Distant
learning is receiving increasing interest in Saudi Arabia especially because
it is part of the country new strategic plans, Vision 2030. Saudi Arabia is a
very conservative country and the education is strictly controlled by the
ministry of education. This has limited the access to learning and training
materials and courses which have to be approved by the ministry and training
and teaching should be provided to males and females separately. On the other
hand, Saudi Arabia is a vast country with youthful population where the
median age of the population is about 29 years. The Saudis are also
tech-savvy and they compete to have access to new technologies.
The model of
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), one of the important distant learning
models, is still new in the Saudi context where the first applications of
this model has taken place only this year, 2018. The first learners to undergo
learning through this model are teacher trainers in the Saudi ministry of
education.
This study
used both qualitative (interview and observation) and quantitative
(questionnaire) methods to answer the following research questions:
– What are
the experiences of the learners while attending the MOOC component of the
course?
– What are
the experiences of the teacher who designed and executed the course?
The results
found through the questionnaires, observation, and interviews suggest that
MOOCs have the potential to become very popular in the Saudi context. This is
because of the following factors:
Providing
courses via MOOCs helps overcome the geographical barrier where the vast area
of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is about 2.15 square kilometres, makes
transportation from one place to another time-consuming and costly. There are
only about 45 centres for providing teacher training that are run by the
Saudi ministry of education. Using MOOCs allows reaching far more learners
than the traditional face-to-face model.
Using MOOCs
to provide training to the teachers helps avoiding any disruption to the
stability of the academic day. Teachers can have access to training at any
time that suits while in the traditional face-to-face training they can only
attend training during the day which means they might have to stop teaching.
Providing traditional training after school hours didn’t solve the problem as
teachers faced difficulties travel after school hours to attend training in
remote areas. This also caused another burden on teachers.
Using MOOCs
to provide training helps achieve equality as both genders can have access to
the same training/teaching while in the traditional face-to-face model males
and females need to attend separate sessions where they receive training from
a teacher-trainer from the same gender. MOOCs then offer better chances to
females.
In
recent years, Saudi Arabia has invested a lot in delegating students to study
abroad. Hundreds of thousands gained high qualifications and had access to
state-of-the-art knowledge. However, it is not possible for those people to
share experience with other Saudis because of the limitations of time and
place. MOOCs provide a possible solution where those experts can use distance
learning to provide training to learners from any part of the vast kingdom of
Saudi Arabia.
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