Delivery of an Interactive Audio Course on Fisheries Law via Dumb Phones: Agalega Island as a Case Study for Testing a Novel Distance Education Platform - The Audio MOOC

This work is a continuation of a larger research work which advocates that Distance Education (DE) through audio-only learning mode can be developed into a full fledge audio-MOOC. Audio MOOC framework is an innovative framework which enables learning through mere phone calls. It has been conceived to digitally include low literate population in the education process by opening up access to learning materials to the unreached and the have-nots usually hindered by barriers such as language, literacy, culture, connectivity and distance which existing MOOCs have failed to address. This work demonstrates how our proposed framework is used to connect to a remote island lost in the middle of the Indian Ocean with limited maritime and air access but which since some few years back can be connected via basic phones through voice calls. Agalega is an ideal test case scenario for our research since it characterizes remoteness, limited connectivity, semi-literate population with limited access to education which our research aims at addressing. A group of 50 Fishermen was identified from both the Agalega islands. The course was of 9 days duration from 15 to 23 September 2017. The system was conducted live over the telephony network making use of our GSM gateway. The specificity of the system was that our GSM gateway resided in Mauritius connected to a cloud server, while the course was delivered to people of Agalega 1100 Km far from Mauritius over the sea. Nevertheless, our system performed as expected and proved to be a success.