FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Facebook Is Bringing MOOCs (and Facebook) to Rwanda

The social giant is riding an education-colored horse into developing economies.
Image: Niall Kennedy/Flickr

In its quest for sustained growth, Facebook has begun to look outside of established markets in places like the US and Europe towards developing countries. The company has been circling around this goal in recent years by developing more mobile friendly products and even making a version of its social network compatible with feature phones—an initiative that won over more than 100 million users around the world by last July.

But with 1.23 billion people already using the world's largest social network every month, a few million people—even a few hundred million—is just the beginning. The real benefit to setting up shop in developing countries is that it can establish itself as an integral, and thus irreplaceable, part of a society's internet infrastructure.

Advertisement

So what's the best way to guarantee a seat at the table? In August of 2013, Facebook announced the formation of Internet.org, a sort of corporate supergroup consisting of the social media giant and six mobile phone companies (Samsung, Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, and Qualcomm) designed to spearhead numerous global initiatives to bring more people online. Today, the company unveiled one of the most intriguing plans to come from the collective so far: SocialEDU, an online education ecosystem it's setting up in Rwanda.

According to the press release, here's how the pilot program will break down: Facebook will develop an educational app along with EdX, a massive open online course (MOOC) platform that will make course materials from institutions like Harvard, MIT and the University of Tokyo available for students in Rwanda. Nokia will lend support on the hardware side by providing "affordable" smartphones. Airtel, a local carrier, will provide free data for participating students for a year—though it remains unclear what subsidies, if any, will be offered after that. The Rwandan government, meanwhile, will provide financial aid for students purchasing smartphones and extend its free WiFi program to cover the country's universities.

Facebook emphasized that this is a pilot program, so the whole thing is still in an experimental phase. But the company noted that it hopes it will serve "as a blueprint for other partnerships to follow" in additional regions. And it's already doubling down on these efforts: the release detailed additional plans to "launch a unique testing facility" later this year. Developed with Ericsson, the facility is designed to simulate "alternative environments for developers to use when creating apps for similar markets."

Advertisement

It's hard to balk at the idea of increasing internet access in developing countries. And if an organization can advance that goal alongside educational initiatives? Well, that's even better.

But are these aspirations really so noble? It's telling that Facebook made this announcement on the same day that CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivered his keynote address at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. As The Guardian noted, this was his "first mobile-centric keynote" at the massive industry event, and it followed shortly after his company paid a whopping $19 billion to acquire WhatsApp, a mobile messaging service with a huge and ever-growing (particularly internationally) audience.

Many tech analysts and critics have interpreted the deal as the way that Facebook wants to stick it to the entrenched telecommunications industry. But, again, a big part of the appeal of developing communities for Facebook is that it doesn't have to worry about the AT&Ts and Verizons of the world when establishing its roots. Instead, as David Talbot wrote last month in a feature for the MIT Technology Review, companies like Google or Facebook can establish themselves as the de facto internet standard for communities in which "getting online cheaply in the first place is a greater concern" that issues like net neutrality.

Susan Crawford, a co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, told the MIT Tech Review that she sees it as “a big concern” that these companies are setting themselves up as the gate through which all online content is then accessed.

Advertisement

"For poorer people, Internet access will equal Facebook. That’s not the Internet—that’s being fodder for someone else’s ad-targeting business,” Crawford explained. “That’s entrenching and amplifying existing inequalities and contributing to poverty of imagination—a crucial limitation on human life.”

How does education factor into this concern? To start, Facebook already said that the "social educational experience" it's developing with EdX will be "integrated with" the social network, which suggests anyone participating will need to be a Facebook member as well.

Even in light of Crawford's concerns, it might be too dystopian to start thinking this will lead to corporate-sponsored MOOCs. Hopefully, we won't start seeing things like The Simpsons predicted with its hilarious scene of Troy McClure teaching an overcrowded classroom a section entitled "Pepsi Presents: Addition and Subtraction."

But like net neutrality debates here in the US, the concern in developing countries is whether or not smaller and younger competitors to a company like Facebook will be able to afford establishing themselves in a given community once Facebook has secured an inner track through deals with local governments and network providers.

It's scary enough for some people to consider how giant cable companies like Comcast might be able to start strong-arming its leaner partners into paying more to reach their own customers. So what happens when that becomes a problem of accessing educational opportunities, rather than just binge-watching episodes of House of Cards?

For his part, Mark Zuckerberg did his best to dismiss any criticism of these global initiatives as profiteering during his MWV Keynote by emphasizing how substantial an investment they will be for the company.

“I cannot construct a model in which this will be profitable in the near term," Zuckerberg said of Internet.org. "We are probably going to lose money on this for quite a while.”

That will probably change once he's managed to connect "the next 5 billion people," however.