In a piece in the Independent in 2011, Gor­don Brown wrote: “The inter­na­tional aid sys­tem for edu­ca­tion is fail­ing the world’s children.” He was intro­duc­ing his UNESCO report, Edu­ca­tion for All: Beat­ing Poverty, Unlock­ing Pros­per­ity. On a number of occasions over the past six years, I have been able to watch the work of UNESCO close up–and in the process gained considerable respect for the organization. In keeping with that, I do believe that this report is a superb, detailed, and compassionate summary of the state of education for millions upon millions of children across the developing world. It offers a description of a state of affairs that should bring shame to the rest of the world: We are failing all of those children very badly.

Early in the report, Brown states that “No education system anywhere in the world is better than its teachers.” Later, he goes on to say:

Teachers are the backbone of any education system. Ultimately, learning is the produce of what happens in classrooms through a relationship between pupils and teachers. That is why no education system is better than the availability, accessibility, and quality of the teachers it provides, and the level of support that it delivers to those on the front line of education in the classroom.

This begs many more questions than it answers (especially if you agree with the philosophy of I Am Learner), but it would be foolish in the extreme not to accept the core point being made:  that good-quality teaching should be central to good educational provision, and most especially for the education of young children.

It is a dismal and unassailable fact that there is a massive shortage of good-quality teachers across the developing world, especially but by no means exclusively across the countries in sub-Saharan Africa. According to Gordon Brown’s report, the world’s poorest countries need something like 1.8 million additional teachers over the next three years alone to provide even basic primary education to their children, as well as around four million more classrooms and all of the most basic items of equipment we might expect to find in those classrooms. Brown is absolutely right therefore to state that:

The world is today facing an education emergency. That emergency does not make media headlines. But it has disastrous human, social, and economic consequences. It is consigning millions of children to lives of poverty and diminished prospects for economic growth. And it is destroying on an epic scale the most valuable asset of the world’s poorest nations–the creativity, talent, and potential of the young generation.

An education emergency indeed, and one on a vast and massively consequential scale for humanity worldwide. It requires equally vast and prolonged global investment to put right.

Elsewhere in the report, Gordon Brown enthuses over the potential for harnessing technology to improve educational provision. However, he believes that “New technologies do not offer a quick fix for systemic problems in education systems. What they do offer is a vehicle for improving access to opportunities for education and the quality of service provision.”

The last thing this global emer­gency needs is any kind of quick fix. But I do believe that there is a poten­tially pow­er­ful appli­ca­tion of dig­i­tal and net­work­ing tech­nolo­gies that could play a sig­nif­i­cant role, along­side all the other big investements needed, in con­tribut­ing to a much-bet­ter-qual­ity edu­ca­tion for many mil­lions of the poor­est chil­dren in the poor­est coun­tries around the world. 

From Mas­sive Open Online Course to Mas­sive Open Online Class­room (MOOCl)

Any­one with even the remotest inter­est in higher edu­ca­tion of late will be aware of the MOOC. The basic con­cept of the Mas­sive Open Online Course (a term devised by Dave Cormier) is a sim­ple one, but the impli­ca­tions of the MOOC for the future of higher edu­ca­tion in par­tic­u­lar are the stuff of a debate that is wash­ing around global edu­ca­tion at the present time.

I will trust that any­one read­ing this already knows what a MOOC is, although I will not nec­es­sar­ily trust that every­one knows that there are MOOCs and there are MOOCs. If your knowl­edge of the con­cept of the MOOC is restricted to those “deliv­ered” by the likes of Cours­era or Udac­ity, then I would urge you to go back to grass roots and read some of what you might find, for instance, in MOOC.ca, set up by Stephen Downes to host news, infor­ma­tion, and discussion around the con­cept, in the writ­ings of George Siemens, Dave Cormier, already men­tioned, and oth­ers. Open, exper­i­men­tal, and con­nec­tivist in nature, the MOOC is an explicit and con­scious attempt to use the incred­i­ble affor­dances offered by the Inter­net to change the nature of education.

The massive-ness, open­ness, and online-ness of the MOOC all are givens, of course, and all are crit­i­cal to the effect that the devel­op­ment is hav­ing at the present time. But I, for one, am less sure that the course-ness of the con­cept has to be a given too. I would recog­nise that the fact that the MOOC is built around the course is prob­a­bly what is keep­ing the con­cept fairly firmly within the broad arms of higher edu­ca­tion, for the moment at least. As Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University in the U.K., has written, “After a decade of OERs [open educational resources], it’s inter­est­ing that we’re com­ing back to edu­ca­tor con­structed courses.…”

Think Class­room instead of Course?

When I look at the sit­u­a­tion faced by those mil­lions of chil­dren world­wide, in a con­text of poten­tial mas­sive global connectedness, and yet in cir­cum­stances where so many of them have no access to good teach­ing, I can’t but help won­der how the MOOC might be taken, reshaped, and made into some­thing that could begin to ame­lio­rate some of the worst effects of that gen­er­ally awful situation.

I recog­nise, of course that such a sim­ply stated change is, in fact, any­thing but sim­ple. The course is a gen­er­ally uncom­pli­cated thing, usu­ally (although by no means nec­es­sar­ily) a lin­ear, struc­tured, com­pre­hen­si­ble process in which ideas or con­cepts or infor­ma­tion are intro­duced, dis­cussed, dis­sected, reshaped, com­bined, under­stood; it can be a sin­gle unit of “instruc­tion” or a whole pro­gramme of learn­ing, or some­thing in between; and it can be delivered or pre­sented (taught) by a sin­gle teacher or in some senses by every­one on the course (as the orig­i­nal conception of the MOOC seeks to achieve).

The class­room–even the vir­tual, con­cep­tual class­room–is a quite dif­fer­ent beast. It is a “place,” a plat­form; it is the site where courses can hap­pen, where teach­ers can offer lessons across all dis­ci­plines, where learn­ers can go to access learn­ing, debate, insight, exper­tise, author­ity; it is a meet­ing place in which edu­ca­tion can hap­pen; it is the locus for teach­ing and learn­ing activ­i­ties of all kinds.

I believe we have many, per­haps most, of the ele­ments already that would have to be brought together to cre­ate the MOOCl. Instinc­tively, how­ever, I feel that a MOOCl would not be nearly as sim­ple as a MOOC to start up and sus­tain. It would require an oper­a­tional core of a kind and scale that is prob­a­bly not true of the MOOC, although that oper­a­tional core, I would sug­gest, need not be a sin­gle orga­niz­ing unit: it could be an open, dis­trib­uted affair, sym­pa­thetic to the ori­gins of the MOOC. It should offer access to masses of great teach­ing and learn­ing resources. The Khan Academy is an obvi­ous exam­ple of what could be utilised, but so too could the thou­sands of other high-qual­ity, freely avail­able teach­ing and learn­ing resources that increas­ingly throng the web, and across so many of the world’s major, and not-so-major, languages.

So Far, So What?

All of these resources are avail­able today. But the MOOCl would have to incor­po­rate some kind of orga­niz­ing layer, a sim­ple inter­face that would allow any indi­vid­ual any­where in the world not only to access the resources as such but also to access courses, com­mu­ni­ties, teach­ers (who can be, and prob­a­bly will be, other learn­ers), exper­tise, and guid­ance. The MOOCl might also be a device for those teach­ers who already are on the ground, so to speak, in the poor­est coun­tries, to grab hold of and use as a means of enhanc­ing their own teach­ing exper­tise. The MOOCl would be the teacher’s global men­tor, guide, teach­ing assis­tant, just as much as it would be the learner’s teacher too.

Again, you might say, this sounds like a descrip­tion of the World Wide Web. But the MOOCl would have to be more than sim­ply “avail­able”:  It would have to be set up in a way that would allow it reach out in a proac­tive way, to find its way into those places in the world where we know there are young chil­dren who cur­rently have few or no teach­ers to help them learn, where there are few or no teach­ing and learn­ing resources. This will require much thought, huge orga­ni­za­tion, and of course invest­ment. Is there a role here for the big phil­an­thropic foun­da­tions as well as governments? I believe so.

But what of access to the net­work, access to con­nected devices? Of course, the MOOCl would have to be capa­ble of being used across the world’s mobile net­works and acces­si­ble on mobile devices. Gor­don Brown’s report tells us that mobile cel­lu­lar pen­e­tra­tion has reached 50% in the devel­op­ing world and is still increas­ing fast. The cell phone is the default access device for many mil­lions of peo­ple in the world’s poor­est coun­tries, and that is likely to be the case for many years to come.

How much of this can be done in the same spirit as the orig­i­nal MOOC? I don’t know. I sus­pect not much, but I would love to be proved wrong. I know I am merely scratch­ing the sur­face with an unde­vel­oped and poten­tially still­born idea–but if the acute minds of thought­ful and cre­ative peo­ple can come up with the MOOC, I would like to think those same  and other minds could be applied to how we can turn the Mas­sive Open Online Course into the Mas­sive Open Online Class­room to serve the des­per­ate, des­per­ate needs of so many mil­lions of chil­dren in dire eco­nomic and edu­ca­tional poverty across the world.