In the past year the hype around online education reached a fever pitch, but if there’s anywhere in the world where free and low-cost online education could transform lives, it’s in Africa where the demand is huge, writes Anya Kamenetz in a report for FastCompany.
Free massive open online courses or MOOCs, are at the center of the debate, Kamenetz said.
A growing network of social entrepreneurs — some African, some foreign — are appropriating free resources produced overseas into a new context: packaging them into a low-cost bundles with moderated discussions, mentorship, and practical experience, sometimes to create complete degree programs, other times on an informal, as-needed basis, according to the FastCompany report.
It’s a unique recipe with a chance to leapfrog traditional, complex university infrastructure and succeed, not just in Africa, but around the globe, Kamenetz said.
Africa has the world’s largest unmet demand for higher education. There are 200 million people aged 15 to 24, the youngest population in the world. This youth population is set to double by 2045.
But higher education enrollment of this population in sub-Saharan Africa is just 5 percent, the lowest in the world. Around 35,000 people every year study abroad. The remaining 190 million are out of luck.
If Africa had the education rates of North America, it would have approximately 150 million more young people in college right now, according to the report. The number of young Africans who have experienced blended MOOCs is maybe in the hundreds.
“There are a lot of young people in Africa who could be Steve Jobs, but most of them will die without living their full potential,” Ndubuisi Ekekwe told FastCompany.
Ekekwe is founder of First Atlantic Semiconductors and Microelectronics, one of Africa’s leading microelectronics firms. He is on leave from a faculty position at Carnegie Mellon University to start First Atlantic University, a for-profit, blended learning institution that aims to bring cutting-edge practical and technical education to the far reaches of Africa.
Margaret Li Yin is senior coordinator of the Open School at Open University of Mauritius, a new online institution. She recently facilitated a blended MOOC, combining the video-based course with an in-person discussion on classroom technology for K-12 teachers in partnership with Coursera and the U.S. State Department.
She compares describes online learning as “Ali Baba’s treasure.”
“First you have to know that it exists, and once it exists you have to have the magic formula, the open sesame,” she said. “For my students the Internet was just for emailing. They didn’t know how many avenues for self and professional development it holds. Our main purpose was to make it known that you have access to free learning, and
that has been extraordinary.”
Over the past few decades, governments on the continent and international aid organizations have focused on basic, K-12 education at the expense of university learning. The World Bank’s spending for higher education fell from 17 percent in the 1980s to 7 percent in the ’90s. Combine that with a decade of austerity (Nigerian public universities, for example, just ended a five-month-long strike), and the result in many countries in Africa has been increasingly expensive and scarce spots in both public and private universities that aren’t producing much in the way of world-class research.
Internet penetration — still half the world’s average — is growing across Africa thanks to undersea cable connections including SEACOM, low-earth orbiting satellites and 3G connections using cell towers. There are now 167 million Internet users in Africa, and industries are mushrooming to serve them.
A conference and event series, Digital Africa, is sending the first-
ever delegation of African tech companies to CES in Las Vegas this month .
Jamie Hodari and Alex Hague founded Kepler University. It’s an idea that grew out of Generation Rwanda, a nonprofit that for the past nine years funded students to attend Rwandan universities, and a growing frustration that these universities just weren’t good enough.
“What we learned sending students to traditional universities was, first, that no one can afford it, and second, that people don’t graduate ready to hit the job market at all,” Hodari told FastCompany.
Classrooms designed on a post-colonial model of memorization and repetition are a poor fit with today’s employers, he said. “We started saying, ‘What could we be doing to provide a more active learning environment that fosters critical thinking?’ And then these MOOC
resources emerged, and the Internet started getting faster and faster in Rwanda. All of a sudden a solution was there that wasn’t before.”
Kepler University started in the fall with 50 students simultaneously enrolled in College for America, an American competency-based program through which they’ll earn their U.S. associate’s degrees.
At night, on their own time, they watch video lectures from MOOC courses created by professors at colleges such as Stanford on topics including economics, statistics, and psychology. It’s a so-called “flipped classroom” model — they spend much of their class time in small group work and discussions.
“We want to maximize active engagement. In this first year, they are learning how to learn, how to interact with material more critically,” Hodari told FastCompany.”When our professor says, ‘What do you think about this?’ that’s literally the first time they’ve ever been asked that.”
In the future Kepler’s model will integrate work experience through partnerships with global employers. The whole program is aiming for a $1,000-a-year cost — a fraction of what Rwandan universities charge.
University of the People was founded four years ago as an online-only, free institution. Shai Reshef designed the open-source curriculum to rely on PDFs so that it could reach the lowest-bandwidth areas of the world. He assembled an all-volunteer virtual faculty made up largely of retired professors from around the world.
But one donor, Microsoft, is nudging University of the People to blend learning direction. It recently announced that through its new 4Afrika initiative it will be sponsoring 1,000 Africans aged 18 to 34 to earn associate’s degrees in business administration and computer science.
In many cases, peer-to-peer learning using MOOCs and other online resources is happening at tech incubators and accelerators such as Nairobi’s iHub, Kigali’s kLab and Cairo’s Flat6Labs, Kamenetz said. In these informal spaces, students tap online tutorial sites, MOOCs, peers and mentors for the knowledge they need to grow tech skills or start a business.
“My student interns actually call the iHub the ‘university of life,’ where you learn things through self-learning and peer learning,” says Jessica Colaco, director of partnerships at the iHub, a center for coworking, innovation and informal learning in the business and technology worlds.
Another champion of blended MOOCs across Africa is the U.S. government, Kamenetz said. This past fall, the State Department began hosting discussion groups based around Coursera MOOCs in more than 40 countries, including several in Africa, and they are having a small but significant impact.
Can this solution get anywhere near big enough to meet the demand?
The technology infrastructure, while improving, is still a huge barrier to scaling, Kamenetz said. Dropped calls, glitches, and mid-conversation switches from Skype to cell to Gchat are standard. Hodari said Internet access has improved greatly in Rwanda, for example, but it’s still “terrible.” In many places where the State Department is running MOOCs, they’ve had to record the lectures to DVD so that students can watch them.
And there is another, more subtle issue around funding. International donors and investors are supporting blended learning programs in the hopes of achieving major impact quickly, by educating students directly for the workforce. The economic imperative is driving new African education ventures hard in the direction of technology and entrepreneurship — courses of study with paths to immediate employment. What doesn’t, largely, get funded in this scenario are the next generation of African designers, historians, poets, artists, or political scientists, or the pure research leading to the world’s next big ideas.
Research at African universities is low, but research at University of the People, Kepler, or iHub is zero.
Still, those who have discovered the “open sesame” of blended learning are not going to shut the door because of these long-term, big-picture concerns, Kamenetz said.
Jima Ngei, a 54-year-old unemployed Nigerian, is a Coursera power user with 100 courses under his belt. “The education I have now is pretty backward,” he told FastCompany. “I want to compete internationally. I am very, very grateful for MOOCs.”
