How India, Rwanda, and El Salvador are solving the biggest problem in online education

November 18, 2013 Leave a comment

How India, Rwanda, and El Salvador are solving the biggest problem in online education

By Lauren Alix Brown @laurenalixb November 15, 2013

Massive open online courses have quickly fallen out of favor—initially thought to be the savior of higher education, the huge classes are now its punching bag. Critics of the free online courses point to low completion rates, a devaluation of degrees, the displacement of professors, and an absence of necessary classroom time. But a more effective application of the standalone courses is taking root, notably outside of the US.It’s called blended learning: a combination of online education and in-class instruction. 

In Bolivia, South Korea, and Indonesia, a pilot program found that when an online course was paired with a weekly discussion, completion rates were higher (40%) than for those who only took the online course (10%, which is also Coursera’s average completion rate).

In New America’s Weekly Wonk blog, Anya Kamentz explores how MOOCs are being paired with local education systems in India, Rwanda, El Salvador, and other emerging markets. She writes:

Research shows that blended learning, combining face-to-face contact with online work, is generally superior to either mode used alone. The emergence of ultra-affordable blended-learning degree alternatives based on free online resources just might be the “leapfrog” solution that allows nations full of undereducated young people to move into the middle classes.

According to data from last year, almost three-quarters of students enrolled in Coursera were outside of the US with the majority in the BRICs. While the rise of MOOCs has put pressure on universities in the developing world to improve, their rapid adoption may allow poor education sectors to persist.

In the US, new studies show that integrating a single, or even multiple, MOOCs into a traditional university class gives students the opportunity to learn across various media and access a broader academic community. The turn toward blending learning and MOOCs is only logical—it was research on blended learning that gave rise to the development of MOOCs in the first place.

Now, Coursera is offering a MOOC on teaching blended-learning, with the hopes of exposing thousands of educators to the new technique.

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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