The Emerging ICT Sphere in Morocco: Investigating the Feasibility and Usability of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) -- Surveying the Case of Ibn Tofail University EFLers

Abstract

In 2009, Morocco launched the “Maroc Numérique 2013” (Digital Morocco 2013) Strategy to generalize the ICT usage all over the country, increase the national digital capacity, and realize the digital switchover (Zaid & Ibahrime, 2011).  Amid this nationwide digitalization process, which is not yet completed especially in rural areas for several reasons, an ICT sphere seems to be taking some shape all in the academic, professional, and daily life spaces. In academia, the abbreviation ICT buzzes everywhere to sneak itself into syllabi, conferences, workshops, seminars, and research projects with and without enough mastery of digital literacies. MOOCs seem to have surged along with this buzzing yet fledgling ICTs landscape, inviting academically rigorous research to investigate their feasibility and usability in the context of Moroccan higher education, which is the main mission of the present paper.  Like other Moroccan universities, ITU is reinventing itself digitally by offering most of its professional and administrative services online.  This online reinforcement can be extended to cover web-based projects like MOOCs that can host considerable numbers of learners who wish to pursue their studies, especially already employed students from different ages are recently increasingly enrolling in formal study programs. MOOCs may be feasible and usable education toolsets if properly designed, distributed, managed, and performed. This paper investigates the possibility of operationalizing this MOOC business in ITU.

Keywords: MOOCs, ICTs, web 2.0, higher education, online/ lifelong learning