Ope Bukola

Whether and how to get students back in physical classrooms is one of the thorniest problems we currently face. There are many good reasons to resume in-person learning, not least of which is that the forced experiment in online learning has been far from successful. Online learning during the pandemic has magnified some of the worst inequities of global education, with nearly 190M children completely out of school, and many more undereducated. Still, with everyone forced to learn online, we are finally starting to reckon with its possibilities. Online learning has a long way to go, but it must go forward if we are to have education equity. Our current system, where education opportunities were restricted by geographic barriers, leaves hundreds of millions of students underserved. In the fastest-growing regions of the world, there is simply no way to build physical classrooms or infrastructure to serve anywhere close to the number of people who need them. The challenges of the past year are a reminder that the full experience (people, content, technology) must come together to unlock global talent and get online learning right. Our team at Kibo recently ran a fully-online introductory programming class to 30+ students from Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and Malawi. While we have much to improve, the lessons we learned make me bullish on the future of online learning for Africa.

Design learning experiences for connection, not just content "I didn’t expect it to be so fun. The best part was when I was doing projects with others, doing assignments together and helping each other. As Tabot said in the mentor session, in school we are told to compete and not share, but if you want to become someone who is successful in industry you need to collaborate with others, share ideas and be part of a team." - Libe, 19, Zimbabwe

The dismal completion rates of MOOCs and other largely asynchronous, self-paced courses are a stark reminder that content is not enough. Creating a sense of belonging is crucial. It makes students feel safe to ask questions, and drives them to learn from and help one another. Notably, community is about more than just social bonding (though our students loved hanging out in our Discord music lounge). It’s also about mutual responsibility. In her book Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks offers up one of my favorite descriptions of transformative pedagogy when she writes that classrooms must become “a democratic setting where everyone feels the responsibility to contribute.” Our class was at its best when students helped each other (e.g. debugging code, showing each other where to find course information, reminding each other about deadlines), took responsibility to check on their squad members (small peer group), and worked together on projects. Those of us who have taught classes know that students often hate group work. Our experience at Kibo was the opposite. Students raved about working with their peers and wanted more opportunities to do so.

There are two criticisms that I primarily hear of cohort-driven learning experiences. First is that they prevent individual students from going at their own pace. This may be true, but if learning tasks are designed with the principles of “low floor, high ceilings, wide walls,” you can maintain cohort cohesion while meeting the needs of individual students. The second criticism is that cohort-based learning experiences can’t scale. The argument is that it’s easy to scale access to content, but impossible to scale community. It is definitely hard, but not impossible. During our course, our Head of Learning invested heavily in building the community environment and culture, and those efforts were critical to our success. Much of that work is manual today, but it doesn’t have to be. We can build tech that provides better insight into academics and community, and gives a better line of sight so that humans can effectively intervene where needed.

Students want to learn across geographic barriers “Best part of it was learning with people from different countries, and getting to collaborate with people in the squad. I enjoyed interacting with people that are not in Kenya” - Daisy, 18, Kenya

Cross-border collaboration is the future of work, and the same should be true for learning. We need new school models that are global by design, and where students learn to work effectively across geography and culture. I’m excited to join the movement of those building new school models online (e.g., Galileo ) with an explicit focus on global cohorts. During our class, students were genuinely excited to have friends and colleagues in different African countries. We are in the nascent days of this type of global education, and there are still many barriers to its success. For one, licensing and accreditation is country-specific, as are many assessments. This makes it risky for families to choose options outside of their local context. Especially in tech, where working across barriers is increasingly common, I’m hopeful that students and families (and eventually regulators) will see the value in choosing global schooling.

Mentors matter “The mentor session I had with Adesola was exceedingly helpful in putting into perspective what it means to be a woman in tech and the commitment required to succeed. The most valuable takeaway I have was that I need to be more comfortable reaching out to people in professional positions that I would like to be in the future.” - Ruva, 19, Zimbabwe

“As someone who had zero experience prior to applying for FPWP, meeting with people who work in leading top Tech companies was super cool. Learning that experiencing panic was very normal especially from these professionals was what kept me grounded.” Chukwuemeka, 21,Nigeria

Our vision for Kibo is to help students build skills and networks to thrive. In addition to peers, professional mentors can play a huge role in unlocking motivation and persistence. We saw this in the second week of our program, when many students self-identified as being in the “panic zone,” grappling with loops and other challenging concepts. Students were tired, our team was a bit tired too, but mentors were able to jump in and reinforce that struggle is good and expected. It was truly inspiring to see professionals from across the African diaspora supporting African learners, and we have big ambitions to scale the student to professional connection.

Infrastructure is still a barrier for online learning “One time, my router battery was low, I thought it was charging but it wasn’t. It pained me so much to leave the class, I had just figured out the problem and was about to share my screen and my internet just went off ” - Ayo, 16, Nigeria

I’ll end with an observation that may seem counter to my enthusiasm for online learning. Infrastructure and tools are nowhere near where they need to be for this modality to hit escape velocity. 80% of students in our program had challenges with low bandwidth and/or power interruption at one point during the 3 week program. We anticipated this and designed a hybrid, largely asynchronous model where students learned at their own pace (with support from the Discord community), then came together for live sections facilitated by instructors and teaching assistants. Still, bandwidth challenges meant that some students could not participate as effectively as they wanted to in those live sections. Plus, the tools we used are not yet optimized for the experiences and interactions we want to create. Even with just 30 students, implementing active learning principles online is extremely difficult. While I am immensely grateful for Zoom, Replit and Discord, there is much more work to be done in learning and technology design to enable active learning engagement online (and offline too, but the problems are exacerbated online).

I remain hopeful because, in spite of these challenges, students persisted. They planned for and around interruptions, and learned a lot of Python. It shouldn’t be this hard though, and it will get better. In the next few years, new subsea cables and low latency satellite internet will increase bandwidth in Africa and other underserved regions. And, the spotlight that the pandemic has shone on education means more investment dollars and innovation are going into building the next generation of learning tools.

We certainly have a long long way to go at Kibo, but we’re energized by the possibilities. I’m grateful to our amazing team, Keno, Misan, Mohammed, Nicolas and William for pulling off this first class. We’re taking everything we’ve learned and doing it again -- and you can join us!

If you know students aged 16-24 in Africa who are awaiting university and curious about tech, tell them to apply for our next cohort of the Future Proof with Python program. If you love Python and love sharing your love with others, you can apply to become a volunteer mentor. Lastly, we are hiring! Check out our open roles here .

Ope Bukola

New York, New York, United States 6K followers 500+ connections

Experience

Kibo School

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Education

New York University

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