By: Gibrill Amid Sesay
The most unsettling idea I encountered during my MSc in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh was not about artificial intelligence or virtual reality. It was a single proposition from the Manifesto for Teaching Online: “Text has been troubled; many modes matter in representing academic knowledge.” At first, I resisted it. Like many African academics, I had been trained to believe that scholarship reached its highest form only when it became a long, carefully referenced document. Yet the more I reflected on my own work as Director of Quality Assurance and International Relations at Central University of Sierra Leone, the more I realized that we have confused the representation of knowledge with knowledge itself. A 200-page thesis is not necessarily more intelligent than a working prototype, a documentary, a digital archive, or a community-designed innovation.
This question has become even more urgent as artificial intelligence reshapes higher education. If an algorithm can generate pages of coherent academic prose within minutes, then the value of scholarship cannot continue to rest primarily on the production of text. What distinguishes a scholar today is not simply the ability to write, but the ability to think, create, solve complex problems, and contribute something original to society. Ironically, AI is forcing universities to confront a question they have avoided for centuries: have we mistaken the written dissertation for knowledge itself?
For Africa, and especially Sierra Leone, this is more than an educational debate, it is a question of epistemic justice. Our universities inherited a colonial model that privileged written English over oral traditions, community wisdom, craftsmanship, performance, and indigenous ways of knowing. Across Sierra Leone, I have met young innovators building solar technologies, developing software, designing agricultural solutions, and preserving local history through digital storytelling. Much of this work never enters the academy, because it does not resemble conventional scholarship. The tragedy is not that these innovators lack knowledge; it is that our institutions often lack the imagination to recognize it.
This is why I find reports that some universities are exploring alternatives to traditional dissertation so compelling. Whether the final product is a technological invention, a policy intervention, or a creative digital artefact, the underlying principle matters: scholarship should be judged by the originality of its contribution, not by the thickness of the document that describes it. Text remains indispensable, it allows us to explain, critique, and reflect, but it should no longer enjoy a monopoly over academic legitimacy. Knowledge today is increasingly multimodal, collaborative, digital, and embodied.
As someone who works in quality assurance, I do not see this as lowering academic standards. I see it as raising them. True quality is not measured by page counts or formatting guidelines; it is measured by intellectual rigor, social relevance, ethical practice, and transformative impact. If a doctoral candidate develops an AI-powered literacy platform for rural schools, a renewable energy solution for off-grid communities, or a digital repository that preserves endangered indigenous knowledge, why should these achievements merely become appendices to a dissertation? Perhaps, they are the dissertation.
Africa has a rare opportunity to rethink the university before simply reproducing outdated models. We should not abandon writing, but we must abandon the belief that writing is the only language of scholarship. If we are serious about decolonizing higher education and achieving epistemic justice, then we must recognize that knowledge can be written, coded, designed, filmed, performed, built, and lived. The future of African universities will depend not on how many pages our students produce, but on whether the knowledge they create changes the lives of the communities they serve.
Gibrill Amid Sesay writes on quality assurance, digital education, epistemic justice in Africa higher education. The views expressed are his own.
