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E-Education in countries with low and medium human development levels using MOOCs

Abstract:

e-Education is the area of e-Government that involves the use of information technologies for education. The implementation of e-Education initiatives faces huge challenges in countries with low and medium human development levels due to budget constraints and lack of infrastructure, among other limitations. In this context, massive open online courses (MOOCs) might be a useful tool to offer educational opportunities to citizens, provided the right strategies are envisioned and applied. This study has two parts. In the first part, we selected a sample of countries covering all levels of human development index (HDI) and found an inverse correlation between HDI and population growth. We also found that countries with low and medium HDI have low education indexes and need to improve their primary education completion rates, secondary education enrollment, and tertiary education enrollment. In the second part, we performed a SWOT analysis to identify the internal and external factors of MOOCs that influence their ability to be used for e-Education in countries with low and medium human development. Based on these factors, we defined a set of strategies. As future work, we plan to evaluate the strategies proposed with the collaboration of public educational institutions and government organizations.