Guest editor Bill Gates Can online classrooms help the developing world catch up? By Adi Robertson

We're excited to have Bill Gates as our guest editor in February. Throughout the month, Bill will be sharing his vision of how technology will revolutionize life for the world's poor by 2030 by narrating episodes of the Big Future, our animated explainer series. In addition, we'll be publishing a series of features exploring the improvements in banking, health, farming, and education that will enable that revolution. And while the topics reflect the bets Bill and his wife Melinda are making with their foundation, they've asked us for nothing less than fully independent Verge journalism, which we're more than happy to deliver. Turns out Bill Gates is a pretty confident guy. Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief

In 2012, a 15-year-old named Battushig Myanganbayar aced a circuits and electronics course designed for sophomores at MIT — from his school in Ulan Bator, Mongolia. Myanganbayar had watched lectures in English, a second language, and worked through the course material online with the help of a visiting Stanford Ph.D. candidate, Tony Kim. "If Battushig, at the age of 15, were a student at MIT, he would be one of the top students — if not the top," Kim told The New York Times. In fact, Myanganbayar went on to MIT a year later — crediting the online course as a "watershed" moment. Myanganbayar’s success is a testament to the power of online educational programs: thanks to revolutionary technology, a prodigious student has access to the education of his dreams. Today, Myanganbayar is even working with edX, the Harvard-MIT joint partnership behind the original course he took from Mongolia, to improve the experience for future students. Behind the student’s story, though, is a larger question: can online classes be used to help not just a few exceptional students, but the developing world at large? "Before a child even starts primary school, she will be able to use her mom’s smartphone to learn her numbers and letters." In his foundation’s 2015 annual letter, Bill Gates describes a future in which world-class education is only a few taps away, for anyone in the world. "Before a child even starts primary school, she will be able to use her mom’s smartphone to learn her numbers and letters, giving her a big head start," he speculates. "Software will be able to see when she’s having trouble with the material and adjust for her pace. She will collaborate with teachers and other students in a much richer way." Career paths, Gates speculates, will be built into this new education system — students will be able to lift themselves out of poverty by figuring out the requirements for their chosen field and fulfilling them with online classes. And software will connect students to distant teachers and each other. While the concept of remote learning is as old as correspondence courses, today it’s often discussed in the context of massively open online courses, or MOOCs. Organized by companies, universities, and nonprofits, MOOCs provide education in the form of online lectures, quizzes, and projects, allowing large numbers of students to learn at a flexible pace. There’s no single definition for what constitutes a MOOC: some academics have split the term into "connectivist" cMOOCs — which emphasize learning among a loose network of students — and more centralized xMOOCs, which are often traditional college courses expanded to fit tens of thousands of remote pupils. And researchers still aren’t quite sure how to measure MOOCs’ overall impact. "We’re the World Bank, so we like to have data on all the stuff we say, right?" says Michael Trucano, a World Bank technology and education specialist who writes frequently about MOOCs. "There frankly isn’t a lot of good data on this, at all." Coursera, the largest and arguably best-known MOOC platform, claims a total of 11 million students, who can sign up for hundreds of classes from professors at Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and other universities. Classes are free, but students can purchase "verified certificates" for a single class or work towards mini-degrees in subjects like entrepreneurship or cloud computing. About a third of Coursera’s user base, says president and co-founder Daphne Koller, is from the developing world. "An educated world is simply a better world." While students like Myanganbayar have used online classes as a springboard into a traditional top-notch education, Koller touts more practical success stories like Sharmeen Shehabuddin, a Bangladeshi activist who learned to run a successful bakery with online business classes. "We see a lot of lifting up happening along our learners," she says. "We hear anecdotal stories about people whose lives are entirely transformed." Anant Agarwal, CEO of MOOC nonprofit edX, is similarly effusive about his platform. "Education is a path to prosperity, better economics, jobs, and frankly, world peace," he says. "An educated world is simply a better world." In an interview with The Verge, Gates pointed to the highly successful Khan Academy — which doesn’t consider itself a MOOC, but operates similarly to one — as a sign of how far the technology of remote education has come, from an age when "we were just sticking cameras in front of people and putting them online." In 15 years, he speculates, "that type of material will be wildly better than even the best is today, and it will be available through phones and tablets in a free form to anyone that’s got that internet connection." But right now, which students are really benefiting from MOOCs and the boom in online education? And will these services reach those who need education most?

Globally available and extremely cheap, MOOCs have managed to attract a broad range of users. Khan Academy, for example, says 30 percent of its visitors are non-Americans. Clarissa Shen, VP of business development at MOOC company Udacity, says that "our focus has been on the US to date, but even without much concerted effort, 60 percent of our students are international … We have had students win coding challenges hosted by multinational companies in Africa based on the skills they have gained in our courses … In Brazil, we’ve had Google and other tech companies host meet-ups for students who are interested in learning new tech skills, to also give them insight into how to get careers in tech." MOOCs, though, are still best equipped to deal with the well-schooled and well-supported — a problem that’s reared its head from the concept’s beginning. Stanford professor, former Google X head, and Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun helped launch the MOOC movement in 2011 when he drew 160,000 students to an online version of his Stanford introductory artificial intelligence course. In 2013, Udacity and San Jose State University — supported by a Gates Foundation grant — attempted to expand the program, offering $150 online-only accredited courses for disadvantaged students. But in its first semester, participants performed far worse than their offline counterparts, and the pilot program was put on hold after six months (a scaled-down version was eventually relaunched, to some skepticism.) "These were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives," Thrun told Fast Company later that year. "It’s a group for which this medium is not a good fit." And unfortunately, that’s exactly the group that most needs education overseas. One survey found that nearly 80 percent of Coursera students from developing countries already had a college degree In countries where large parts of the population struggle with basic literacy — in Bangladesh, for example, only 62 percent of men and 53 percent of women can read and write — MOOCs usually offer higher-level courses aimed at the middle class. A University of Pennsylvania survey found that nearly 80 percent of Coursera students from developing countries already had a college degree, compared to less than 10 percent of the overall national population. "MOOCs were heralded as a revolution in education access, and to some extent I think that’s true," says Brandon Alcorn, co-author of the study. But it’s a complicated truth. "Yes, we’re seeing a lot of students from [developing countries], but they are students that have already received an education. They’re already the elites in their countries, if you will." Or, as Trucano puts it: "They’re the folks who have already figured out how to learn." MOOC providers aren’t blind to the fact that their courses can favor the elite. When I asked how they were improving access, platforms like Khan Academy and Coursera pointed to their work in bridging language barriers — early MOOCs overwhelmingly favored English, but companies have been pushing resources into adding translated versions or partnering with local universities. "If a majority of people taking the courses already have a degree, then we are not completely fulfilling our mission, which is to provide education for people who need it the most," says Agarwal of edX. So far, he says that around two-thirds of all edX students have a bachelor’s degree or higher, but the organization launched a program for high-schoolers last year which could tip that balance. Even so, edX isn’t designed for developing basic skills like literacy — which Gates calls one of the most important near-future goals — or even computer literacy. Neither is Coursera, which prides itself on offering top-level university courses. For someone with no computer skills, "I don’t think Coursera will be the place for them to start," says Koller. "We all realize we need to solve the problem of the digital divide, whether it’s the basic access problem … [or the] basic literacy skills. You certainly need to learn to read and write in order to learn to use the internet effectively." And that, she says, is beyond the company’s scope. She believes that other organizations can step in and fill that gap better than Coursera, but it’s still a sign of how far we are from Gates’ vision of universal online education.

Well-connected autodidacts can draw a lot from online courses, but others have stumbled over these access and literacy problems. University of Reading MOOC expert Tharindu Liyanagunawardena, for example, carried out an in-depth study of Sri Lanka’s attempt to fold online coursework into its general educational program, gathering data from 2009 to 2011. In surveys, students expressed fears that the internet could end up putting course materials out of reach. Less than half the participants had online access at home: one student reported taking 45-minute bus rides to get to a regional center where internet was available; another had access to a computer, but no understanding of how to use it. While students might have money for normal course fees, "not everybody can afford to have internet access from home nor everyone can use the internet," said one respondent. "Children of ordinary families will face difficulty in pursuing a degree." one student reported taking 45-minute bus rides to get to a regional center where internet was available For MOOC platforms, Gates’ vision — a wave of smartphones that can act as ubiquitous, cheap computers — is central to solving this problem. And unfortunately, we’re not there yet. It’s true that where wired broadband networks have failed to make inroads, mobile phones are connecting citizens for the first time; a 2013 Pew Research Center study found cellphones were "almost omnipresent" in many countries, even ones where comparatively few people went online. The vast majority of these devices, though, were still feature phones, which offer only basic internet access. Major platforms like Coursera and Khan Academy integrate low-bandwidth interactive elements like quizzes. But they rely heavily on video to make lessons accessible and entertaining, and major platforms are still planning for the smartphone boom that Agarwal, at least, sees as inevitable: "We do need some basic capability," he explains. Eighty-one percent of edX students still view material on a desktop computer, while 12 percent use a mobile phone and 7 percent use a tablet. "It’s actually rather challenging to get [Coursera] content even onto a smartphone, because there is a lot of visual material in some of our courses," says Koller, and feature phones would require "a completely different model for teaching." Most MOOCs have started releasing mobile apps or letting students download lectures for later viewing offline, but by and large, they’re waiting for hardware to catch up. In addition, companies like Coursera believe that focusing on a country’s most privileged students can boost the entire economy. "People have often asked me, well, aren’t you focusing on the wrong part of the problem?" says Koller. "We all of course are strong believers in the moral imperative of making sure everyone is literate and has access to basic education. But if you think about the economic benefit of taking someone who is pre-literate and giving them four years of education, versus taking someone who’s more or less high school-level and giving them four years of education, the latter have a much bigger effect in terms of the society around them," whether through entrepreneurship or educating their own families. EdX’s Agarwal has a loftier vision: build a good online education program, and the delivery system will follow — for everyone. "We’re already hearing from a number of governments that if high-quality content begins to become available on mobile, then the governments will begin investing in infrastructure," Agarwal says. He mentions a $40 tablet called the Aakash, sold in bulk to Indian educators. "It’s much cheaper to provide that to kids and to provide bandwidth than to build lots of brick-and-mortar institutions. So we believe … that bandwidth and devices will come, so we decided to really focus on high-quality content."

The counterargument, raised in Gates’ letter, is that glossing over inequality could end up exacerbating the very social problems education is supposed to solve — calcifying gaps between rich and poor, rural and urban, or male and female students. EdX, for example, says about 60 percent of its students in developing countries are male, and the University of Pennsylvania study found roughly the same split in Coursera classes; the emerging BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa had an even starker disparity of around 68 percent men to 31 percent women. "Just introducing technology into education doesn’t actually act as a silver bullet," says Ronda Zelezny-Green, a mobile learning expert and PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London. "There’s a lot more work that needs to be done around attitudes and approaches." Social norms and economic realities can make it harder for women to participate in online education — parents can discourage girls from using mobile phones, for example, because they worry mobile phones will become a way for them to secretly communicate with boys. Literacy rates for girls are markedly lower in many developing countries, and girls may be hesitant to actively participate in courses. (Coursera even warned me to take its own gender statistics with a grain of salt, saying women were less likely to fill out its surveys.) "Just introducing technology into education doesn’t actually act as a silver bullet." Zelezny-Green thinks online education can be transformative, but she’s skeptical of centralized MOOCs. "With a lot of the ed-tech rollouts, people approach it as if we in the developed world have it all figured out," she says. "We need to take a bit more of a nuanced approach to develop a way of integrating technology that actually makes sense for the local context." Zelezny-Green and some other educators are starting to address the gender gap by working directly with communities. In 2012 and 2013, she visited students at a girls’ school in Nairobi, Kenya, looking at the role of mobile phones in their education. Phones weren’t used for online courses — in fact, teachers, parents, and even some students worried they were a distraction. But girls could use them to call friends and teachers to catch up on missed lessons, contact sponsors who could pay their school fees, or do their own basic online research. "If I get some things that I think I need to know more about I’m going to just Google them," explained one student. And some targeted programs are already creating new opportunities. In Afghanistan, where female literacy hovers around 12 percent, smartphone apps and simple text messaging programs have helped women learn to read and write in private. Last summer, the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Labor used edX’s open source platform to create its own MOOC portal, providing online classes tailored to women, students with disabilities, and others who might not be able to physically attend school. Once again, this isn’t a silver bullet — if Saudi women aren’t getting the face-to-face instruction that Saudi men receive, they’re still missing out on an important element of education. But Trucano says that even with this double standard, it’s better than nothing. "Some girls from some families … [will] have access to higher education that they now [don’t], because they have access to online universities," he says. "We’ve seen programs in West Africa and Senegal, in Algeria, where girls have seen that they can participate in online communities as a learner, and not first and foremost as a girl."