MIT). While still not an optimal model for online learning, the pedagogical
affordances of the MOOC platforms have improved, as has MOOC providers’
capacity to support educators in online learning design. While the major MOOC
platforms all charge a premium for features such as assessment, certificates and
continued access beyond the course run, the courses are typically still open and free
to enrol. In this paper, our focus is to consider the extent to which MOOCs, being
large-scale, offer a potential solution to the large-scale challenges of global higher
education.
While global demand for higher education grows, it remains beset by problems of
inequality (Atherton, Dumangane, & Whitty, 2016). In the Global South especially,
access to higher education is limited and expensive for hard-pressed governments to
develop. They are unable to make a significant investment in HE, despite the general
acknowledgement that it is positive for development at the macro-level by ‘helping to
fuel economic growth and strengthen crucial public services’ (Schendel & McCowan,
2016). For those with the resources and freedom to travel, increasing international
student mobility offers a way for a select few to travel abroad to study. However, this
will never be a solution for the many. The promise of ‘virtual higher education’ is its
potential to be a ‘cost-effective way of coping with the problems of access in some
developing countries’ (Unterhalter & Carpentier, 2010, p. 23). MOOCs appear to
offer even more by scaling up virtual engagement with higher education while
removing the barrier of fees. However, the potential of MOOCs as a viable solution
to this global challenge needs a careful and critical assessment in the context of the
global and in-country factors affecting HE.

This paper begins by outlining the broad context of HE in which the MOOC
phenomenon has developed, and goes on to analyse the extent to which MOOCs
could offer a solution to the challenge of equity in higher education, with particular
reference to the Global South.
MOOCs in the context of global higher education
Literat argues that the emergence of the MOOC phenomenon is the result of a
‘confluence of several key trends in higher education’:
• globalisation and associated internationalisation;
• increasing demand for access to higher education;
• lifelong learning and changing learner demographics;
• individual access to technology and social media; and
• the need for alternative models of access and affordability in the higher
education sector (Literat 2015, p. 1164)
Each of these themes features extensively within the higher education research
literature, and together they generate the opportunities and pressures that have
enabled MOOCs to thrive.
Forces such as the rise of global rankings have resulted in increased global
competition for students, researchers and funding among HEIs (Hazelkorn, 2017;
Liu, 2016;). In response to such pressures from globalisation, HEIs have been
required to broaden their mission towards internationalisation. Yet, increasingly,
critical voices have pointed to the way that ‘global flows’ have led to ‘growing and
shifting imbalances and inequalities’ (Wende, 2016, p. 7), marking out
internationalisation as an elite cosmopolitan project. Global higher education mobility
has been seen to favour ‘disproportionately privileged international students’
(Wende, 2016, p. 14). Universities may have seen direct benefits from
internationalisation but there is a pressing need to ‘rebalance globalisation’, and
address its other impacts such as displacement and social exclusion, i.e. universities
should aim to:
enhance access for migrant and minority students, support the integration of
student groups with different cultural, ethnical and religious backgrounds, and
to embrace diversity as the key to success in a global knowledge society
(Wende, 2016, p. 15).
Nevertheless, such an approach may not sit easily alongside HEIs’ drive for global
expansion. Unterhalter & Carpentier (2010) argue that contemporary globalised
higher education is a site of struggle over the conflicting agendas entailed in their
public good mission and their role in the development of individuals. Accordingly,
there is a ‘tetralemma’ facing higher education, as it attempts to balance the

demands of ‘democracy, equity, economy and the environment’ (Unterhalter &
Carpentier, 2010, p. 5). Moreover, there is a challenge for universities to maintain
quality as they expand to incorporate more students. This is a tension experienced
particularly acutely by low- and middle-income countries, whose systems have
traditionally focused on a small elite student body, but are now facing a growing
demand for places (Schendel & McCowan, 2016).
Survey results from multiple sources show that students and the wider public are
developing a lack of trust in universities to provide quality education. According to
Hazelkorn (2017), there are three reasons for this rising concern with quality:
• the globalised job market within which graduates need to be able to trade their
qualifications;
• a greater interest among governments and students in value for money for
their investment in higher education; and
• greater choice resulting from the massification of higher education which has
led to massive growth of higher education providers, including for-profit and
transnational.
Hunt et al. (2016) have further explored the growth of private higher education in the
USA, Australia, Germany, Poland, Japan and Chile. Private providers are distinctive
because they tend to be teaching rather than research focused, and offer the same
constrained portfolio of courses in low-cost subjects, particularly business, law,
computing, hospitality and tourism, management and healthcare. With the exception
of private not-for-profit colleges in the US, private higher education had less status
than public sector institutions. However, private for-profit higher education tends to
recruit well from the least well represented student bodies in higher education,
catering to disadvantaged or lower income students, thereby serving equality of
opportunity, but not necessarily quality.
Online learning is associated with these private providers, particularly in the US. The
historical concerns about quality and value for money within the private for-profit
college sector in the US may have also affected the reputation of online learning. For
example, private institutions have been criticised for spending more on marketing
and recruitment than providing quality education and accused of fraudulent
advertising. The colleges offer the high demand subjects with low overheads to a
‘geographically distant and dispersed’ (Hunt et al., 2016, p. 20) student population.
Poor completion rates and greater chances of unemployment on graduation
contribute to a disproportionate rate of student loan defaults in the private sector,
severely reducing their value for money.
Despite this, online learning may be seen as widening opportunity for participation in
higher education for these disadvantaged groups, since the adoption of online
courses is a response to students’ need for flexible learning. This enables the private
sector to recruit students who would not otherwise be able to study at all. The

anxiety among some commentators, however, is that this could be a movement that
produces poor quality learning for the poor and preserves a two-tier system
exacerbating ‘the distinction between ‘luxury’ and ‘economy’ college degrees’
(Carlson & Blumenstyk, 2012).
In the UK, the decline of adult learning (Soulsby, 2013) and part-time study (Hillman,
2015), a corollary of rising student fees and the global economic downturn, stands in
contrast to the government’s stated commitment to lifelong learning, ‘reskilling and
upskilling workers from declining areas of the labour market’ (Hillman, 2015, p. 47).
Opening up online learning has been considered as a means to redress this
downward movement, offering flexible opportunities without the barrier of exorbitant
fees. Moreover, accrediting prior learning has been shown to have a positive impact
on graduation rates, and giving credit for MOOC completion has the potential to
provide further support to lifelong learners (Literat, 2015).
Examining the potential of MOOCs in the context of global HE
We have seen that MOOCs could potentially play an important role in the
development of a more equitable global HE. However, while the MOOC may appear
to offer a new model of access and affordability for the learner, this may not be the
case for the providers. Whether or not MOOC platform providers are for-profit (e.g.
Coursera) or not-for-profit (e.g. edX) they need to become financially sustainable
(Yuan & Powell, 2013), something that universities need also to consider as they
supply free content to the MOOC providers (Kennedy, Laurillard, Horan, & Charlton,
2015). In addition, if HEIs are to consider accrediting prior learning on MOOCs, the
thorny issue of quality returns. Three issues are central, therefore, to the impact that
MOOCs could have on the sector: the capacity of MOOCs to increase equity in HE;
the quality of that learning; and the efficiency of providing it.
The challenge of equity in education is to help all learners achieve their learning
potential. The UNESCO Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) [4] is to achieve
universal education by 2030. The scale of education needed is currently estimated to
be 263m children, and the number of teachers needed by 2030 is expected to be
69m2
. In one sense, we have the technology. Digital technology has the potential to
reach every child, at a level of efficiency that no other technology can achieve.
However, we do not yet have the installed base to achieve that potential, nor do we
have the design capability to provide high quality education at scale.
The challenge of quality in education is to recognise that all education sectors
struggle to help learners achieve the high level of learning outcomes that modern
economies need. Digital technologies have the characteristics of interactivity,
adaptivity, communication, and user control that a good educational experience
demands. However, the advances in technology have never been focused on
2
http://www.uis.unesco.org/Education/Documents/FS39-teachers-2016-en.pdf

education, which borrows and repurposes the technologies made for other
industries. Consequently, the optimisation of digital technology for the educational
experience has yet to happen.
The challenge of efficiency is to work out how the worldwide teacher communities
can achieve both quality and equity in an affordable way. Unfortunately, classical
costing models for teaching with conventional methods have not been well
developed for understanding the efficiencies of economies of scale, although this is
critical for optimising the use of technology. Digital methods for teaching and learning
that have the potential to deliver both equity and quality, but to do it in an affordable
way at scale, demand a focus on efficiency as well. The aim of this paper is to clarify
the extent to which global education is working towards achieving that potential.
The first section establishes the definitions and respective characteristics of the
types of learning at scale, namely: online methods for formal learning via open
universities, distance learning courses, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs),
and courses from private providers. These are distinct from informal learning through
open access web-based resources. Informal learning will not be our focus, although
we will discuss its relevance to formal learning, and why it is of interest. We also
distinguish wholly online from blended learning courses and activities.
This is followed by a consideration of the extent to which online learning at scale
achieves equity, the issues this raises, and the policy actions needed. Later we
discuss how we might achieve greater quality at low cost through greater efficiency,
given the characteristics of online learning.
We work according to the following definitions of equity, quality, and efficiency, as
they apply to online learning:
• Equity – as parity of learning experience in relation to the barriers to inclusion
such as access to technology, geographic location, language and culture, and
gender (UNESCO, 2015)
• Quality – as ‘quality of the learning experience’ and ‘quality of the
certification’
• Efficiency – in terms of the relationship between the investment of time and
money and the return on that investment in the form of, e.g., learning, credit,
income, recognition, for the student, the course or community team, and the
provider institution.
There is a trade-off between the three issues, and we provide policy actions to
propose a way forward.
We work towards what it takes to improve equity through online learning at scale and
end with a proposal for research that is necessary if we are to secure sustainable
and effective solutions for education.

Why should learning at scale be feasible through
technology?
The term ‘learning at scale’ refers here to any form of learning that makes use of the
specific characteristics of digital technology to both
• support and enhance learning, and
• reach large numbers of learners, in ways that conventional educational
methods cannot.
This section begins by defining the different forms of online learning in terms of their
main logistical and funding characteristics to clarify the challenges for achieving
equity.
Digital methods cover a wide range of technologies, so we then set out the means by
which they might enhance learning, and how they can improve the reach of
education.
Characteristics of online and digital learning
This paper focuses primarily on formal learning. The key difference between formal
and informal learning is whether it leads to certification, or a qualification or not. The
current UNESCO (2016a) definition of informal learning is:
‘Self-directed, family-directed, socially directed learning: workplace, family, local
community, daily life
Incidental learning: reading newspapers, listening to [the] radio, visiting museums’
(p. 8).
There are now digital equivalents of all these formats, which also count as informal
learning. By contrast, formal learning, whether conventional or digital, leads to either
a recognised award, or a non-formal certificate, and therefore must specify a
curriculum, a programme of work, and an assessment method for the certification.
Informal learning has none of these characteristics.
There is an argument that there should be less division between formal and informal
learning, and its implications for education:
‘… a blending of formal and informal methods of learning can create an
environment that fosters experimentation, curiosity’, and above all, creativity.
In this sense, ‘an overarching goal is to cultivate the pursuit of lifelong learning
in all students and faculty’ (Johnson et al., 2016, p. 22).

This idea of ‘lifelong learning’ is valuable because it strengthens the links between
the two, to allow flexible entry and exit points, and the formal accreditation of
informal learning and experience (UNESCO, 2016a). While our focus remains on
formal learning, as the domain where policymakers can effect most impact, the move
to blend formal and informal learning will continue, and is likely to increase with
greater access to open educational resources (McGreal, 2015), and the continuing
trend to provide free online courses, which we discuss below.
The value of formal learning is that the provider takes responsibility for taking the
learner from their current capability to a more advanced personally and economically
valuable level. The value of informal learning is that the learner has free choice over
what and how to learn, and what counts as having learned.
In terms of formal learning, there are several different types of online courses
operating in different public and private contexts. As ‘courses’ they all have in
common the characteristics of a recognised award, or a non-formal certificate, a
curriculum, a sequence of teaching-learning activities, and assessment for the
certification. They differ in size of cohort, and this affects both logistics and funding
model. To understand the potential for equity it is important to identify the principal
dimensions defining the contrasts between the conventional and new models, and
the implications of the latter for the logistics and costs of scaling up, as shown in
Table 1.
Conventional New models Implications of new model
Fee-paying Free - attracts large numbers
initially
VLE-based MOOC-based - platform must manage large
scale
Selective Open admission - fewer may be able to
complete
Accredited No formal award - fewer are motivated to
complete
Tutor feedback Peer/automated
feedback
- keeps costs low
Tutor
assessment
Peer/automated
assessment
- difficult to validate for credit
Table 1: The dimensions contrasting the conventional/new model of online courses
and the implications of the new model for the logistics and costs
These characteristics define the extremes for each dimension. Any particular course
may combine, for instance, fees with free access to some parts, or mix VLEs with
MOOCs.

The conventional formal online education model is at the left of all six dimensions,
while the clear contrast is the MOOC model on the right-hand end of all dimensions.
Some of the MOOC platforms are now developing models that place some courses
more at the conventional end of the dimensions as they relax the free and open
conditions in order to offer the expensive requirements of accreditation and tutor-
validated assessment (Chuang & Ho, 2016). Some conventional university courses
are now including MOOCs to enhance the teaching3
, making it a blended learning
course that moves it to the right on some dimensions.
The dimensions are interdependent and interactive. Figure 1 shows how the long-
standing conventional model of elite courses for small numbers of selected students
compares with the new, potentially disruptive model of free courses with large
numbers open to all, with respect to their implications for cost and benefit.
a) b)
Figure 1: Comparison of how the dimensions interact for the (a) conventional and (b)
new models of online learning, with (a) viable, and (b) non-viable effects.
The conventional online course runs on a business model that works for small
numbers but becomes unmanageable in most universities for very large numbers.
Open universities are set up to manage the large numbers of tutors needed, but
even these typically number their students only in hundreds per course, not the tens
of thousands that MOOCs promise. However, these large cohorts are attracted by
the free course, open to all, which produces no income to run the high-cost platform
needed, and so cannot fund either the accreditation of an award or the tutor support
that leads to high completion. Inevitably, therefore, the MOOC model is retreating to
the classic conventional business model of fees for accreditation and support for
some courses and participants.
This is the real challenge now: to find the ways in which digital innovation can
achieve both high quality learning and low costs for support.
3
For example, the Post-16 Postgraduate Certificate of Education at UCL-IOE requires students to
enrol on and study the Blended Learning Essentials: Getting Started course on FutureLearn at
http://bit.ly/28RNQpI

All versions of these courses may be offered at the level of professional,
postgraduate, undergraduate, and wider public, and all are included in this review.
How digital technology can enhance learning
Digital technologies support and enhance the process of learning by emulating all
the types of teaching-learning activity through which learners develop concepts and
practice, and the relationships between them. The main teaching-learning activities,
for any sector of education, have been categorised as learning through acquisition,
inquiry, practice, discussion, collaboration, and production, which can be applied to
both conventional and digital learning (Laurillard, 2012). Digital learning is valuable
because it can support independent and guided self-paced learning for each of the
six learning types. For each one, there are properties unique to digital learning that
are key to being able to achieve high quality learning without the presence of a
teacher:
• the use of video, multimedia, animation, augmented reality, virtual reality, etc.,
to improve understanding, and engage and motivate learning through
acquisition;
• the ease of web searching for relevant high quality sources and tools to
support learning through inquiry;
• interaction with a digital simulation, game, analytical tool, assessment tool, or
design tool, using learning analytics and adaptive feedback, for learning
through practice;
• asynchronous and synchronous online groups and forums for negotiating
ideas with others, to extend opportunities for learning through discussion;
• the combination of online discussion forums with digital design and production
tools for developing a shared digital output, to support learning through
collaboration;
• digital authoring to motivate learners to present what they have learned, for
learning through production (Laurillard, 2012; NMC, 2016; Sharples et al.,
2014).
These are the digital features an online course must exploit to create a supportive
and productive learning experience, regardless of the course category or sector. If
the learner has well-designed resources and tools, and well-organised social
interaction with other learners online, then digital methods can support effective
independent learning, i.e., without the teacher being present. This is the key to digital
technology enabling low-cost/high volume courses. However, this is conditional: it is
only possible if the teacher’s skill is represented in the ‘well-designed’ and ‘well-
organised’ learning experience which the learners need. This point will be a recurring
theme of the paper: the dependence on teachers as designers of the learning
experience.

Teacher presence is important to learners, and so ‘blended learning’ is significant,
because it uses digital activities to supplement teacher-supported classroom work.
The blend is optimal because it combines the value of the face-to-face interaction
with teacher and peers, which is constrained in time and place, with the online
environment, which is self-paced and less time-constrained. The lack of classroom
presence means that ‘wholly online’ courses lose some of the social and emotional
value of the face-to-face, but the trade-off is the greater flexibility, the increase in
time for peer discussion, and the more inclusive reach of online, thereby reducing
the barriers of location, disability, age and even gender.
Therefore, there are ways of solving the dilemma of high quality/low cost if teachers
can use their expertise to embed their support in a digital method that supports
independent learning and does not require their physical presence, where the italics
emphasise the critical condition that is not yet being met.
How digital technology can enable learning on the large scale
Online technologies enable learning at scale because
• online delivery of digital resources and activities reaches very large numbers
of students, which campus-based delivery cannot, due to space and time
restrictions,
• the learning activities can be created in the form of fixed cost resources,
which achieve economies of scale over large numbers, and
• they can replace some of the variable cost services required in education with
peer- and digitally-supported activities.
Teaching and learning resources, and activities, have to be carefully designed to a
high standard if they are to engage and support the individual remote learner as
effectively as the class teacher (Kennedy, Laurillard, Horan, & Charlton, 2015).
These are high fixed cost resources and must embed teachers’ expertise in the kind
of support they offer, as argued in the previous section. It is possible to achieve
economies of scale here if development is well managed: a campus lecture may
reach 500 students, whereas the same lecture online can reach 500,000 or more, for
a similar design cost.
If student numbers are high, however, the variable cost can be very high. This is the
cost of teaching, per student, or per group, for services such as 1-1 tutoring,
individual feedback, group tutorials and discussions, and individual marking. These
services are client-centered, and explicitly not mass delivery. For this reason, the
costs of supporting online learning are not necessarily significantly lower than those
of campus-based learning. The opportunities for economies of scale in an industry
like education are in the development of the fixed cost resources and tools discussed
in the previous section. The variable costs of tutoring, feedback, tutor-supported
discussions, and marking rise in a linear relationship with student numbers.

Therefore, as the previous section suggested, if we can replace some forms of
variable-cost feedback, assessment, and support by teachers designing their
expertise into interactive and adaptive digital resources and tools, capable of doing
feedback, assessment, and adaptive support, then these would become fixed-cost
resources. That is how we could potentially achieve further economies of scale. We
do not yet have those technologies.
How digital technology can support teachers supporting learners
The most important reason for considering learning at scale is equity, i.e., to
understand how it might contribute to the most challenging Sustainable Development
Goal (SDG) 4 of universal education at school level. It is not yet realistic to plan for
wholly online learning being the solution. Children need the social and emotional
interaction with teacher and peers that physical schools provide. However, we can
think in terms of the teacher as a mediator, i.e., the teacher being supported online in
their updating of the curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment that will improve their
own learners’ learning and outcomes.
That argument applies to all sectors, of course. One of the most important ways of
using online learning is to support all teachers, at all levels, in the challenging task of
adapting continually to the demands of policymakers, employers, and parents,
changes in demographics, economies, social norms, technologies … Teachers need
significantly more support than they currently receive. Online learning can offer this
through:
• teacher professional development through online courses;
• enabling teachers to engage in collaborative making and sharing of high
quality ‘open education’ resources and tools for supported independent
learning;
• helping teachers to complement classroom work by curating digital resources
and tools, and organising online social learning.
Collaborative learning is important for students. It is even more important for
teachers. Teacher development is one of the critical conditions that any education
system must address if we are to harness the benefits of online learning (Laurillard,
2015).
To summarise
Digital methods are unique in their capability for enhancing the learning
experience and operating to orchestrate learning on the large scale.
The challenge is to find the ways in which digital innovation can achieve both
high quality learning and low costs of development and support.

One approach is for teachers to embed their pedagogic expertise in digital
methods that support independent learning and do not require their physical
presence.
The potential for equity through learning at scale
The global HE sector is now expanding provision to use online learning technology
as a new model that can achieve greater equity of access to HE, affording ‘ever
greater and more credible options for potential PGT students to study in their home
countries in leading international programmes’ (Archer, 2016). Certainly, the use of
technology is the only way education will achieve access on a scale that is anywhere
near commensurate with demand in the sense of ‘need’.
The need for improved education is high across the whole of the Global South, as
reflected in UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goal 4: Universal basic education.
Even in a modern and rapidly developing economy such as China, there is a high
level of inequality of opportunity. The socially and economically disadvantaged
groups are those in greatest need: they are living in rural regions, poor, female,
disabled, or ethnic minorities – all of whom have little or no access to high quality
educational experiences (Tang & Carr-Chellman, 2016). Even the rapid economic
growth and public health improvements in China will not change these inequalities
because it is always the better educated who are able to take advantage of them,
until the point of saturation (Song & Burgard, 2011). This is why ‘need’ does not
necessarily find expression as ‘demand’.
In this section, we consider the conditions under which large-scale online learning
succeeds in achieving equity, as defined in terms of digital access, language and
culture, gender, and geographic location (UNESCO, 2015). We also consider how
online learning can address these barriers to inclusion so that we optimise equity in
relation to different aspects of access, and to the learning experience itself.
Access to digital technology
Access to digital technology for learning is dependent on the digital infrastructure in a
country, which is still at a low level for many developing countries, in terms of both
broadband speed and the availability of internet-enabled devices.
The eLearning Africa project reports a wide range of connectivity across African
countries, where, for example, in 2015 the proportion of schools with internet access
varied from 0 per cent in many countries, with most below 20 per cent, to 100 per
cent in Botswana. Personal access to broadband connection was very difficult; the
highest percentage of broadband provision being 13 per cent in Seychelles, with the
majority being below 2 per cent. Access is even worse for women, who prefer to use

the poor service of public libraries rather than private cybercafés for internet access
because they are safer (Gomez, 2014).
However, mobile penetration has made great progress to 100 per cent or more in
some African countries (where many people have more than one device), such as
Tunisia, South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. As smartphones begin to penetrate
as well, this will transform access to online learning. Already, smartphone access is
above 20 per cent in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa (Manji, Jal, Badisang,
& Opoku-Mensah, 2015).
The digital divide between the Middle East and Western countries is closing, but
there is a wide range of provision in this region as well. Countries such as Syria,
Lebanon, and Yemen have limited investment capital and more government
intervention in technology regulation, while Bahrain, Jordan, and Kuwait have been
able to build up their telecommunications, having a more liberal approach to digital
technology (Shirazi, Gholami, & Higon, 2009). The changing conditions of public
infrastructure within a country affect the nature of access. In Syria, as more people
become displaced there is a reduction in computer usage and an increase in mobile
usage for internet access, where a recent survey showed that one of the principal
uses, given high-speed connectivity, would be for online education (Xu & Maitland,
2016).
Access to adequate broadband speeds and internet-enabled devices either for free
or at affordable cost, is the sine qua non for the potential of online learning to be
achieved (Warugaba, Naughton, Hedt-Gauthier, Muhirwa, & Amoroso, 2016), along
with teacher development, and it has to be the job of governments to ensure this
happens. At present it is highly inequitable, within and between countries in the
Global South.
The increasing use of smartphones for education across the Global South (Curioso
& Mechael, 2010; Sahu, Grover, & Joshi, 2014; Shrivastave & Shivastava, 2014) is
accelerating now as open online course providers such as FutureLearn and iTunesU
ensure delivery on all platforms (J. Chen, 2013).
Actions to consider
For policymakers: the online devices industry, and the broadband industry to
provide wider access to viable internet-enabled devices and high-speed
broadband as a route to education.
For course designers: the resources and activities should be designed to also
be accessible in settings that are less well-equipped by offering options for
low definition videos, audio only versions with slides, video transcripts, and
other ways of reducing access requirements.

Access to online courses
Countries in the Global South may now be providing digital access in some areas,
but the digital content is still driven largely by the Western countries. The need for
online distance education at degree level has previously been met by the open
universities (Daniel, 1996), and during the 21st
century development of this kind of
provision has expanded greatly in the countries in the Global South (Jung & Yoo,
2014). Inevitably, it was the open universities that were among the first to take on the
challenge of the open, free, short course model of the MOOC. The Open University
of China is one such example, driven in part by a strong influence from government.
Government involvement is characteristic of many of the Asian online learning
initiatives, for example, in Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and South Korea, as
well as China. In Japan, on the other hand, the JMOOCs project was the initiative of
a consortium of universities, corporates, governmental institutes and academic
societies (Kim, 2015). Progress towards offering online learning is rapid now in these
Asian countries, exemplified by Tsinghua University’s development in 2014 of its
own MOOC platform Xuetangx for Chinese students, now used by over 200
universities across China4
. Change may be slow, but progress is unmistakable now.
Governments in Africa are also moving faster now. The e-Learning Africa project has
tracked progress across the continent, published in comprehensive reports that
detail some disparity between 55 African countries in terms of the implementation of
digital learning infrastructure and courses. As infrastructure improves, so does
course provision, and many countries have made great progress towards online
education, some in partnership with the African Virtual University5
, and others as part
of government support and planning. For example, the Republic of Congo has a
digital learning strategy, Cote d’Ivoire uses online learning for teacher education,
Djibouti has opened a digital learning centre in the capital, a digital learning
university in Cairo offers blended learning courses, and there are many other similar
initiatives across the continent, demonstrating the willingness of governments to plan
with digital solutions in mind.
While local provision is developing slowly, the African countries represent an
opportunity for IT companies such as Google to experiment with online courses6
,
mainly focusing on digital and vocational skills for management and computing.
Udacity and 2U may also increase their offers for fee-paid online courses in these
subjects for professionals. However, this does nothing to assist the broadening of
opportunity for the great majority of learners who need more and higher quality
education (Haggard, 2017).
4
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/one-and-half-million-chinese-students-are-using-
xuetangx-cloud-lms-platform-300433028.html
5
http://www.avu.org/avuweb/en/
6
https://learndigital.withgoogle.com/digitalskills/

An alternative model is cross-national provision by IT-oriented company partners in
Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, which are collaborating to offer K-12
courses that fit the local curricula and certification requirements. With 2m registered
learners, Eneza Education7
is offering affordable education via short lessons and
quizzes to smartphones and other devices, a model that could potentially move more
into higher education as well (Haggard, 2017).
The improving digital infrastructure in many countries, even with only informal access
to open education resources, adds value for users as a form of informal learning. A
survey of public access computing in 25 countries in the Global South found
evidence of clear personal benefits in users’ comments about their new-found pride
in accomplishment and a sense of self-efficacy afforded by their access to open
educational resources, although such benefits are never captured in standard usage
metrics (Gomez & Pather, 2012), and only become evident through qualitative
studies.
Local provision of high quality online education that fits local requirements is slow to
develop in the countries in the Global South, therefore, with faster development
coming from private companies, which inevitably prioritise education for
professionals in business and IT. This does not help to generate the models for
equitable access to high quality education and higher education for the great majority
of learners.
Action to consider
For policymakers, educators, and researchers to explore ways of enabling
local development of online courses, once the digital infrastructure is
available.
Language and culture
Online learning currently originates in countries in the Global North, which was the
first area to experiment with large scale online learning. By contrast with the
approach in Asia and Africa, the expansion of online learning in Western countries
has been initiated entirely by a relatively small proportion of universities and private
providers, many of which reach primarily students in their own regions (Allen &
Seaman, 2010). The recent expansion of MOOCs to provide free and open access
to short courses in HE has transformed access, at least to this limited form of
provision, to many millions of mainly degree-holding professionals across the globe
(Laurillard, 2016a).
The origin of MOOCs being the Global North creates a language barrier to access
because most MOOCs are developed in English, albeit with subtitles for some
7
http://enezaeducation.com/

languages (T. R. Liyanagunawardena, Adams, & Williams, 2013; Sharma, 2013).
Nonetheless, access to Western University MOOCs by learners from China, India,
and South Africa, for example, is rising, though from a very low base (Macleod,
Haywood, Woodgate, & Alkhatnai, 2015).
Language is a problem, but it is not sufficient simply to make the language more
accessible, as there are cultural differences that argue for taking greater care of the
localisation of courses. In some cultures, for example, higher quality learner
engagement means more time given to direct student interaction by the teacher
(Che, Luo, Wang, & Meinel, 2016). A study that compared online and onsite versions
of a short course found no difference in student performance or evaluation of the
course features except for the quality of instructional interactions, which were rated
significantly lower for the online course (W. Chen & Jia, 2016), impacting on both
teacher-student and peer-to-peer interactions. If wholly online learning is not
acceptable, then an alternative approach would be to use such courses, within a
blended learning model, by integrating the resources they offer with the more
traditional classroom mode. This would enable students to ask questions with a
teacher present, and so improve their engagement and completion of intended
outcomes (Yu, 2015).
It is clear that ‘distance learning’ and ‘online learning’ have not been acceptable in
some cultures. While demand for the flexibility and accessibility of online learning
may be high, if it is not seen as legitimate high quality education, then the return on
accreditation fees will be low, keeping the price down, and the business model
limited. It is important, therefore, to work on improving the acceptability of this form of
learning in the countries of the Global South.
The spread of open educational resources and online courses from Western
universities has enabled the emerging economies that are in need of highly skilled
graduates to make an innovative leap into adopting new digital methods, but this has
happened without any intervening phase of localisation or adjustment to new styles
of pedagogy. Western models of group learning that make no provision for how
group roles should work, for example, may need a redesign if they are to be a
culturally appropriate pedagogy (Nguyen, Terlouw, & Pilot, 2006).
The nature of the cultural differences that are most important was explored in a study
of Asian students studying an online MBA, which found that although the students
appreciate the opportunity to broaden their cultural experience of study, there are
several ways in which course redesign would assist them:
• more flexible and varied assessment to help with a misunderstanding of the
rules,
• more audio-visual aids to help with language problems, and
• a better balance in the use of local and global cases (Liu, Liu, Lee, &
Magjuka, 2010).

The international mobility of students that has driven transnational education (TNE)
does not push western universities to orient curricula and pedagogy towards other
cultures, because by being prepared to travel to another country there is a tacit
assumption that the students have to adjust, rather than the host. By contrast, online
courses bring the host institution to the student’s local cultural context, where they
have no other access to the host culture, so it is the host that should adapt. An
online course, such as a MOOC, will be reaching students in up to 200+ countries,
so adaptation to all is impossible. But there are ways of localising the content, as we
discuss in below. More sensitive approaches to supporting learners from different
social, economic and ethnic groups can deliver substantial improvements to
completion rates (Kizilcec, Saltarelli, Reich, & Cohen, 2017).
This creates an imperative for MOOCs to make good use of their discussion forums
to enable the negotiation of ideas, approaches to learning, and personal
encouragement.
Actions to consider
Universities, colleges, and other education providers to develop studies and
exemplars of effective online learning that demonstrate its value, and how this
can be optimised.
Researchers and designers to promote the techniques that make online
learning design more effective for all types of learners.
Gender
Gender segregation in some countries means that women have lesser access to
high quality university education. For example, there are reports that many of the top
research universities in China discriminate against women8
, and universities in Saudi
Arabia have far fewer teachers with doctorates for the women students than the men
have. With segregation such inequalities persist. One solution has been to use video
conferencing, although this reduces the quality of teacher-student interaction. The
more recent developments in online learning provide a better alternative if they are
well-designed to promote social learning. This method uses the quality of video
lectures, and the social value of MOOC-based discussions, in a blended learning
format: the video is used prior to classroom sessions, followed by further lectures
and group work within the class, and online discussion after the class. Social media
sites can support local group discussions beyond the MOOC itself (Almutairi &
White, 2015). This blend of the online and the classroom gives the women access to
more senior experts as well as having the benefits of social learning online and in
class.
8
http://www.chronicle.com/article/In-China-Universities/141275/

New technologies level the playing field, particularly among the better educated
women, who take on jobs that use their comparative advantage in non-physical
work. Recent evidence from the United States shows that it is the better educated
and women who are able to get the high-paying jobs that are intensive in non-routine
skills as the middle-skilled jobs shrink (Cortes, Jaimovich, Nekarda, & Siu, 2014).
However, online learning is no solution when women have much less access to the
technology infrastructure:
‘Over 1.7 billion women in low- and middle-income countries do not own
mobile phones. Women in those countries are 14 percent less likely to own a
mobile phone than men, on average. Women in South Asia are 38 percent
less likely to own a phone than men’. (World_Bank, 2016, p. 134)
Besides poorer access, women in developing countries have much less control over
their use of the internet, where it can be considered culturally inappropriate, and
more than eight per cent did not access it more often because family or friends
would disapprove9
. For some developing countries, women – unlike men – prefer
using the internet in public libraries rather than in private cybercafés because they
are safer, despite poorer service (Gomez, 2014). Their situation would be improved if
more public access were available and if more blended learning methods were used
in women’s education to give them better access to more senior experts as well as
the advantages of social learning.
Actions to consider
Policymakers to promote both blended learning and better access to IT as a
means for improving the gender inequalities in educational opportunity.
Location
Digital learning offers access to education for people in rural and remote locations for
whom onsite learning is unaffordable. For many generations in countries with large
rural populations, technology offered children ‘blended learning’ via radio, and more
recently television, as it was used to support local adults in teaching their children.
The internet (where it exists) is the current technology for distance education, and
again, it offers direct education for adults and supports them in providing blended
learning for their children. Throughout the latter part of the 20th
century, the ‘open
universities’ that provide remote learning for adults have been successful in their
mission to overcome the inequalities of location for millions of adults. In the 21st
century, campus universities also provide wholly online courses, but in addition to
their campus courses, and not necessarily as part of a mission to reduce inequality.
US universities, for example, mainly offer online learning in-state, with only a 2 per
9
http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/pdf/women-and-the-web.pdf

cent reach to international students. We have to examine, therefore, the extent to
which such courses are well-designed for a global audience.
One study investigated the equity of location explicitly by comparing the digital
learning experience of a target group of adult learners who self-reported an inability
to afford a formal education, with a comparative group drawn from the rest of the
cohort. They were studying six Coursera MOOCs over a year. The target group of
low earners had a significant proportion of learners with less than a 4-year degree,
(34 per cent vs. 19 per cent), but they were more likely to be awarded a certificate of
achievement (9 per cent vs. 6 per cent) than those in the comparison group. For
them it was a critical opportunity: they were five times more likely to be motivated by
geographic isolation and twice as likely to be using the course to decide if they
wanted to take college/university classes on the topic. The majority were males over
25 (Dillahunt, Wang, & Teasley, 2014). Similarly, the value of a certificate is clearly
demonstrated in a comparative study of students on a history MOOC: those who
were on the credit-bearing version scored significantly higher than those on the non-
credit-bearing version, in terms of achievement and perceived course value (Kursun,
2016).
For the millions of people who are capable of studying online, and are motivated to
use life learning and professional development opportunities, but live too far from
affordable campus education, online learning is their only hope. Given that the digital
world now enables remote employment as well as remote learning, online learning
would be a lifeline to a level of prosperity that has never before been possible.
Actions to consider
Universities and other providers to design and invest in online learning and
accreditation to build up more ‘localised’ learning opportunities while operating
at scale.
The learning experience
A consequence of the large cohorts in learning at scale is the difficulty of ensuring
that the course adds genuine value for every student, by adapting to their language,
cultural and local needs.
Online courses that run on the large scale are essentially ‘one-to-many’ operations,
and this makes it difficult for providers to offer equity by addressing a wide range of
needs. Traditionally, HE runs on the small scale and tends to be provider-led rather
than market-led in its offerings, primarily because of the cost of developing resources
that are contextualised (Laurillard, 2000). Online learning offers economies of scale
where the fixed cost of developing a video lecture, for example, is offset by the large
numbers of people using it, over many courses run. Clearly, economies of scale
would reduce if the resources had to be adapted to a wide range of local contexts.

However, the social learning made possible by a MOOC platform such as
FutureLearn means that generic video content can be contextualised through the
‘localisation’ that takes place in the peer ‘co-learning’ conversations that follow the
video (Laurillard, 2016a). Encouraging learners to create face-to-face communities in
their local contexts would also help learners engage with and improve their
interactions with the global MOOC courses, especially when they need to overcome
the language barrier of delivery in English only, or to improve the opportunity for
collaborative learning (Firmansyah & Timmis, 2016).
We have discussed several aspects of equity in this section. The education industry
cannot itself achieve equity with respect to access to internet-enabled personal
devices, as that is the province of governments and the telecommunications, and IT
industries. Online learning serves the issue of location very well, as long as the
internet reaches everywhere. The existence of online learning can ameliorate the
problem of gender inequality, but the platform design must develop better ways to
embrace local languages and cultures (Liyanagunawardena, Williams, & Adams,
2013). The responsibility for the equity of the learning experience, in terms of
transition, completion, and achievement, lies firmly with the provider as much as the
‘client’, and is only likely to be met by establishing local partners who can modulate
the design of the curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, so that they respect the
needs of the student of any locality, language, culture, and gender. In some cases,
they could be local ministries of education, universities, NGOs, or commercial
partners, depending on the nature of the course and its audiences.
Models of delivery that essentially mimic the traditional classroom format, such as
TNE and online masters’ courses, with tens or at the most hundreds of students, will
not exploit the opportunities that digital technologies offer. Large-scale distance
learning from the open universities moves beyond that model when they manage to
achieve both economies of scale in the development of activities and resources, and
support for teacher-student interaction by managing large-scale local tutor provision.
MOOCs are moving further still from the traditional model by replacing teacher
support with peer support, which can be managed on the large scale if well-
designed. But this does not address the need for reliable certification of the learner’s
achievement. As a result, MOOC platforms are moving towards premium models
that do provide tutor-assessed credit awards, essentially returning to the traditional
paid-for model of assessment, while reliable automated assessment remains difficult
for most academic subjects.
We cannot yet envisage the UNESCO goal of universal education being achieved by
direct interaction with school-age learners because that model still requires tens of
millions of as-yet untrained teachers. But perhaps online learning could train non-
professional adults to be those teachers. Could we envisage a ‘cascade model’ of
online learning for professional adults who could then support the development of a
much larger teaching workforce, as illustrated in Figure 2?

Figure 2: The ‘cascade model’ where 10,000 highly qualified professionals are
trained on the large scale to each train a class of 25 local adults using blended
learning
The MOOC approach is beginning to show how we can achieve large-scale
education for professional adults if it can provide equitable pedagogies and peer
assessment through social learning, and localise the generic teaching through co-
learning to make it more widely acceptable and equitable. By cascading this model
to local adults and less qualified teachers, using blended learning mode, the large
scale development of tens of millions of teachers might ultimately be feasible
(Laurillard, 2016b).
Actions to consider
Education providers to design in the ‘localisation’ of a MOOC, and affordable
options for access to resources and activities as a matter of policy.
Educators to use and refine the ‘cascade’ model to reach larger numbers of
learners by supporting the professionals in large-scale online courses in
supporting their smaller groups of learners who can use blended learning.
Ministries of Education to take advantage of MOOCs by promoting them to
assist with the development of local teachers and professionals to improve
local educational opportunities.

Realising the potential for learning at scale
The aim must be to achieve high quality learning that reaches all learners, i.e., that
achieves equity in terms of high value and low cost to the user. The model must be
more efficient than the current model, to be sustainable on the large scale long term.
Is this feasible?
The need for learning at scale, across the world, is clear. To take just one strand of
application, we know that to achieve the SDG4 goal of universal education requires
the development of some 69m new teachers by 2030 (UNESCO, 2016b). Digital
technology is the only means by which we could manage this immense task and it is
now clear that MOOCs could be part of the solution: of the 25 million people enrolled
in MOOCs between 2012 and 2015, 39 per cent were from less-developed countries
(Kizilcec et al., 2017).
Sections 3.2 and 3.3 argued that it could be feasible to design into online learning
the pedagogic and support expertise that would achieve the necessary economies of
scale. The previous section established the conditions for achieving equity of
provision, with respect to high value and low cost to the user:
• Low cost access to personal internet-enabled digital devices with high-speed
broadband, with explicit action to improve women’s access to online courses
• Online courses that are localised in terms of curriculum, pedagogy,
assessment, and certification of learning to ensure relevance and personal
value for all types of learner groups
• Online course designs that offer options for access to resources and activities
in locations with poor broadband connectivity, or low-powered devices.
• Development of a ‘cascade + blended learning’ model to extend the reach of
online learning beyond highly qualified professionals
Now we consider what can be done to meet these conditions for equitable online
learning.
Low cost access to digital infrastructure is an issue that has to be addressed at the
level of national policy, perhaps with industry and philanthropic support, as its
success will depend on local policy priorities and imperatives.
In the previous section we discussed ways of designing in the localisation of courses
to improve equity through orchestrating co-learning conversations, encouraging local
community groups, recruiting local partners, and offering adaptable resources.
In this section, we focus on the further problems of affordable assessment and
certification, and how the cost to the individual learner can be kept low, by taking a
realistic analytical approach to costing online learning.

What kind of assessment is feasible and valid?
The challenge for scaled-up online learning is to make the assessment of learning
objectives feasible for massive cohorts without creating unrealistic burdens on
teacher or facilitator time. While tutor-marked assignments are largely seen as
unsustainable as learning scales up (Chauhan, 2014), one of MIT’s most popular
MOOCs has recently added this option to complement the automated elements, with
a $300 identity-verified certificate (Straumsheim, 2016). This model of higher fees for
certification pays for tutor time to mark assignments, which of course is a retreat to
the classical model of HE that reduces equity, which so far remains the only reliable
way to assess for credit.
Alternative ways of reducing the cost of assessment are now being investigated:
peer, self, and automated assessment, but these are used for formative assessment,
rather than for any high-stakes summative assessment.
It is common in MOOCs to use peer assessment of learner participation in
discussion forums, learner produced digital outputs shared publicly, and structured
peer-to-peer review of assignments (de Waard, 2015; Luo, Robinson, & Park, 2014).
To improve the validity of peer assessment some providers include processes to
calibrate and develop learners’ capacities to review their peers’ assignments
according to scoring rubrics, for example, in EdX and Coursera. This approach
enables peers’ scores to be proportionally weighted or discounted according to
marking expertise and provides feedback to learners on their reviews of others’
assignments, as well as on their own assignments. Scaffolding the process of giving
and receiving peer reviews has the potential to both reduce learner resistance to
peer assessment, and harness its value for learning (Balfour, 2013). The acts of
giving and receiving peer reviews are both rated highly as productive learning
activities, especially the former, as it promotes more critical analysis of the student’s
own output (Laurillard, 2016a).
A similar approach can be used for self-assessment, where the individual learner
assesses their own work in relation to the marking criteria, and then against an
assessed model answer, in order to sharpen their awareness of what they should
aim for.
Both peer and self-assessment are uncertain methods in terms of validity, which
makes it difficult to use them for building up credit for transfer to accredited university
courses. In the attempt to address this issue, technology for automated assessment
is developing rapidly. It has the potential to range from computerised adaptive testing
tailored to individual performance to continuous integrated assessment, intelligent
measurement, and personalised feedback, drawing on data provided by learner
analytics (Redecker & Johannessen, 2013). A combination of these approaches is
being pioneered, e.g., by using text mining in a Global Blindness MOOC aimed at
health care providers in the Global South, to monitor the extent to which participants

are commenting on key learning themes in discussions, and to provide feedback to
learners and course developers (Parsley, Patel, Stroud, & Lynch, 2017).
Learning analytics can also be of value to the individual learner as feedback on
where their current performance lies in relation to their peers who were previously on
a trajectory for a particular grade (Laurillard, 2015).
Other options for avoiding expensive tutor time include Automated Essay Scoring
(AES). AES systems use statistical models to predict instructor scores for specific
essay features, for example, essay length, grammar, vocabulary, organisation. While
AES has been offered by EdX since 2013, comparisons of AES and tutor marking
show statistically significant differences (Reilly, Stafford, Williams, & Corliss, 2014),
making such systems arguably more appropriate for formative feedback, which
improves the outputs to the tutor for marking, rather than for direct summative
assessment.
None of these methods address the problem of summative assessment for credit,
but by improving the quality of output to the tutor they help to reduce the marking
and feedback workload. Tutor-based assessment, whether formative or summative,
is a high cost because its value is in the personalisation to the learner. It is this
nurturing of the individual mind that makes education a ‘client-centered’ industry,
rather than a mass delivery industry. The human interactions scaffold the maturing of
concepts and high-level skills, and the intellectual confidence to deploy them.
Education is no more a mass delivery industry than is parenthood. Whatever
techniques we use to reduce the personal tutor support in order to keep costs down,
there is the likelihood that we reduce quality, and therefore equity.
Actions to consider
Promote the investigation of techniques for improving formative assessment:
• Peer assessment
• Self-assessment against a model, or peer performance
• Automated essay scoring
Accreditation of learning at scale
Accreditation of learning means that learning providers, awarding bodies and
universities must work to recognise prior learning, so that participants in MOOCs can
use this kind of certification for credit transfer to degree programmes, or for
professional development.
The validation of assessment of online learning on the scale is difficult, but important,
because it paves the way for the provision of university credit for participation.
Governments and universities are propelling the global growth in credentialing

MOOCs (Chauhan, 2014), with EdX offering MicroMasters that can be exchanged
for credit on an accelerated Master’s programme with a number of university
partners (Agarwal, 2017), and other platforms developing similar initiatives. The
provision of formal credit for open, online and distance education can in itself
improve learners’ perception of the quality of the teaching and learning experience,
and their level of achievement (Kursun, 2016).
As the need for lifelong learning becomes widely accepted, there is a growing
interest in the ‘recognition, validation and accreditation [RVA] of the outcomes of
non-formal and informal learning’ (Singh, 2015), such as skills developed in the
workplace or in personal time. Recommendations for making visible previously
unrecognised skills and competences developed outside the formal education
systems emphasise the need for agreed standards or benchmarks, clear
assessment criteria, competent assessors and robust validation procedures. The
capacity to have prior learning accredited has been shown to be a factor in the take-
up of further education and training (Singh, 2015), and the ability to do this at scale
could be of great benefit across the Global South. Within a nationally agreed strategy
for scaling up RVA, it may be possible for online learning to conduct automated, self-
and peer- assessment efficiently. The Open Badges movement (The Mozilla
Foundation and Peer 2 Peer University in collaboration with The MacArthur
Foundation, 2012) offers a way of capturing a learning journey and achievements by
using the capacities of digital technology to record and share specific criteria and
outcomes linked to individuals. Such an approach would require a robust RVA
strategy, and widespread monitoring and calibration to ensure acceptance of the
value of these digital accreditation mechanisms.
Actions to consider
Universities to develop a policy for working towards credit transfer from online
certificates to conventional courses.
Analysing the costs of scaled up learning
If we are to find viable solutions to making online learning affordable and
sustainable, then it is essential to understand its true costs.
The costs of providing large scale learning have tended to be opaque, since cost has
not been the central motivation for scaling up education for many institutions, and
lack of attention to costing is a historical characteristic of much tertiary education
(Hollands & Tirthali, 2014). Classical costing models for teaching in conventional
methods have not been well developed for understanding the efficiencies of
economies of scale, and this is critical for optimising the use of technology.

Nevertheless, scaled up learning will not be sustainable without realistic planning for
the costs, particularly in relation to the quality of the learning experience provided
(Kennedy et al., 2015).
There are three kinds of cost to consider – recurrent costs, fixed costs, and variable
(scaling) costs. Recurrent cost items are activities that have to be costed in for every
run, such as marketing, recruitment, platform set-up for the course run, sending
emails and course announcements, tutor induction, and evaluation. A fixed cost item
may have a high cost (such as video or animation) or a low cost (such as text). The
important point about an online digital resource is that it only has to be produced
once, no matter how many people use it. By contrast, a variable cost item (such as
1-1 tutoring, tutor feedback, marking), is costed in terms of teacher time per user, or
per user group (Kennedy et al 2015), so that its costs rise in proportion to the size of
the cohort, with no economies of scale. A teaching-learning session usually has
elements of both fixed and variable costs, but if the fixed cost elements are sufficient
for learning (such as a good video explanation or demonstration), then most of the
learning activities can be done on the large scale. If not, then effective learning will
require some variable cost elements, such as tutoring and individual guidance as
well, which will increase the per learner cost, and therefore reduce the scale.
Conventional costs of teaching are not well understood, so there is no reliable
baseline. An activity-based costing approach (Cropper & Cook, 2010) that models
the true costs of both conventional and online learning, would be the optimal way to
ensure a financially and pedagogically viable transition from conventional to blended
to online learning (Laurillard, 2006; Nicol & Coen, 2003). This provides a realistic
comparison between the two modes of teaching because the method identifies all
the activities associated with a course in terms of staff time, for teachers and support
staff, for both development and delivery, instead of deducing the costs from a top-
down historic budget.
The recurrent costs of administration can be kept low if the host operation is efficient;
evaluation costs are low for MOOCs as much of the data is collected by the platform;
marketing and recruitment costs should boost numbers, so the right balance is
important.
The fixed costs of resources can be kept low. There is evidence to suggest that
reducing the costs of the most expensive content items (usually video) may not
result in overall loss of the quality of learning. Some of the most powerful learning
experiences of MOOC participants involve low-cost audio-video interventions in the
MOOC, e.g., an educator’s audio comment, a pre-recorded lecture, or a short video
encouragement to participants (Adams, Yin, Vargas Madriz, & Mullen, 2014). These,
often self-made, multimedia resources add a sense of intimacy to the learning on a
MOOC, akin to a personal tutorial experience. Moreover, in many developing
countries, reliance on streaming or downloading high quality video can be a problem
for low bandwidth internet connections, and for MOOCs to work in such contexts, the
capacity to study offline is essential (Oyo & Kalema, 2014a).

The estimated costs of providing a MOOC range from $38,980 to $325,330,
depending in part on the quality of the video and special features, and the number of
people involved in production teams (Hollands & Tirthali, 2014). Videos do not have
to be lengthy, and talking heads with slides can be done at very low cost and file
size. However, if the full power of video is used, such as location filming that shows
the professionals in action, or the contextualised theory in practice, then higher
production values are important because they are more likely to motivate
participants, and achieve the intended learning outcomes. They can be very good
value, especially as the costs of re-runs diminish substantially when expensive
content is reused and new costs relate only to mentoring and technical support
(Hollands & Tirthali, 2014).
Variable costs can be reduced, as we have seen, by using peer, self, and automated
assessment, but with the serious loss of human tutor nurturing and encouragement
that are so important in education. One alternative is to reduce these costs by
recruiting volunteers. The volunteer facilitators, who are qualified staff, are recruited
to run face-to-face sessions for local groups, or to support learners pro bono or as
part of their existing role in field supervision of students (Oyo & Kalema, 2014b;
Warugaba et al., 2016). The facilitators played a significant role, for example, in
boosting the completion rate to a high 53 per cent (Warugaba et al., 2016),
underlining the importance and value of the human tutor presence. If the model were
integrated into public education provision, without relying on volunteers, it would
ensure the sustainability of the MOOC approach. However, if the variable cost of
learner support is shouldered by volunteers, this is neither a sustainable nor scalable
solution.
In addition to reducing the cost of developing and supporting online learning, we can
also consider the returns on this investment. Financial returns are low because
completion rates and the take-up of certification is low. However, this is in the
context of the main demographic of MOOCs being highly-qualified professionals,
who are more interested in what they need from a course than in completing it, and
who do not need the certificate. For example, only 54 per cent of MIT and Harvard
MOOC participants indicated an intention to earn a certificate, and 16 per cent
actually did (Chuang & Ho, 2016). Certification alone is thought to be unlikely to be a
significant source of income, a view endorsed by other studies (Macleod, Haywood,
& Woodgate, 2015).
Alternatively, if marketing and recruitments were to aim for wider participation from
lower-qualified professionals or professionals who have little access to good
opportunities for professional development, then this could change. MOOC platform
providers are exploring the concept of differential pricing for different countries, and
this would improve equity for those from low-income countries. Recruitment would be
higher if policymakers were to embrace the value of a programme of MOOCs for
their educational staff, in a strategic move towards a cascade model of supporting

educational provision. Nothing of this kind has been tried as yet, as learners
participate on a personal basis, not as part of any organisational or governmental
strategy.
The return on investment in education is high and must be measured in more than
the income from certified learners. An analysis of the potential intangible returns on a
programme of teacher development MOOCs, for example, would be a valuable
contribution to our understanding of what kind of investment would be worthwhile in
the context of equity and online learning.
The new trends are towards collections of MOOCs, with capstone projects,
combining to offer credits towards degrees and recognised qualifications. Inevitably,
it is the variable costs, the client-centered support activities carried out by costly
teachers, which mark the quality of the teaching and the learner’s achievement, that
provide the return. And inevitably, in doing so, they push up the cost to the learner
and reduce equity.
Actions to consider
Use an activity-based costing approach to the cost-benefit analysis of both
conventional and online learning and teaching, in order to fully represent the
comparative cost and benefits of both, and plan the return on investment
accordingly.
Model and plan for income streams that will offset the true costs of online
learning.
Evaluate the trade-offs between high/low cost designs and the value to the
learners.
Experiment with reducing the costs of online production, rather than under-
resourcing the teaching time needed for learner support.
Develop policies for achieving equity in online learning at scale through
government support for a cascade model of professional development online
with locally supported blended learning.
Conclusions – researching the potential of MOOCs
One of the key successes of MOOCs is that they have provided a proof of concept of
the possibility of scaling up online learning. We now have platforms designed to
enrol and teach learners at scale, and a plethora of research into the ways learners
behave on the platforms, thanks to the analytics they automatically capture. This, in
itself, has the potential to transform global higher education by providing the

mechanism to enable access to study to anyone whose circumstances make
traditional face-to-face learning difficult or impossible. In particular, they have the
potential to extend a form of higher education to the Global South where demand is
high and supply is limited.
In so doing, scaled up online learning could transform both the learning and teaching
experience of higher education for all students and staff. This could be good –
providing high quality interactive learning by existing faculty with an understanding of
online learning pedagogy, supported by newly created professional roles, or bad –
providing low quality programmes for the poor, taught by a casualised workforce
(Carlson & Blumenstyk, 2012). HEIs could benefit from new revenue streams, or be
dominated by commercial forces. The public good mission of higher education could
be strengthened by embedding MOOCs into HE provision, or it could be reduced if
profiteering by commercial and private providers results in reduced access to high
quality courses for those without the means to pay. The challenge for higher
education is to make sure that scaled up online learning serves the interests of those
who need it most, remembering that both private and public higher education can still
be seen as a public good (Marginson, 2016).
Picciano (2017) has proposed that learning technology development in higher
education follows an ‘S-shape curve’ and that blended approaches to learning have
been making a resurgence. A blended approach to ‘wrapping’ face-to-face support
around the MOOC content (for example, Bruff, Fisher, McEwen, & Smith, 2013) may
be the most effective and sustainable model. However, this kind of hybrid approach
will not work without careful design. We need to develop and test our blended
learning designs for localising MOOCs as much as the MOOCs themselves.
The research that is required now is to find out more about how participants learn on
a MOOC, and how learning can be enhanced through design. It is also necessary to
explore the extent to which MOOCs could provide learning at scale in a way that is
both efficient and sustainable for HEIs, faculty, professional staff and platform
providers. Existing research that focuses on platform data alone can only help so far
in this. Platform analytics can be used to test our learning designs, but we need to go
deeper to explore the specificity of the MOOC learning experience, to elicit the ways
learning on a MOOC is similar to or different from other online learning experiences.
As HEIs scale up their online learning provision to include MOOCs and other
varieties of online course, we also need to know what the future holds for teaching
staff. We cannot be passive in this – we need to assess what is happening now in
order to help shape the future course of online learning.
Online learning at scale does have the potential to transform access to quality higher
education. It also has the potential to transform what it means to teach in higher
education. The question now is how can we make sure that this transformation is
productive and sustainable for the future of higher education for all.

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