What Does Digital Disruption Mean for Education and Training? (Part 4)

Africa's Most Versatile and Innovative Training Facility

This is the fourth and final installment in a series of posts that explore the significance of digital technology for education and training in Africa and elsewhere around the developing world. There’s no question that mobile technology, the scarcity of bricks and mortar educational institutions, the emerging new wave of population explosion, and the cost and availability of formal education at all levels are the critical factors driving change and digital disruption. The big unanswered questions are what does it all mean now and what will it likely mean in the medium and long term?

From a customer base and business intelligence perspective, there’s no question that digital education and training in Africa is a blue ocean. Early adopters such as Ethiopia-born entrepreneur Brook Negussie see the opportunity. Negussie launched eLearnAfrica in 2018 as a social enterprise committed to increasing and expanding educational and employment opportunities throughout Africa. ELearnAfrica has now expanded to become the virtual classroom solution for many African universities. It’s the first ed tech startup (a website and a free Android app) to bring the best of Western MOOC offerings to informal learners on the African continent. ELearnAfrica does so by working with non-profit online learning platform edX, founded by Harvard University and MIT, and FutureLearn, a social learning platform owned by the Open University, to offer a broad array of courses to users.

Because eLearnAfrica’s model is built on the MOOC as its basic unit of educational value, it’s worth taking a closer look at some of the obstacles MOOCs have encountered. It’s also worth bearing in mind, regardless of the inherent limitations of MOOCs, that they have become Big Business. MOOCs are here to stay, in part, because they are a well-choreographed response to what has been labeled “The Third Education Revolution,” a model of continuous, lifelong learning in order to meet the shifting needs of today’s economy.

Obstacles on the Road of the MOOC Revolution

The stronger online providers have reaped massive revenues in the last decade. Traditional institutions are swiftly moving into that space and are commanding market share of their own. As an example, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offers an online master’s degree in public administration “that you might not be able to get into.” It’s obvious that a similar online offering by University of Phoenix won’t be able to compete on an equal footing with UNC’s brand. Fifteen years ago, it was probably unusual to find mainstream, traditional colleges and universities participating. Today, the opposite is the case. It would be surprising to see almost any school (other than some place like a Great Books college) not offering at least some online courses to at least a segment of students. More players will enter. The market will grow. But what are some of the drawbacks of MOOCs?

I’ve looked closely at Liberty University, which has been successful in the online space. They have thousands of students online, many more than they have in their traditional student body. At this school, the traditional students take online courses and regular classroom courses interchangeably. The online courses are always offered over a period of eight weeks, while the regular classes tend to adhere to the more typical semester. I asked a few students about their experience with the online courses. They agreed that the online courses are easier than the traditional ones, especially if you are satisfied with a grade below an A.

In fact, they also agreed that if one is shrewd about how to handle an online course, it’s possible to get through without much effort at all. I queried a professor about the online courses. He admitted that in his subject area, history, the online courses probably had 50–60% of the content one would get in the physical classroom offerings. The word that captures the underlying issue is “rigor.” It seems to be a recurring theme that online courses (and certainly MOOCs), lack rigor compared with the traditional alternatives. When Jonathan Haber (of the well-known Degree of Freedom podcast) set out to accomplish an equivalent of a four-year degree in philosophy by taking a series of MOOCs in a single year, he was roughly able to do so. Notably, he had to find ways to voluntarily increase the level of difficulty for himself by adding papers and other outside work. However, by doing so he was able to achieve his personal goal of attending a philosophy conference and understanding most of what was discussed. Unsurprisingly, a self-motivated learner can get a lot out of free MOOCs.

I know first-hand of two entrepreneurs in Haiti who pivoted their business from being a manufacturer of household light fixtures into becoming a manufacturer of solar-powered municipal lampposts by studying every MOOC course they could find related to solar energy.

If the first issue is a lack of rigor (that is at least widespread in the experimental MOOC space and probably varies among the more normal online courses), the second is a problem of persistence. There are some important findings to date.

A University of Pennsylvania study of a wide set of Coursera offerings (varying by subject, target audience, difficulty, length, teaching assistants, etc.) found that while many people signed up for MOOCs, very few persisted to the end of the course. Generally, those who persisted made up less than the 10% of the total who began the course. Intriguingly, the MOOC users skewed disproportionately educated, male, and wealthy. The composition of users seems to undercut the idea of MOOCs as dramatically democratizing education.

A study by the HarvardX Greek Heroes team provided similar results. Out of roughly 45,000 students who began the journey, only about 1400 achieved a score of 50% by completing enough topics to earn a certificate. That’s a low bar and a low number of the total who cleared it. The result is surprising given the effort the HeroesX team has put into the course, though it should be said that the professor who runs the course has encouraged students to be samplers of the content.

Under conditions that are closer to those present in a real university setting, Udacity was able to offer digital versions of math courses available through San Jose State University. Students were able to take the classes for credit and at a substantially lower price. Despite this closer fit, the students in the Udacity courses fared significantly worse than those in the traditional versions offered by SJSU. In the Udacity courses (remember the huge hype surrounding these), the pass rates ranged from 23.8 percent to 50.5 percent, while the pass rates for the classroom versions ranged from 45.5 percent to 76.3 percent.

The experience of Udacity at SJSU caused traditional educators to celebrate as they concluded digital education (even when backed by the hottest professor and the most cutting-edge venture capitalists) had proven to be inferior. For them, the year of the MOOC had come to an end and they could return to business as usual.

Sebastian Thrun, the founder of Udacity, seemed to confirm the opinions of the traditionalists in an interview he gave to Fast Company. Considering the problem of low persistence rates (around 10% or less) among over a million users of MOOCs, the Stanford professor and educational entrepreneur sounded a defeatist note. “We have a lousy product.” In that same discussion, he spoke of opportunities in areas more closely related to pure vocational or professional training. It seemed that he was abandoning the field he had set out with tremendous fanfare to transform.

Despite this seeming replay of the classical story of the one who dares to fly too close to the sun and falls to earth in spectacular fashion, it would be wrong to draw an inference of failure. There are several reasons to be bullish about digital education.

First, as economist Russ Roberts has noted, online courses may not be better than a good professor standing in front of us, but not all classes are taught by good professors. Even those of us who may have attended strong undergraduate institutions remember classes of uneven quality. It is quite likely that we might have found a solid (and easily reproducible) online course to be superior to the indifferent course we sat through. And the online course is certainly cheaper and more convenient than its traditional counterpart.

Second, MOOCs and other online courses have tremendous potential in the developing world. It is clear that where there may be no professor at all in a particular discipline, students will be far better off having potentially inexpensive options such as MOOCs. MOOCs may be capable of leveraging human resources. A person with native intelligence in the developing world, but without access to traditional higher education, may be able to learn well enough from digital offerings to create more traditional options of their own for their fellow citizens.

But third, and most important, the MOOCs and other digital offerings are likely to get better, indeed much better. Did Udacity prevail at San Jose State University? No. Did it deliver much better results than other MOOCs generally have in the past? Absolutely. Those poor pass rates go miles beyond what has been demonstrated in MOOCs that weren’t offered for credit and which had no real price tag. The SJSU experience shows that when we begin to adjust some of the variables such as price and credit (e.g., skin in the game), then digital students begin to perform more like they do in the traditional setting. In fact, 86% of the Udacity/SJSU students completed the courses (though many didn’t pass). That is a huge improvement over the 10% persistence rate many have made the heart of the case against MOOCs.

And we should hasten to listen to digital apologists who would argue for more sophistication in the way we measure success in MOOCs. Using the massive group of sign-ups as the base for determining participation may not be fair to providers nor analytically precise enough for those of us trying to make sense of the situation. Instead of looking at the huge number who sign-up and fail to complete the course, perhaps we should look to the number who actually consume some of the course content. What if we used the group of students who view the videos and do the work for the first week of the course? If we used them as our denominator, then the numerator of finishers would comprise a much higher percentage than 10%.

The Next Big Step

To date, we have seen offerings from Coursera, EdX, Udacity, and eLearnAfrica launched amid great hopes and with much ambition. Even with partnership from the world’s most prestigious universities, the MOOC experiment would have to be considered a modest success. As we have seen, MOOCs (as the most promising form of digital education so far, or at least viewed as such by investors) have yet to produce a convincing win of the type that would really challenge traditional instruction across the board. We are, however, seeing scalable digital education cross the threshold in some places, thanks to a project taking shape at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech).

Georgia Tech and Udacity are partnering to offer the university’s three semester master’s degree in computer science in the form of a series of MOOCs. As a result, a program that could normally handle a relatively small number of students is now available to thousands, even tens of thousands at a time with an international reach. The cost for students is low. AT&T has provided seed funding and sends a number of employees through the program. The U.S. military will also provide students. How will Georgia Tech and Udacity provide for things such as grading, one-on-one assistance, and other matters that go beyond simply making content available? Rather than tasking graduate students to handle the large numbers as universities have often done to deal with mega-lecture hall courses, Georgia Tech will rely upon Udacity staffers who will act as professional course mentors. The same is true with Coursera, which has relationships with several universities and offers full graduate degrees in selected disciplines, and has staffers who serve as professional course mentors.

There are several questions which will be answered (or at least partially so) as the project rolls out. How much does the scaling effect cut cost? We know that the price offered to students will be lower, but how well will Georgia Tech and Udacity do in the process? Mobile network operators are obviously subsidizing the effort. How well will cost considerations work out without a subsidy? Will the number of course mentors signed up at the beginning be enough? How much will they have to be paid? How will their compensation compare to a more professorial rate in computer science? Finally, will these students persist in their coursework and will they perform well in the process? Specifically, will they perform as well as traditional graduate students or at least close enough to make the effort worthwhile given the lower cost per student?

One of the key takeaways is that if Udacity succeeds with Georgia Tech’s computer science program, it will have done so by returning to its roots. Thrun began the MOOC sensation with a course in computer science (his own discipline). The Georgia Tech project is an organic extension of that first effort. Rather than setting out to conquer the whole of education and achieve such vast scale that the world’s thousands of colleges and universities will concentrate down to a handful, Thrun has gone back to his core competency. Udacity’s MOOC effort may succeed in building a strong base upon which to develop further efforts. It appears likely that the Georgia Tech experiment will yield new knowledge in terms of digital pedagogy that can be used to improve the field as a whole, as well as in computer science.

What does all of this mean for African digital education? What does it mean for Moja Academy and its focus on MSMEs and small-holder farmers, a rigorous mobile-learning environment for 24/7 agricultural and entrepreneurial training? All of that remains to be seen in the not-too-distant-future. I will say this, though, the purpose of Moja Academy is to build human capacity through high-quality and innovative training in agricultural, financial, management, and entrepreneurial best practices to lessen the effects of climate change on rain-fed agriculture and to upskill African youth to become job creators in the digital economy. This education will be delivered via mobile devices directly to the marketplace through partnerships with leading business incubators, universities, and educators in cooperation with faith-based organizations (FBOs) and NGOs across Africa.