**7. Case study 1: community-led massive open online courses (MOOCs) for life long learning**

The Massive Open Online Courses is an outcome of the emerging knowledge society to empower everyone to contribute to knowledge exchange at the global level; leading to making higher education accessible to everyone. (see for instance Anant, [22]). Nonetheless, MOOCs model and framework is a challenge to blend in with the indigenous rural community way of life to sustain lifelong learning. Single mothers Association community members in Bario made the illfitting very clear to us when we first mooted the idea at a focus group discussion meeting.

In response, the spokesperson said: "Thank you for introducing this new system to us. We look at it and admire how it works for instance to provide means to receive and learn new ideas and things. That is very admirable. However, I don't think we need any more ideas from outside to make us better farmers. In fact, over the years we have developed our own farming system and we are very good at it. Ilah let ngen tetepuh [knowledge from our ancestors]. And this is evident from the sufficient rice and food we provide for our families and our community. We would like to ask, why not use the platform for us to teach our skills and our languages to others especially our grandchildren. Currently, most of us are far removed from our grandchildren since most of them are living in town and are going to national schools where they learn other languages such as Bahasa Malaysia and English. As a result, many do not know to speak their mother tongue. We are not really able to communicate and teach them at the moment because of the distance and language barrier. Can we redesign your platform for us to teach them our way of life - for instance how to prepare our own traditional food and to introduce our traditional adornment which are important as markers of identity."

Another person went on to say, "With your platform [videos] you are able to capture what we do and keep them to show them. For we teach our younger generation by showing them how it is done. They learn from observing and trying it out for themselves. We don't teach them by giving them instructions, because for us when they try and do it for themselves after seeing us doing it, that knowledge will last longer in their minds. I want to teach my grandchildren how to make this ornament using beads. There are many techniques that they should know, and they can only learn from us. Nobody else knows how to do this; they cannot learn it on their own. They have to learn from us."

Invited as collaborators, the single mothers' community members reshaped the current model of MOOC by fitting it into specific roles in the community. First, they have made it clear that they did not need any more information

*Digital Socio-Technical Innovation and Indigenous Knowledge DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101861*

to upgrade their standard of living as farmers. Second, they would like to ensure that the knowledge – skills, expertise that they have accumulated over the years, not only be documented but to be passed on to their descendants (grandchildren).

More importantly, by turning the project into a community-driven activity, the single mothers are transformed into knowledge creators and co-designers and not merely consumers of technological-based frameworks. They have redesigned the MOOC channel into community sustainability channels. Their stories suggest that for it to be fully appreciated, MOOCs has to deliver value as an integrated sociotechnical system to enable life-long learning for indigenous rural communities.
