African MOOCs: unlocking a billion more brains

“Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty — by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems.”

Thomas Friedman NY Times

On this view MOOCs are a godsend for Africa. Free, they have the potential to reach vast audiences who stand no chance of getting anywhere near higher education as we know it in the developed world. On the other hand, as the Namibian President wisely said at E-learning Africa this month, let’s not make the mistake of following an overly academic approach at the expense of Africa’s vocational needs, what he called the 'spectacle of hallucination'. African MOOCs will have to be more relevant to Africa’s vocational needs, such as agriculture, healthcare and entrepreneurship. A third view, is that Africa needs to produce as well as consume MOOCs. Absolutely. 

The bottom line is that the simple idea of making and making use of relevant courses, made free (or cheap) and accessible to millions of young Africans, is as good an example as any of Africa leapfrogging a Western Higher Education system that has proved slow, cumbersome and far too expensive. The last thing Africa needs are $20-$40,000 per year undergraduate courses.

Africamooc

‘Africamooc’ is alive and kicking, aggregating and hosting MOOCs. Jens Schneider, a wonderfully enthusiastic Namibian says, “If your course is free, we host for free”. This is a useful service as Jens understands the real needs and contexts in which MOOCs could be used in Africa. Aggregation and reuse is a start, a good start.

Entrepreneurship MOOCs

An example of a relevant vocational MOOC is Jim Vetter’s LIFE, a not-for-profit funded MOOC for entrepreneurs from all over the world, with many in Africa. He uses a MOOC to develop small businesses, especially tech businesses. Lessons learnt? Use a pedagogy for a range of literacies, make it multilingual and make content available on  a range of devices. He also uses learners to help develop content, as they know a lot about troubleshooting in their own, local environments. Stories are important, as are JOLTs (just in time learning tools). What was needed were practical, skills around start-up costs, fixed costs, variable costs, profit & loss, cash flow and so on. For this he uses free, open source spread-sheets with P &Ls etc. He delivers in English and Spanish, and soon in French and Arabic. This is important as 202 countries have logged in so far and it is widely used throughout Africa. I also likes his free ‘facilitator guide’ downloadable from the site.

Tanzanian IT MOOCs

Even more relevant to African needs is the World Bank funded Coursera initiative to provide market-relevant IT skills in Tanzania, where jobs are going unfilled due to lack of relevant IT skills. Tanzania’s problem is not unusual in Africa where talented students go abroad to study, leaving the country bereft of high-end skills. They hope to match IT MOOCs to local employment needs by involving stakeholders such as local IT lecturers, businesses and entrepreneurs. This is promising as it pays attention to local culture and context.

African perspective on MOOCs

What’s now needed are a few home grown MOOCs from African institutions. They need not be universities. Gertjan van Stam has spent a long time in deep, rural Africa, in Zimbabwe and Zambia, and has some revealing insights into MOOCs in Africa. The African perspective on MOOCs, he feels, should be different. Take the rural or traditional African perspective on the subject and you see things through different eyes. 71% in his village use the internet for education in deep rural villages. In his village role models emerged, such as the woman who went online to get a Degree in Divinity and became an important member of the clergy. His children use Khan and BBC Bitesize for maths, His wife, a doctor, is doing a MOOC on mobile health. Most education not accessible to the poor, so MOOCs are a real educational opportunity.

However, he says that Africa must transmit and not just consume MOOCs. There’s a real need for MOOCs in indigenous languages, sensitive to Africa’s oral tradition.  Content in just western languages is hampering progress. Even worse, it may strengthen colonial thought. He wants MOOCs ‘contextualised for Africa’ and sees them as an opportunity to ‘send an African knowledge to the world’. What does this mean? Ubunto – ‘my humanity is linked to your humanity’, Orality - used extensively in Africa, where instant discourse influences everything. He’d like to see MOOCs provide more long-term educational content that ‘withstands rampant individualism’, especially in the Africa where the short-term is unpredictable. This is fascinating and opens up the possibility for MOOCs that are far more oral, immediate and useful than using or repackaged western courses.

Conclusion

When these people presented their visions for African MOOCs, it was disappointing to hear predictable responses about drop-outs, certification and quibbles about the history of MOOCs. This is to apply old narrow narratives to something entirely new and disruptive. This was in stark contrast to the visionaries, who were actually doing real work, on real MOOCs, with large numbers of real learners. We needn’t worry. The digital genie has escaped from the Ivory Tower and caught the imagination of people who really care about access. Thinking of MOOCs in Africa makes you see the potentials for escape from the dominant and oppressive western model of Higher Education; remote, inaccessible, expensive, elitist and overly-academic. I wish them well.

MOOCs – the flipped University?

MOOCs are a phenomenon, a wake-up call for Higher Education and wake-up calls, create a sense of urgency, the first step in the process of change. Here are ten MOOC flips that explain why they may be turning traditional Higher Education on its head.

1. Flip from supply to demand

As George Siemens says, MOOCs are “a supply response to a demand problem”. They have tapped into an immense amount of frustration in that the system has remained immune to change, closed, inward looking and increasingly expensive. A global flood of learners has turned up for courses on every imaginable topic. All sorts of people, from high school kids, parents, alumni, people in the developed world to the retired, have signed up in their millions. Lifelong learning has, at last, surfaced and been made visible. This demand is not going away, it will only get bigger.

2. Flip from offline to online

Like Lady Gaga, MOOCs are a ‘phenomenon’. They came from nowhere, well almost but mostly from online learning, OER and pioneers like Siemens, Downes and Khan. We should be glad of this ‘phenomenon’ effect because I can think of only a handful of examples of similar educational ‘phenomena’ – Open University, Google search, Wikipedia and YouTube. All of these have been flips from offline to online.

3. Flip from horizontal to vertical

Suddenly, we have VOOKs (Vocational MOOCs), HOOKs (High School MOOCs) and African MOOCs. MOOCs have gone viral and spread downwards into and upwards into workplace and lifelong learning. Rather than staying within the horizontal band of higher education, traditionally based on the 18 year old undergraduate, they have flipped out of the horizontal to a vertical model.

4. Flips teaching to learning

You can’t choose your teachers at school or University but you can with MOOCs. The focus on MOOCs is not on the teacher or lecture but the learner, who chooses what course they want to do, when to start, when to watch lectures and formative work, and whether they want certification or not. They are fundamentally more leaner-centric.

5. Flips assessment

MOOC assessment is flipped in several senses. First, peer assessment flips tutor only assessment to learners assessing each others work. Second, many do MOOCs without any interest in paper certification, reversing the universal certification in the old system - it’s learning for the sake of learning. Third, you don’t need to be assessed on one day a year in a physical location within the University. You can choose when and by what method, either online through services such as ProctorU or at centres around the world through Pearson VUE.

6. Flip the standards

MOOCs have little to fear from being benchmarked against traditional campus-based courses. The online experience need not be inferior and may, in many cases, be  superior to such courses. As Siemens said, let's flip this and “hold classrooms and lectures to same standards as online!” On costs – they’re cheaper,traditional courses expensive. On numbers – they’re massive, traditional courses tiny. On access – many are available to start at any time, not once a year. On interaction with others – many have structured peer-to- peer contact, lively forums, social media offshoots and physical meetups.

7. Flips drop-out to drop-in

Drop-out in MOOCs is not the problem people imagine – it’s a category mistake, taking the old-school concept of high-school drop-out or University drop-out. and applying it wrongly in this new domain. I’m just amazed that millions have dropped in! let’s celebrate the fact that tens, even hundreds of thousands turn up for these experiences before pointing the finger. I have stopped in some MOOCs, I’ve also stopped in lots of things – that’s life. I’ve rightly stopped reading some books and watching some movies. Stopping is rational, continuing with a course you don't like for months or years is not.

8. Flips criticism

Before they’ve had a chance to breathe, sections of academia have tried to throttle the infant at birth. They have failed of course. The fact that MOOCs have been such a gadfly is as sure a sign as any that they are having impact. Let’s flip this. The immediate criticisms, on drop-out, pedagogy, inclusion, human contact, assessment and monetisation express a deeper fear, that these things may not be so great in offline Higher Education. The pedagogy is varied and evolving experience is richer than most people imagine and, above all, people like them and use them.

9. Flip from inward to outward

MOOCs are not only the outward facing democratisation of education but internally a facilitator for change and internal improvement. They hold a mirror up to Higher Education and force us all to ask more searching problems about the purpose, methods and costs. In this sense MOOCs have flipped from inward to outward delivery then flipped back into internal catalysts for change.

10. Flipped University

For the first time in 1000 years we have flipped education to delivers quality education to massive numbers, at low cost, that people want and enjoy. And what’s the response by the curmudgeons? Not in my back yard. It’s intellectual nimbyism. The reason MOOCs have succeeded, when so many smaller, even funded initiatives by and within Universities have not, is that it boldly flips the model. Inward looking attitudes have turned outwards, internal courses have flipped into external courses, the 18-year old undergraduate has been flipped into lifelong learners. The agricultural calendar has been flipped into anywhere, anytime. The offline only model has been flipped into the online model. The extortionate costs have been flipped to zero at point of delivery. What’s not to like here?

Conclusion
You might assume from above that I’m being critical of Universities. Well, to a degree, as they have their serious deficiencies in pedagogy, some poor teaching and high costs. In fact I want more and better Higher Education, not a system premised on scarcity and elitism. Like the flipped classroom, MOOCs may be the best thing that’s happened to Higher Education in the last two hundred years. It may encourage growth in higher education, based, not on the paper chase for degrees, the cramming, the poor teaching and primitive assessment but to a newer model, where students are drawn from a wider world and can try and take courses when they want from where they want. Are we in not the learning game? Can’t we celebrate access and low costs for learners? AMEN to the MOOC!

WISE 2013 – Reinventing education

The World Summit on Education in Doha, Qatar brings together educators from around the globe. They literally fly you in, put you up in a fine hotel, feed you and let you rip. Networking here, and that is its strength, is as global as you can get, as you’re guaranteed to speak to people from every continent. It is arguably, as George Siemens says, “world’s most important education conference”.
‘Reinventing education’ was this year’s theme, an admirable goal and badly needed as we know that the Millennium goals will be missed, that the existing model is flawed, costs too high and that demand is exceeds supply. So what happened?
As I said when I blogged the last WISE conference I attended (this is my 3^rd), “Education’s a slow learner - it may be more accurate to say that education has learning difficulties. The system is fixed, fossilised and, above all, institutionalised, so the rate of change is glacial. People are, by and large, trapped in the mindset of their institution and sector. In truth, small pools of innovative practice are patchy and stand little chance of wide scale adoption. Many of the speakers repeated platitudes about education being the answer to all of the world’s problems. What they were short on were solutions. Education is always seen as the solution to all problems. The problem with all this utopian talk is that it dispenses with realism.”

4 pillars of education

The plenaries were, well, institutionalised, UNESCO, in my opinion, have become part of the problem and low on solutions. They dominated many of the sessions and regurgitated old reports, clichés and truisms, none worse that their 4 Pillars of Education ‘to be, to know, to do, to live together’. This is fine, but fails on a number of counts. ‘To be’ is a banal abstraction that has no real purchase in education. ‘To know’ is an obvious truism – of course education is about knowing – but knowing what? ‘To live together’ is better but not best taught in school and classrooms. The last, ‘To do’ is good but largely ignored as education gets ever more abstract and academic, treating vocational learning as an afterthought. What we needed was the Samson of innovation to push over the UNESCO pillars and enter the temple of institutional thought to upturn a few tables that have been selling the same tired, old stuff for decades. Sorry - I’ve mixed up two parables in one sentence!

Morin – disappointing ‘discourse’

Morin opened the conference with an abstract, rambling précis of his old UNESCO paper. He’s 92 and struggled to handle his notes and microphone. It was stratospheric, a piece of French philosophy, totally detached from the real world. It’s a type of ‘discourse’ (as French philosophers like to call it) that remains rooted in dualist abstractions and dialectic, with the occasional apercu. But this approach fails to deliver concrete ideas that one could take away and apply in the real world. When asked for some real suggestions and detail, he couldn’t and fumbled through with some more discourse on ‘strategy’. Worse, it set the wrong tone for the summit. One of abstractions and a failure to address real problems.

Literacy & numeracy

But things got much better with a hard hitting session which delivered some surprises for me. First some brilliant insights from Helen Abadzi, that around 18 our minds become less plastic and open to learning literacies. You can learn the letters but it is difficult to see them come together as words. You can experience this for yourself when you learn a new language as an adult. As you rarely reach a reasonable reading speed, of around 60-80 words a minute, you forget the start of sentences before you’ve reached the end. The implications of this research are huge, that we may be wasting too much time and money trying to solve an insoluble problem. The second was that the whole literacy push in Africa and the developed world is being thwarted by poor textbooks and teaching. I have seen this for myself in Cambodia, where a literally unusable textbook was being used in a country classroom. There was a call for the abandonment of traditional ‘English’ and ‘Middle-class’ teaching methods and texts for a literal ‘letter by letter’ approach in the local language, which is rarely as irregular a English. When done well it takes around 100 days. The other issue is teacher feedback, which is often poor and misdirected in schools, focussing on the best not the worst performers in the class. As for numeracy, it’s a different class of problem, as we are all born numerate. New born babies are numerate but not literate. In truth this side of the debate wasn’t covered at all.

Small-minded debate on Big Data

This session bordered on the bizarre. As one of the most important current topics in education it deserved better. What we got were idiosyncratic, personal and to be frank, not very informed, views on the subject. John Fallon, of Pearson, was reasonably articulate and tried to keep to topic, but the other three were amateurish. I saw one ‘analytics’ expert in the room leave after 15 minutes.

For John Fallon we need to collect, analyse and interpret data give opportunities to look at education like never before and transform outcomes. We’re not short of data, it’s just that most of it is inputs such as spend, enrolments, millennium goals, broadband connectivity and so on. As I always say, to measure bums on seats is to measure the wrong end of the learner. Then there’s the outcomes; PISA PIAC, high stakes tests, artificial once year events. What we don’t use it for, said John, is to enhance learning. How do I know what’s going on in students’ minds. Big Data needs to scale. Thousands of individual interactions each and every day, across informal and formal learning. He was the only one on the panel who had any real grasp on the detail.

Divina Frau-Meigs, a sociologist, and self-styled activist for media literacies (stretching the meaning of the word activist), gave an idiosyncratic presentation based on her own flimsy research. At one point she included drawing mindmaps on paper as Big Data. It’s called BIG data for a reason. Her statement that it’s mostly dashboards and data mining missed the point. Emilio Porta an economist from Nicuaragua was obsessed with global data – UN, UNESCO, PISA and so on. He couldn’t see the flaws in having created a sort of arms race as the leaning Tower of PISA data is hopelessly skewed. htp://buff.ly/1aCLCSb Politicians distort and exaggerate these stats for their own ends. This was a very low level chit chat about a complex and serious subject. I’m not sure that any of the panel had the expertise to do it the justice it deserved.

Mindgraphs - Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling has a great TED talk on the animation of statistics. But what matters is what those statistics tell us. Rosling stunned us with his assertion that our common perceptions about population, poverty and education are worse than that of chimps! He did this with enthusiasm and humour.

What is the global literacy rate?

80%

60%

40%

20%

(answer at bottom)

Again and again he showed us that our common perceptions are misconceptions. Population is not increasing exponentially as birth rates have and are falling and the number of children in the world has stopped growing.

On education he also scotched a few myths around figures quoted by notables on the panels. What is worse, he asked POVERTY or GENDER in education? Poverty is the clear answer. Above all, we no longer have developed v developing nations but a range. Rosling should have been the opening keynote, he set the tone for a proper debate, based on real figures.

What if Finnish teachers taught in your schools?

Pasi Strahlberg posed a few questions to show that you must tackle improving your educational system holistically. It is not JUST about quality teachers, the mantra we so often hear. It’s a wide range of social issues around scrapping the private sector, not rushing things and avoiding early years ‘schooling’. Let them play until they’re 7 or 8. Don’t get obsessive about testing. This flies in the face of almost everything we do in education in the UK. We have become trapped in an arms race, where the solution to everything is more ‘competition’, more ‘schooling’, more ‘league tables’ and more ‘testing’. I also noticed that this was in direct contradiction to Julia Gillard’s prescriptive ‘testing’ approach.

Monsters and misconceptions

This was a revelation, quick fire talks on all sorts of topics and solutions, some good, some great, some awful. Let’s get the awful stuff out of the way. The talk by the Observer journalist was an anecdotal rant about how women rule the world and hapless men need to listen to them, as ‘men can’t collaborate, women do’. This was a statement so general and awful that it deserves a response. I played football nearly every night as a child, I’ve managed companies, worked in teams and have little to learn from a hackneyed journo, who has spent most of her life in solitary confinement typing out articles on subjects to a deadline. She obscured an interesting point about the feminisation of education in early years and primary by caricaturing men. OK, got that out of my system.

To counter this, we had superb presentations on hard hitting topics, like child marriages, self-sustaining schools in Uganda, MOOCs in China, Amazigh education in Morocco and the Khan Academy. This quick-fire stuff needs to be promoted and given more status, maybe themed. I particularly enjoyed the iThra talk, about an after school science programme. He had a stunning quote, “The education system is a monster, by fighting it we would have become monsters ourselves”.

Mozilla – tinker, share, make

Mark Surman showed us how to present. Face the audience, stand up, look people in the eye, speak knowledgeably but from the heart, don’t use notes and deliver a clear message. Compare this to Morin and others on the many panels that delivered the same old platitudes. Motivate, engage and excite learners. Get them to tinker, share and make things. It’s a learn by doing model that allows young minds to understand the technological world in which they live and use that technology to learn, do things and make things. What gave his message clout was the fact that he was doing this through the Mozilla Foundation, around the world, in Mozfests and Maker events.

Educators are always going on about 21^st C skills. For Surman the 4th literacy is web literacy, as the web is the new classroom, 21st century skills - 5 Cs (Classroom is not one of them)  communicate, create, culture, collaborate, community on the WEB. These skills are not well taught in schools and universities, where learners are herded into classrooms and lecture theatres, online communication tools and devices often banned and creativity rare, often squeezed by the obsession with STEM subjects. Educators are also always trying to force storytelling. Young people tell stories daily - it's called Facebook. Lifelong learning is Google, Wikipedia, Social networking and YouTube - life is not a course it's informal learning.

MOOCs

Excellent input from the knowledgeable George Siemens and the Chief Scientist for EdX. These guys know their stuff but the other two participants clearly knew nothing about MOOCs and astonishingly, had never taken a MOOC. How do I know this? I asked them and the chair. Neither had taken a MOOC. They both spoke like amateurs because they were amateurs, trotting out clichés about human interaction and drop-out without any grasp of the detail. Siemens was clearly frustrated by their uninformed negativity and explained why drop-out is not the problem people imagine it is, that pedagogy is varied and evolving and that the experience is richer than people imagine and, above all, people like them and use them. For the first time in 1000 years education that delivers quality education to massive numbers, at low cost, that people want and enjoy.

MOOCs are a wake-up call for Higher Education. MOOCs flip universities. Siemens is right, MOOCs are a supply response to a demand problem. We’ve seen more action in 1 year than last 1000 years and MOOCs will produce dramatic systemic and substantial change. Certification is NOT the point in MOOCs - only 33% wanted certification in Edinburgh MOOCs and there are plenty of ways they can be monetised.

Human interaction is an issue but in the 6 MOOCs I've taken this has been great - teaching seems intimate, peer-to-peer interaction strong, forums lively and physical meetups possible. Siemens got a little tetchy when drop-out was mentioned – rightly so. The sceptics seemed determined to look at everything within the deficit model. What about the hundreds of thousands of drop-ins? I’m absolutely amazed that so many have taken so many courses from so many places. Online experience need not be inferior. As Siemens said, let's hold classrooms and lectures to same standards as online!

There’s real fears around dominance by the private sector, but if that delivers cheaper, faster, better education, so be it. In my opinion, however, the future of MOOCs is: open platforms, open content, open pedagogies and the opening of minds. African MOOCs may unlock a billion more brains HOOKs VOOKs - High school and Vocational MOOCs are also being delivered as this is not just about HE and degrees. The MOOC session by far best at WISE talking about real reinvention and a real phenomenon.

Conclusion

This is my third WISE summit, and as usual, I met some amazing people. Thanks George Siemens, Mark Surman, Cathy Lewis Long, Derek Robertson, John Davitt, Davod Worley, Jef Staes and all of the new people I met in Doha. The Souk was a hoot (try the Iraqi restaurant there), the gala dinner hilarious (the lack of alcohol made us almost hysterical) and on the rides on the bus to and from the conference I had some of the best impromptu sessions.

Overall however, you can see the problem, a failure to engage with the real problems head-on; costs, relevance, technology, that faculty and existing teaching systems biggest barrier to progress in learning.  86% of the delegates want reinvention of education but time and time again the panels reflected and reinforced old ideas and practices, with the audience clapping every time the word ‘teacher’ was mentioned. Teachers matter, but until we recognise that teaching is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for learning and look for some other additional solutions, WISE will forever be focussing on the wrong thing – teachers, not learners. The fear, that students may ‘manage to learn without me’ and of technology in general, is holding us back. Next year, less administrators, more innovators. The good news is that the Qatar Fundation has been doing brilliant work across the globe and announced a focus on innovation this year, with financial support for such innovation. They may be on to something here.

PS

Session on University Rankings was in Room 101!

 (Answer 80%)

From Rift Valley to Oculus Rift (7 lessons learnt at eLearning Africa)

A mind blowing week in central Africa at the eLearning Africa Conference in Uganda, where I was flipped so many times, both mentally and physically. My mind was repeatedly flipped when I saw the wrong solutions being forced into the wrong contexts. Conversely, I saw unexpected solutions in the right context. Physically, I was flipped into the Nile on a White Water raft trip – more of that later.

Technology, learning and Africa

My opening gambit in a talk to Ministers from across Africa was to show that we were not far from the Rift Valley, where the first technology was invented by man – the stone axe (see full article on its importance as a learning technology). This handheld device was to last for the next 1.5 million years and is a window into the mind of early man. It showed, intent, planning, ability to find resources, hand-eye co-ordination and a culture of teaching and learning. We were close to the source of the Nile, and it was in Egypt that the first writing was invented (see full article), the big-bang in learning technology, far more important then the printing press. Papyrus technology was also invented in Africa (see full article). So what does Africa need now?

1. Innovation is not innovation unless it is sustainable

In asking what Africa needs now from technology and learning I believe we must stick to a simple mantra – that innovation is not innovation unless it is sustainable. Sugatra Mitra’s Holes in the walls are now just that – holes in walls, with no computers, no lasting impact, a waste oftime and money. Tablets may prove to be less than useful, especialy Negroponte's Ethiopian experiment. Before any initiative is funded or started, do a cost-effectiveness and sustainability analysis.

By sustainability I mean the big 6:

People
Sustainable stakeholders
Sustainable learners
Sustainable change management
Pedagogy
Sustainable teacher skills
Sustainable design
Culture
Sustainable culture

Resources
Sustainable electricity/Sustainable wiring
Sustainable resources
Cost
Sustainable on cost
Technology
Sustainable technology
Sustainable maintenance

2. Infrastructure not devices

Flip the mindset away from devices to infrastructure, and focus spending on bandwidth so that accessibility and prices fall. $50 a month for an unreliable 126K connection is way too high. This means deregulation and getting networks built along with free tariffs, such as Wikipedia Zero, for educational content. Economic growth is closely correlated with internet penetration.

3. Projects not pilots

Africa is littered with short-term, funded pilots. A donor-led, pilot mentality means too many pilots are really ‘doomed to succeed’ and fall flat when finished. Pilots are thinly disguised research projects, often led by academics whose real goal is simply publication not pragmatism. Fund projects that have real feasibility objectives and sustainability as their goal.

4. Vocational not academic

Africa has schooling and Universities but a huge hole in the middle – vocational colleges. Yet what Africa desperately needs is not more Universities but more vocational learning. Economic growth will come from practical skills agenda not building expensive educational institutions. Why copy a University system that doesn’t work in the developed world. It’s expensive, elitist and graduate unemployment is rising. Only 6% of Africans will even have a chance of a  University education, what about the other 94%. Let’s focus on them, as they are Africa’s future.

5. Learning not schooling

The Millennium goals focus too much on simple schooling, yet all of us eventually leave school. What happens then is important. Employability and job creation is vital, not the Anglo-Saxon liberal-arts, colonial agenda. It’s not schools that matter but what is taught and learnt in schools. Improve the quality of teacher training (take it out of Universities) and focus on what is required locally.

6. Leapfrog don’t follow

Africa has the highest growth in mobile penetration in the world. Everywhere, people have cheap phones and use them to transfer money, communicate and get on with their lives. Mobile griwt has been the big success story and new, cheap smartphones will accelerate internat access via mobile. They’re cheap and compelling because they’re useful. Africa needs to do the same with learning, leapfrog with good infrastructure projects that use the BYOD devices. Fascinating things are happening on leapfrog infrastructure –  a geostationary satellite above the Congo with pan-African reach – one way internet access but a start. Then there’s Facebook’s solar powered drones using infra-red to provide internet access, easy to launch and maintain. Finally Google’s balloons.

7. Focus on the free

They say that information wants to be free, well education now wants to be free. We have Wikipedia, Khan Academy, OER, MOOCs (see articles on MOOCs) and so on. Africa would be mad not to take this stuff, as it’s free. MOOCs are now being produced by the likes of EPFL, Kepler and the African Virtual University in relevant languages on relevant topics – and they’re free. With MOOCs Africa has bandwidth problems, even on campuses, so well designed offline solutions are needed. We also need to integrate MOOCs into local curricula, blend involving local faculty, collaborate at the teacher level. Academic regulations need to be amended and MOOCs bundled.

Conclusion
Africa is rising and needs, not the failed models of the developed world but new models that are more suited to the massive demand that already exists for education and training. This is not more universities but more vocational learning. The great opportunity here, is to use the great gifts of the internet, that are already there, for free. 

This conference is a small miracle, but it's in Africa and well attended by Africans from across the continent. Once again, Rebecca Stromeyer and her fantastic team pull together a fantastic conference that focuses wholly on Africa and is not scared to ask hard questions and seek out new and radical answers.  
PS
News from China may be the greatest boost Africa has seen in a long time. A major Chinese Solar Tech CEO says, "We are not far away from the cost of (solar energy) production for conventional energy. We are sure that by 2016 - or at the latest 2017 - the cost of solar PV will be the same as coal-fired generation in China". If true, at that moment each ail drive economic and educational growth in Africa.