If you’ve been reading the OTTSYDs lately, you’ll know that I’m more than a little skeptical when it comes to most claims about MOOCs, and the way they are going to change (or “disrupt”, in the current argot) undergraduate education.  The reason for this is simple: the MOOC value proposition assumes that higher education is about human capital development, not signaling.  This is fundamentally mistaken; for most undergraduates, signaling is enormously important, and obtaining a degree from a real, established university (rather than a bunch of certificates from a start-up e-company) is far more important than the content of the courses taken.

But… what if degrees from extant universities weren’t worth much?  What if many of the universities had only recently been established, and were themselves seen as perhaps a bit dodgy and fly-by-night?  What if, in short, you were almost anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa, where your choice of institutions – a few gems apart – tends to be between older, prestigious state universities, where materials and curricula are frequently a long way out of date, and younger, private universities, which have little prestige and where quality is extremely uneven?  What then?

The key to analyzing the appeal of MOOCs is to actually analyze the appeal of the alternative to MOOCs.  Yes, traditional higher education is expensive, and in many cases involves very large classrooms with little teacher-student interaction.  But it is delivered – mainly – through established institutions whose degrees carry prestige and meaning into the labour market.  In the developed world, MOOCs therefore face a chicken-and-egg problem: they aren’t going to affect undergraduate education until their certifications carry meaning, and they aren’t going to carry meaning until the labour market sees lots of such certificates, and can evaluate their holders.

But in Africa (bits of Asia as well – Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar, for instance), the competition is a lot weaker.    In Uganda, it’s quite possible that a few Coursera certificates, even if they don’t add up to a real degree, might in fact be worth more than a degree from Ankole Western University, or Mountains of the Moon University, because the prestige of the western universities from which those certificates will come is so much higher than that of the local universities, and will offset the fact that they don’t quite add up to a real degree.  For most Africans, top-notch MOOCs offer a type of education so different to what’s available locally that they may well end up being a first-choice educational destination.

The institutions most vulnerable to MOOC disruption are in Africa, not North America.  And though this fairly unequal competition between western institutions and African ones raises difficult questions about neo-colonialism, there’s no question that the choices available to African students are getting a lot better.