2ND FORUM OF CIS SCHOLARS FROM REVEALED KNOWLEDGE AND SOCIAL SCIENCES FACULTIES ISLAMIC EDUCATION IN CIS COUNTRIES Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur December 1 – December 5, 2018 ISLAMIC ONLINE EDUCATION. CURRENT CONDITION AND DEVELOPMENT PROSPECTS Ali Evteev Founder and general director Online Academy “Medina” The topic, which I would like to present to you today is Online Education or Distance Learning. To be more pre- cise - Islamic Education with implementation of online technologies. Let us begin with the definition of the term: “Distance education is acquisition of knowledge and skills through intermediate information and guidance, which involves all technologies and other forms of remote learning” this def- inition is given by the United States Distance Learning As- sociation. There is another more concise version of the definition, which I also find very appropriate: “Distance education is a system, a process, which connects students with the suppliers of education services through various educational resources”. According to some sources, today more than 70 million students have completed their education by taking 8,000 online-courses designed by educators from more than 750 universities of the world. Affordable Colleges Online points out the fact that today more than 6.7 million people undergo their studies on the Inter- net. In 1997, for example, Peter Drucker, a re-known Ameri- can scholar in education management stated that 30 years from now the big university campuses will become relics. 2 Universities will not survive. The future is outside the tra- ditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Dis- tance learning is coming on fast. Although his forecasts were not accurate the tendency is rather strong and intensive. It is clear that the concept of education is inevitably go- ing to be modernised. This is also due to the evolution of the function of the educators. Practically all new tendencies in education field are moving towards modification of the role of an educator and a student in favour of the so-called reversed class- room, where the primary role in the learning process is given to the student who must himself digest the material, whereas the educator’s role is only to assist in the process. Exhausting publications, lectures that have become a cliché and outdated materials will see their end. Micro-learning or in other words mini bytes of educa- tional content is another tendency which is gaining popu- larity in this field and which will most probably become a hit in the future, especially in the corporate world. Five- minute videos, single page documents, specific courses, small pieces of information will be easily integrated into daily life of a busy individual, as the cognitive load is much lighter. Let’s also not forget that micro-learning is ideal for mobile devices, which partially explains their popularity. A well-known researcher and a founding general direc- tor of Class Central – a popular system for the search en- gine and review sites for onlibe courses, Dhaval Shah con- cluded the development results of online-education over the past six years and outlined six main trends in evolu- tion of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). 3 Having listed he main trends of MOOC evolution, Dhaval Shah points out their multi-directionality. The first trend is monetisation of online courses. Ac- cording to Dhaval Shah, in 2011 the content and certifica- tion of online courses was free, but today this is no longer the case. The second trend - online courses are becoming distant from the learning process moving towards independent learning. As Shah points out, 55% of all courses which make up the Class Central system do not have a specific date of beginning and end of lecturers and are available at any desired period of time. Since 2014 online courses which were earlier available only within a defined period of study session have taken On Demand format – “upon request”. This leads us to the third trend – decrease of the general load of each individual online course. In the old days, when online courses were conducted once or twice a year, all students used to gather into one massive group. Today these courses are available at any time. This means that instead of collective learning, each student undergoes his studies at his own individual pace and non-synchronous participation had eased the course load. Individual online education, by the way, serves as a good drive towards monetisation of the service. The fourth trend is mainly related to online education system in the USA and concerns the issues of accreditation process. Mainly the certificates which the students receive upon the completion of MOOC in a particular field offered under Corsera’s programme Specializations, Udacity’s Nanodegrees или edX’s XSeries. These programmes have 4 been accredited by colleges, universities and the credits received in the process can be used to acquire certificates. The fifth trend is that online courses are gaining a larg- er audience in the field of professional education. Today the volume of potential market for corporate online educa- tion amounts to billions of dollars annually. According to Coursera online platform, more than 50 enterprises use corporate product Coursera for Business. Colleges and universities nevertheless remain in the centre of the sys- tem, despite the fact that online platforms strengthen partnership with business for the development of online courses, online platform operators repeat continuously that external developers of MOOC cannot be considered as alternative to universities in terms of developing educa- tional content. This should pacify opponents of open edu- cation from university academia who are concerned with a possible disappearance of the need for universities in the near future. The sixth and the last trend is the disruptive develop- ment of national online education programmes as op- posed to global platforms. Programmes like XuetangX (China), НПОО (Russia), Fun-mooc (France), Mexicox (Mexico), Miríada X (Spain), NPTEL (India) etc. It is obvious that today governments of the leading countries of the world invest into online learning in an at- tempt of not being left behind the evolution of educational technologies. 5 What does this have to do with Islamic Education?! The new era and old concerns. Every time a new form of knowledge transmission is in- troduced the conservatives label it as innovation. Unodoubtedly this was the case at the advent of teach- ers who started practicing persoal systematic education. In the ancient times people learned by observation acquiring their knowledge and skills naturally in the course of at- tending to their daily affairs. Later, we noticed a shift from personal education to groups with an advent of the first madrasahs and univer- sities. Strange as it may seem but even today we have cer- tain people who consider group education an innovation. In our times, in the age of new technologies in a rapidly developing world we find ourselves standing at the door- step of a new turn a new form of delivering education to the masses. A distance education. And as before, we see opponents of this knowledge transmission method. And if in the West opponents of distance education are almost non-existent, Muslims often refer to this method as innovation. All this brings to mind not so distant past, when a ban was imposed on importation of typewriters into Muslim world, in fear that it may lead to uncontrollable publish- ing of books and as such to possible deviations in religious knowledge. As a result, for dozens of years our Ummah has been deprived of access to elementary and applied knowledge in contrast to mass education of the Western world. 6 And here we find ourselves again at the new turning point of technological development with some suspicious- ly questioning the new methods and forms of knowledge transmission. We hear familiar statements like: - The sudent must be able to see the teacher in per- son. Alhtough video format perfectly fits this requirement. - The teacher must be able to establish eye contact with the student in order to understand him. - There are no guarantees that the student will digest the material in an appropriate manner. There are many more arguments beyond any criticism. The Good News A number of concerns, however, are quite clear and fairly objective, but these concerns should lead us towards finding solutions rather than complete avoidance of the problem, which may cause us yet again to lag behind in this new endeavour. Should there be concern with the remote presence of the student one must ensure proper feedback from him, to establish a sense of interactive and accessible communica- tion channel. Should there be a concern with regards to proper un- derstanding or lack of assistance from the educator’s side in the process, the programme can be enhanced with addi- tional webinars or direct student-lecturer communication option. These additional features will add to the cost of online education but this may only seem to be at the beginning. Once we look from a different angle, a possibility to en- rol students en masse in thousands, tens of thousands or 7 even hundreds of thousands, substantially reduces the relevant cost of education. If the courses are offered at a nominal fee, then these projects can become very profita- ble. If we can develop a culture of making payments for acquisition of religious knowledge within the Muslim community, it would open a good commercial perspec- tive. Imagine if every student of our academy today makes a monthly payment of $10. Our monthly revenue will amount to $350,000. Of which clean profit would be $300,000. Not bad, right? Jama’a Islamia, for example spends around $3,000 for each of its student. The cost of learning at our academy, for example, cur- rently stands at $0.5 per month.