Distance education and MOOC: Opportunities for quality education in higher education in Mauritius

We are witnessing a learning community who is always willing and eager to be associated to innovative practices online. With the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), developing countries are given new opportunities to be part of the global community with access to a wider range of resources and expertise from leading universities around the world. But these resources cannot be integrated in programmes without investigating on their pertinence and their value added factor. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to analyze the actual distance education systems in Mauritius and to outline strategies on how MOOC can be used effectively in order to revitalize higher education and lifelong learning by giving access to quality complementary resources. As methodology, the evolution of distance education in Mauritius is analyzed as well as the growth of MOOC. Furthermore a framework of the integration of MOOC in a new form of education that transcends boundaries is proposed for a developing country like Mauritius. It is found that, for innovation to be effective, it needs to find its way in the existing valued solid foundations that were inbuilt.