Wow, really interesting post Maha – so many aspects: social, cultural, language, class, infrastructure that is very rarely if ever put on the agenda in discussions of MOOCs. Having read a couple of perspectives from rhizo14 participants (Heli’s, yours) I’m coming to realise just how first world westernised middle class the commentary on MOOCs is – thanks for opening up the discussion. Fascinating also to know about the complexities of the Arab language – re text being different to speech, and the regional dialect variances (which I believe is quite common amongst quite a few languages – i.e. regional dialects, at least where they haven’t died out altogether).
How would this work in the context of a MOOC? I assume it would mean any text would be the written form, and video or audio would be the spoken/ colloquial Arabic…?