The increasing number of enlistees claiming their right to enroll in the programs of African Universities and the limited number of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) were the prime reasons of students overcrowding in classes. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) showed a potential to help limiting the challenges of massification in open access HEIs. As the literature review of the MOOC situation in Africa is still nascent, we will qualitatively share the experience of Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakech, Morocco (UCA) in launching a MOOC for its learners as a case study. Created in 2013, this MOOC was entitled UC@MOOC and appeared to respond to the challenges of massification in open access HEIs and the language difficulties faced by students. We will also present an overview of this project, its achievements and the quantity of knowledge delivery it accomplished. This MOOC experience attracted learners from other countries. And we have found that a shortage of MOOCs in Africa drove learners from other African francophone countries to learn from UC@MOOC. Yet a low-cost MOOC with certain limitations such as the weak ICT infrastructure available to the African public will thrive if operated using a MOOC platform and boosted its financial means.
Many researchers have underlined the benefits of student mobility in strengthening their communication skills. Studying a foreign language and fostering knowledge about behavioural attitudes are the most common research cases. One of the major issues of mobility, by its very nature, is that it implies significant travel and accommodation costs. Virtual mobility, or Virtual Exchange (VE), can be introduced as a proactive alternative solution. This work presents an evaluation of a telecollaborative online course model organised as a VE between German and Moroccan universities. It was established to explore the benefits of integrating a VE experience by practicing some 21st-century knowledge elements as tools for the development of intercultural, language, and digital competencies from the perspective of mobility. In this paper, we present a VE model and its design, structure, and progress. Then, we evaluate this first experience to overcome some challenges that similar future experiences could face. We analyse the tools proposed in this design, the interactions between the different actors, and their feedback. The evaluative study shows the acquisition of awareness of cultural differences and the improvement of language skills through practice in addition to the development of some digital skills.
This work presents the UC@MOOC project as a pedagogical innovation to face the effects of massification that are making Moroccan universities endure many constraints for the past ten years, as well as other African universities. It aims, among its objectives, to cope with the massification factor and to overcome the language difficulties encountered by students. In this project, our top priority is to reduce academic failure then we will get to the point of responding to the training' needs. Courses are scripted and posted online which did not require many resources, so their production cost is relatively low. Audiovisual digital content also helps us to save time, and go to a hybrid teaching or even flipped classrooms in some cases. The idea is not to suppress the face-to-face courses but, instead, to place teachers at the center of this educational innovation. The online posting of free content allows students to deepen knowledge autonomously and independently. We will present the low-cost economical model that has been used to support this initiative and the challenges that we are facing. Some provided ideas on the critical success factors of this initiative will be described and discussed.
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