Relevant literature
For MOOCs to fully realize their potential in democratizing education, a lot of effort is needed to overcome barriers in less developed countries in the form of technology and context
\cite{castillo2015moocs}. Efforts addressing these areas include +Acumen (
https://www.plusacumen.org), which aims at empowering social change and provides MOOCs employing in-video transcripts, culturally-diverse case studies, and content that is viewable off-line and platform-agnostic . Consequently, +Acumen attracts participants from a diverse pool of countries, including Afghanistan, Botswana and Sri Lanka
\cite{countries}. Successful participation from those countries and other top Fragile States
\cite{reports} was also reported in AuthorAID's offering on Scientific research writing, which utilized low-bandwidth friendly format via mainly text-based content, with occasional featured guest videos and voluntary course alumni as facilitators incentivized by certificates and badges
\cite{Murugesan_2017}. Though less obvious, Kizilcec et al have demonstrated that brief psychological interventions aimed at lessening social identity threats, like value affirmations and social belonging, significantly improved the persistence and completion rates of learners from less developed countries in MOOCs, at a negligible cost of only a few minutes from the course designer and learners
\cite{Kizilcec2017}. Furthermore, studies reporting on the application of the blended MOOC paradigm, which combines online MOOC components with in classroom interactions, have systematically shown positive educational indicators; even when applied in resource limited settings
\cite{ghadiri2013transformative,Yousef_2015,nkuyubwatsi2016opening}.
In the particular case of bioinformatics, there are huge, urgent, unmet training needs \cite{Attwood_2017} exacerbated by the breadth of the discipline, and its fast-pace of evolution \cite{Mulder2018}. Contributing factors to this gap are the difficulty of curricula design due to the diversity of learners' backgrounds \cite{Tastan_Bishop_2014}, and also the shortage in experienced qualified trainers \cite{Attwood_2017}. Therefore, various international efforts have been exerted to bridge this skills gap, like GOBLET, ELIXIR, EMBL-ABR and BD2K TCC and H3ABioNet. These efforts have took many forms including short face-to-face and online courses which are preferable by researchers in the later carer stages \cite{Attwood_2017}.
For basic bioinformatics users, both Coursea and edX provide introductory level training aimed at the molecular biologist level. Table \ref{599235} compares their offerings with H3ABioNet's blended MOOC in terms of length, recognition and content. These three courses are comparable in terms of the content they provide, and the quality of these offerings is unquestionable. However, it remains to be investigated their accessibility to learners in less developed countries. In the rest of the article, we highlight and evaluate elements of the blended MOOC run by H3ABioNet, the IBT course in its 2017 iteration, that makes it particularly accessible to learners in less developed countries.