Assessing the effect of a massive open online course (MOOC) on school water, sanitation, and hygiene improvements in the Philippines

Improving the water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) services in low-resources setting is a challenge. The Department of Education (DepEd) of the Philippines, supported by GIZ and UNICEF, runs the national WASH in schools program which promotes a stepwise approach to reach national WinS Standards and foster the institutionalization of WASH in the education sector. This includes national-level annual monitoring on WASH service levels in schools, information which is used to set target and allocation resources. Since 2019, the programme has also included a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for school staff. This platform provides uniform implementation guidance of WinS in the schools across the country. In this analysis, we use annual WASH monitoring data from the 2017/2018 (baseline) and 2021/2022 (endline) and compare this against school-level information on MOOC enrolment and completion. For each school in our analysis, we calculated baseline and endline overall and domain specific star ranking, a standardized 3-point composite measure of school WASH services adopted by DepEd. Linear regression models assessed the relationship between school staff participation in the MOOC and average change in star ranking between baseline and endline and logistic regression models were used to calculate the odds of improvement in star ranking between baseline and endline. Baseline and endline data were available for 28,779 schools. Of those, 5,980 schools had at least 1 teacher enrolled in the MOOC. Overall, MOOC participation was associated with improvements in both overall and domain specific star ranking, with larger improvements seen for hygiene services. The MOOC is a promising key component of the national WASH stategy complementing the annual monitoring process and warrants further investigation in the school management sector.