This Tanzanian E-Learning Enterprise Is Beating MOOCs by Going Local

Internet evangelists have pitched massively open online courses (MOOCs) as a boon for education, especially in low-income countries like Tanzania. Yet most seem completely oblivious to key local factors that inform effective learning, which has led to some commentators to say that plans for expanding MOOCs into developing nations are "delusional."

Ubongo, a Tanzania-based social enterprise, is trying something different. Ubongo creates locally relevant, interactive educational content for kids on a multitude of platforms—not just online. By distributing content across TV, radio, mobile, and broadband networks, Ubongo hopes to both bust MOOCs and address local problems implicit in the Tanzanian education system.

One of the major quandaries with education worldwide, and certainly education in Tanzania, is the crucial difference between understanding information and simply memorizing it. “According to my experience, many pupils have a problem with understanding. Most of them, I think, cram rather than understand," said Tom Ng’atigwa, Ubongo’s educational director, as well as a math and music teacher at Saint Therese of Lisieux in Dar es Salaam. "The teacher puts info on the board, the student memorizes it, has no idea what it means."

While it's a problem endemic to education, the issue is heightened in Tanzania, where the national language is Swahili. English isn’t introduced until secondary school, where it becomes the primary language, making things confusing to say the least.

“You’ve got students who learn in Swahili until they’re 13, then they have to switch to English, they have four years to relearn all their subjects in English, then take a national exam," said Nisha Ligon, Ubongo’s managing director, over Skype. "So they just end up memorizing. It’s amazing, there are students who can tell you how to do an entire scientific experiment in English, because they’ve memorized it, and they don’t understand what those words mean.”

Last year, 60 percent of Tanzanian students failed the national exam necessary to pass to advance to go on to two more years of advanced education. Efforts by the likes of the World Bank to bring Western MOOCs to Tanzania notwithstanding, the majority of MOOCs involve a teacher speaking English to a screen, which may only exacerbate the cramming problem.

“In their current format—'the best courses from the best professors'—MOOCs are troubling in many ways,” emailed education activist Audrey Watters. “With classes from the likes of Harvard, Stanford, Duke and MIT, MOOCs suggest that local knowledge taught by instructors at non-prestigious institutions is at best inferior, and at worst irrelevant. As such, MOOCs don't seem to be about generating knowledge or knowledge communities, but about exporting content packages from elite universities in the Western world.”

Add to that the simple matter of access. Internet penetration in Tanzania is around 12 percent, and even if you’ve got internet—or can pay to use it from a cafe—there’s a difference between being technically connected to the web, versus actually having the bandwidth necessary to fully maximize its capacity and stream a lecture.

When Ligon, who has a master's degree in science media production from Imperial College in London, was working at The Virtual School producing an interactive video platform for UK students, she realized how completely inaccessible these tools would be for youngsters in low-income countries.

“The goal of The Virtual School was basically to be for the developing world, [although] it was based in London,” she said. "But as someone who had already lived a lot in Africa I thought, 'Well, this is never going to work, for Africa at least, because people don’t have access to the internet.' It was a beautiful online learning management system, but two percent of kids in Africa could access it.”

Ubongo's approach begins with going back to the basics, technologically speaking. The group plans to start by launching with Bunga Bongo, an animated TV show for kids, on January 18, in the traditional 9 AM Saturday morning cartoon slot. Bunga Bungo will air on TBC (Tanzania Broadcasting), which has an especially great reach because it’s still broadcasting in analog signal.

Ligon says theoretically 80 percent of the population has access to the analog TV signal; however, household penetration sits at around 30 percent. The discrepancy is due to TV often being a community activity. If you travel around neighborhoods in Tanzania, you’ll see a TV perched outside a “duka” (the Tanzanian equivalent of the bodega) with a crowd around it. Ligon said cartoons permeate, even in places you wouldn't expect, which is a perfect opportunity for educational programming.

“I’ve gone to extremely remote areas, like nine hours by boat from the nearest town, no road," she said. "I thought I was going to be showing these kids their first cartoon, and they all knew Ben Ten, Kirikou, Dora [the Explorer], so these things are getting out there, it’s just that they aren’t watching at the household level, it’s at the community level."

To increase distribution further, Ubongo plans to let its broadcasts be pirated. After every four episodes of the show comes out, Ubongo will release a DVD. “What happens is the DVDs just get copied and they make it all over the country,” said Ligon.

Ubongo expects this, and is fine with it from a saturation point of view. They’re also working with the ministry of education and other organizations who have hardware, tablet, and projection projects in Tanzanian schools. The goal is to be a quality content provider.

“For now our policy is whoever wants to use the content is welcome to, as long as they’re not profiting from it,” Ligon said. Ubongo is covering production costs through advertising.

Each episode of Bunga Bongo follows animated characters Kibena, Kiduchu and Koba on an adventure. Kids will watch them use their wits and knowledge of math to solve mysteries and problems in their community. Ubongo tested on about 300 youngsters aged 7 to 12, and all loved the cartoon and wanted to watch it on repeat.

Because Ubongo is launching with TV, much younger and older people will end up watching, which will allow the show to act as either an introduction or a reinforcement tool. Even if you’re not learning integers in math now, it’s much easier to have the vaguest memory of what they are, then to go into it totally cold.

Ubongo addresses the cramming problem by focusing on stories that resonate locally. “We take a concept and then we spend a good amount of time trying to come up with a story that really helps you understand the fundamentals of that concept. Rather than saying ‘this is how I convert a decimal to a fraction,' I understand the concept of a decimal and the concept of a fraction and how they relate to each other,” said Ligon.

To teach negative numbers, for example, Bunga Bongo tells the story of a girl who is borrowing bananas from people, when a banana thief monkey comes to town, stealing fruit. This puts the girl more and more into banana debt, until she can find enough to get out of the red. The story ends with the girl back up to one banana, and the audience has watched her move from negative to positive numbers.

Localization is key because American examples don't always translate. “There was this black and white textbook with kids eating doughnuts, and apparently the children were all asking ‘why are they eating tires?’” Ligon said. “Why would you eat this round black thing?” Doughnuts aren’t big in Tanzania. It remains to be seen if bananas go over better.

Regardless, it's a reminder that pressing Western-centric education on Tanzanian classrooms isn't necessarily productive. By suggesting that methods from the global north are the only option for learning, education that relies on exported Western stories and concepts makes life in Tanzania seem significant and makes lessons unnecessarily difficult to understand.

Ligon, who previously spent a year studying at the University of Dar es Salaam, and spent another year in the country working on a documentary, Twiga Stars: Tanzania’s Soccer Sisters, said that working on education feels like it has the biggest potential for impact.

“For the most part you come to Africa, you make a documentary and then that’s watched by an outside audience," she said. "How do the actual people here benefit from it? Whereas the great thing about educational media is that we feel like we’re having a direct impact here.”