During the second quarter of 2020, humanity was forced to improvise a large-scale experiment in distance education due to the need to close schools at all levels to help contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like many other sectors and activities, whose face-to-face formula has been abruptly disrupted, the entire education community has worked against the clock to improvise solutions to  solve the immensity of the challenge.

A little bit of history

Distance learning is by no means a new concept and the first correspondence courses in the modern sense were created in the United Kingdom and the United States as early as the mid-19th century. Later on, radio and television were also used as a vehicle to bring various forms of distance learning to the public. The main objective of these early experiences was to bring education to less densely populated areas rather than to completely replace the dominant model of classroom education.

Since the beginning of the large-scale deployment of the internet and the web in the 1990s, education has been one of the sectors in which revolutionary advances were most expected. However, the truth is that the solutions available today are limited, especially when compared to the scale of the challenge of keeping the education system functioning in a non-face-to-face way.

During this period organizations such as Unesco have listed educational technology solutions to help the educational community adapt its programmes to the distance education formula. Perhaps the best known of the solutions that facilitate self-learning is Khan Academy, which provides free classes in mathematics, science and humanities. Khan Academy won the Princess of Asturias Award for international cooperation in 2019.

MooCs courses for a more equitable education

The field of educational technology (edTech) has been proposing solutions for decades to facilitate learning and improve academic performance with the incorporation of information and communication technologies to enhance educational theories at different stages, cycles and circumstances. Education through mass and open online courseware platforms (MOOCs) is perhaps the most popular innovation in educational technology in terms of its worldwide adoption.

The idea behind MOOCs is to educate a number of students that would be physically impossible to reach with a traditional course (M for Mass), to offer them learning materials structured as complete courses, not as individual lessons (C for Courses), and of course completely distance learning via the internet (O for online).

Although the concept was proposed earlier, it was not until the beginning of the 2010's that the large MOOC platforms that currently dominate the market, such as Coursera, edX or Udemy, heirs to MIT's pioneering MitOpenCourseWare project, became popular. Its growth was so explosive that The New York Times declared 2012 the "Year of the MOOC". In just one year, it went from one university offering three courses to 300,000 students to 40 universities offering more than 250 courses to 4 million students.

During the months of strictest confinement in the world, MOOC's platforms have seen their enrolment growth soar. Coursera announced at its annual conference that enrolment in its courses grew by 644% over the previous year between mid-March and mid-April 2020, from 1.6 to 10.3 million. Enrolment at Udemy also increased by more than 400% between February and March compared to 2019.

The role of open data in MooCs

The fact that the birth and development of MOOCs' platforms comes from the environment of large American academic institutions (Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and large technology companies means that their impact has mainly been in the field of higher and professional education with a certain bias towards training in STEM subjects.

This makes open data play a prominent role in courses offered in disciplines such as data science, data analysis, artificial intelligence, machine learning or big data in general. For example, the most widely used programming languages in these disciplines such as R or Python include both structured and unstructured datasets that are available either directly with the initial installation or with the inclusion of specialised packages. In the context of online training and practical projects, these datasets serve to introduce, test, experiment and understand concepts ranging from basic statistics to the most advanced artificial intelligence techniques.

A well-known example is the Iris dataset that is included in many packages of the main programming languages and has become a common example to explain and test various statistical classification techniques in machine learning. In other cases, public or private data portals are the source used by trainers to customize the education of learners and even to motivate them with examples that may be closer to their interests.

Although not available on major platforms, some companies such as Esri, which provide mapping software, have published MOOCs to help anyone learn about topics including spatial imaging, geospatial analysis and mapping using open data sets.

A few years ago some universities were concerned that MOOCs would become competitors for their face-to-face Bachelor or Master programmes, but now they seem to have found their niche in professional and complementary training for people looking to improve their skills, change careers or simply enjoy the process of learning. In this sense, the pandemic has once again highlighted the opportunity for MOOCs to "democratise" higher education by providing cheap or free access to anyone in the world.

Content prepared by Jose Luis Marín, Senior Consultant in Data, Strategy, Innovation & Digitalization.

The contents and points of view reflected in this publication are the sole responsibility of its author.