Online learning is integral to the future of Higher Education; embrace it or become irrelevant

COVID-19 has presented an opportunity to Africa's universities to take stock of their current practices and identify new ways of doing things; all for resilience and continued relevance beyond this pandemic. This became the common refrain of higher education leaders at a recent Higher Education in Africa zoom webinar that was titled: COVID-19 and Africa's Higher Education System: What is going on?

Professor Benjamin Ola Akande (right), Assistant Vice-Chancellor, International Affairs - Africa at Washington University in St Louis in the United States, labelled this virus "an equal opportunity pandemic" that was impacting all institutions in Africa, and the world, at the same level. Instead of seeing the coronavirus as a nuisance, he chose to see in it an opportunity for African universities to adopt a strong resolve at addressing immediate challenges; to reassess their positions and become more creative in changing "what we do and how we do it, as we prepare for the future, post-COVID-19."

Agreeing with this view, Professor Adam Habib (left), Vice-Chancellor and Principal at South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) said most infectious diseases specialists in South Africa had been stating very firmly that COVID-19 was not going to be a six-month phenomenon. It was likely to linger on for two to three years during which the world would have to confront the reality of possible pandemic outbreaks. Professor William Bazeyo, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Finance and Administration at Uganda's Makerere University, also echoed that until a cure could be found, this pandemic was likely to be around for a while. "Whatever higher education institutions are planning must take this into consideration."

Professor Aziza Ellozy (below), Associate Provost: Transformative Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, therefore asserted that it was time students and academics began aspiring to fluency in digital learning and teaching, henceforth, because "they are going to be working in a very different environment. Unless they learn to collaborate digitally with other cultures and other people, they will be gravely disadvantaged."

Considering that Wits had for a long time been experimenting with different mechanisms of online learning, Prof Habib added that this pandemic had forced his institution to explore alternative teaching platforms, allowing them to shift their thinking in a very significant way. He said one problem that had confronted his institution for years was huge classes. The question emerging from the COVID-19 era was therefore whether Wits should consider shifting those enormous classes to the online platform and transforming the face-to-face experience to applied group learning, tutorials and varied other mechanisms, thus transitioning towards a much more blended learning experience.

Professor Ellozy (right), said she recalled how her institution, prior to COVID-19, had survived three bouts of emergency closure, first when they had the H1N1 outbreak in 2009; secondly during the Arab Spring revolution in 2011 and thirdly, as far as she could recall, during a SARS-related crisis in 2014. Faculty panic prevailed during all those crises as the university scrambled to switch to online or blended learning, somewhat. "However, once things got back to normal, we were back into our old habits," Professor Ellozy told the webinar audience.

This time around, Professor Ellozy said it was her view, and that of their provost, that the American University in Cairo should undergo a deliberate paradigm shift: prepare for a kind of blended learning modality and prepare their students and staff for digital fluency.

Is pure digital feasible in the unequal societies of Africa?

In response to these consensual views on embracing digital or blended learning, Dr Linda Meyer (below), Director: Operations and Sector Support at Universities South Africa (USAf), raised a caveat. "We're looking at online learning to solve this very peculiar problem, when Africa is sitting with 24% connectivity rate. In South Africa, fortunately, we have a 67% connectivity rate." Dr Meyer echoed Professor Habib's point that through numerous engagement structures co-ordinated by USAf and government, South Africa was already introspecting on the "new normal" being ushered in by the COVID-19 crisis.

"We are focused on whether diversifying our education delivery models, in blended learning, new learning and online learning -- all these adaptabilities -- is possible." She said South Africa was facing "real social justice issues where students are being forced to adopt remote learning, when they do not have electricity or connectivity security." Her standpoint was therefore that blended or online learning cannot be feasible in an unequal and unjust society where people do not have access to services that would make them real. "Otherwise all of these solutions become fictitious plasters or bandages that we're trying to apply on a specific problem."

Added to issues of energy and connectivity security, Dr Meyer mentioned a number of other challenges: students entering a very probable recession in the market, where employers might start questioning the quality of the Class of COVID-19 and wonder how they graduated; sustaining the academic and research enterprise where institutions were facing a serious financial threat, with students not paying fees due to parents' job losses or retention on reduced hours with reduced pay; and where institutions were facing demands to pay back certain fees to students because they were not accessing particular services.

"We need to use this opportunity to ensure that our students do not pack up and go study overseas; students need to begin to see the real value of attending African institutions to find solutions to problems on this continent - solutions that will shape their future."

Adapt to digital or embrace your own demise

Continuing with his input from Washington University, Professor Akande went on to say that now that universities all over the world had found it important to embrace digital as a means of engaging, teaching and delivering the curriculum, "we're seeing a confluence of online and face to face… We need to merge the two together in order to provide a more buoyant, more engaging higher education process." He said as universities forged their way forward beyond COVID-19, there was no time better than now, for institutions to consider their investment strategy in this blended mode of education.

It was important, he said, to learn from all the adjustments that institutions were making through this pandemic, to ensure continued relevance and sustained ability to deliver the curriculum much more creatively. To that end, he suggested that universities look at these four critical areas:

1. Develop a new techno-centric approach to teaching;
2. Assess what kind of meaningful curriculum to offer, that best addresses the challenges that we face, today and in the future;
3. Engage our students more intentionally than we have done before, and also
4. Develop new business models that ensure our institutions' relevance into the future.

As he drew close to concluding, Professor Akande said that COVID-19 had actually brought to the fore, two types of institutions: a) those successful in pivoting addressing the challenges of this pandemic to focus on specific areas such as medicine, health, infection, vaccine development or a different kind of curriculum, and b) those that would readily go back to the way they were doing things before this pandemic. "I believe the institutions that welcome this opportunity to introspect intentionally will become much stronger; their education process will become much more effective. Those who will revert to the way they were doing things before will be embracing irrelevance; irrelevance is worse than death. It will be very difficult to come out of that situation," Professor Akande concluded.

The 'embrace online or perish' position should be problematised

Professor Ahmed Bawa (right), Chief Executive Officer at Universities South Africa, who was moderating the Day One discussions of this webinar, did not quite express a standpoint at the time. However, he has since said he wonders whether the position of "embrace online or perish" should not be problematised. "One can understand the need for more effective use of technology in teaching and learning, and the inevitability of emergency teaching via remote and technology-based platforms," Professor Bawa said this week from his Johannesburg home. "Universities are, by their very nature, places of engagement, debates and the exchange of a plurality of ideas - an activity that best plays out face-to-face and on physical spaces. If higher education institutions switch completely to online delivery of the curriculum, how will they mediate their core other function of nation-building and the socialisation and acculturation of new generations of intellectuals? I doubt that this fundamental function would be facilitated through online learning and, therefore, doubt that it is a project for universities to go fully online." Even though this point may not have been raised at the webinar, it is nonetheless, food for thought.

How leadership should advance higher education beyond COVID-19

• Take a long-term view of higher education
  Professor Akande urged universities' leadership to think ahead about what this pandemic means to their institutions; to take a long-term view of what kind of results they want to produce and how those anticipated results could better represent "how we see our institutions respectively".
• Develop appropriate infrastructure

Professor Sandy O. Onor (left), Deputy Senate Committee Chair for Nigeria's Higher Education and Tertiary Education Trust Fund (and a representative of the Nigerian government in the COVID- 19 discourse) said this was the time for African leaders, both in government and in the university system, to change their focus completely and recognise the fundamental value of technological advancement to the higher education system. He said Africa must build the appropriate infrastructure to ensure that computerisation and elearning take place in her educational system. To Dr Meyer's point on power-deprived rural communities in South Africa, Professor Onor said Africa was performing poorly as a continent, as far as maximising the potential benefits of solar energy was concerned. "It is time governments began to tap into that technological window and expand our solar applicability so that a lot of our communities can have power. We need power to run these computerised systems and therefore need to sit down very quickly to respond." It turned out that the Federal Government of Nigeria was already implementing a pilot project of providing solar power to a number of universities, in partnership with some private sector companies.

• Be pragmatic and realistic in selecting solutions
  While agreeing with the notion of investing in infrastructure for the future, Dr Meyer cautioned university leaders against being delusional and thinking that elearning was the answer for the challenges they were facing now. She said it was critical right now to look at modalities that work. In her view, these modalities included:
  • Assessing the system holistically and distinguishing between solutions to the challenges that confront us now (e.g. the cost of data and students' access to teaching/ learning resources); and those we need to address in the future (e.g. access to open resource material); furthermore, looking pragmatically and realistically at the situations that we face and devising solutions that fit the system now (e.g. issuing study material by the post to vulnerable students living in remote areas without electricity and internet connectivity as a mainstream intervention as opposed to treating this as an emergency remote learning capacity intervention);
  • Encouraging African students to stay on the continent by assuring them of quality curriculum offerings that respond to the challenges of the continent and devise appropriate solutions to our context;
  • Developing models of social justice and student-centredness;
  • Working towards legislative frameworks that would support academics and students and support the formation of institutional networks for the success of the continent-wide higher education system.
• Explore collaborative partnerships across the continent
  Dr Meyer also encouraged exploring collaborative partnerships for the future in areas including: increased access to open resources and collaborative opportunities for academics; forming networks of institutions that share teaching/learning resources; seeking collective adaptability of the curriculum to meet today's societal challenges; designing greater support programmes for the students most at-risk and preventing capital outflow from Africa and optimising investment in our own system to strengthen it sustainably for the future.

  Another opportunity for institutional collaboration, especially around delivery of curriculum, according to Professor Akande, was to build sandwich programmes "where our students are able to receive curriculum and programme instructions from each other's institutions, leading to degrees that leverage our competitive advantage to yield impactful qualifications."

  On forming the most effective inter-institutional partnerships, Professor Akande said the secret was for institutions to first identify commonality over a particular problem they needed to solve together. Partnerships, he added, presented opportunities to think about:

  • Ways to enhance our curriculum; to ensure that we reach and enrol targeted students
  • Focusing our research to find solutions to systemic problems and
  • Enhancing our capacity to fulfil our mission at our respective institutions.

Professor Akande conceded that a lot of institutions would struggle to confront, by themselves, the challenges they were facing today. However, in finding partners and collaborators, institutions would need to be definitive in what they were trying to achieve. They would also need to ensure sufficient synergy between themselves and those that they were looking to partner up with, "so that together you are able to achieve more than you could by yourself."

• Look inside Africa for solutions to Africa's problems
  In the quest to find solutions to challenges of this pandemic, Professor Onor implored government leaders and those of higher education institutions to look to the scientists and intellectuals of this continent; to encourage originality of thought that responds to Africa's challenges in their context and use their acquired education to develop local initiatives, local remedies to local problems. He said "it is fundamentally wrong to unquestionably adopt solutions from Europe and America and impose them in Africa." An immediate challenge was for African scientists and technologists to find and put forth a cure for COVID-19, and for the rest of the continent to embrace - and not demonise - an African-born cure for this disease. Dr Meyer and Professor Akande strongly supported this view.
• Place technology at the centre of policy
  Towards mainstreaming elearning in the higher education system, Professor Onor said technology must be placed at the centre of legislation and policy formulation, adding that that was the only way to ensure, in future, that students in Nigeria and elsewhere on the continent, would continue learning even in the wake of crises such as COVID-19 - in future. "In the anticipated new normal, we've got to accelerate in that direction to ensure that we bring ourselves up to speed with correct expectations in the higher education sector, post- COVID-19," he posited.
• Back policy proposals with empirical evidence

  For Professor Yakubu Ochefu (right), a long-time Vice-Chancellor of a community university and now Secretary General of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors of Nigerian universities, universities needed to revert to evidence-based proposals for policy actions. He said whatever policy positions they put forth must respond to problems backed by empirical evidence; otherwise, in the course of implementing new policies, unanticipated challenges arise on the ground, negating the whole process of positive change.

  
• Fundraise creatively in preparation for the "new norm"
  Professor Ochefu further asked university leaders to recognise the economic crisis created by the coronavirus, and to acknowledge that funding previously available to higher education would dry up in future. He thus urged institutions to find creative solutions "to fund the technological initiatives that we are advocating, and devise how our institutions will, in future, finance broadband, internet access and data that is the oxygen of the new data-driven environment for staff and students. We need to explore the crowdsourcing, crowdsharing and crowdfinancing environment and related best practices, in order to get ourselves out of this situation."

Organised jointly by Nigeria's Centre for Higher Education, Innovation and Development in collaboration with BusinessDay Nigeria (the webinar sponsor) and Universities South Africa, this two-day webinar addressed a distinct theme on each of the two 1½ hour sessions. Whereas Day One sought to:

• Understand how individual institutions in Africa were coping with the challenges of COVID-19;
• Discuss the challenges of digital learning and the required shifts by academics and students;
• Share lessons and experiences of those that were faring better in this regard as well as
• Explore ways for institutional collaboration,

Day Two went on to:

• Interrogate ongoing actions, and share helpful leadership insights therefrom;
• Seek to answer the question, what does the new normal look like for higher education and
• Stimulate new ideas and inspire critical thinking necessary for providing effective leadership in these uncertain times.

All in all, the webinar attracted a total of 348 participants from 19 countries representing Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. South Africa had the biggest number of attendees at 181, followed by Uganda at 62; Nigeria came third at 53, followed by the United States at 14. Germany and the United Kingdom each had six participants, whereas Ghana and Mozambique each had four; Cameroon, France, Kenya and Mauritius each had two whereas Belgium, Egypt, Eswatini, India and Italy all had one participant each.

Summing up the two-day experience, Mr Odinaka Iloh (left), Interim Chief Executive Officer for CHEiD, said these were exciting two days of conversation. As he extended a vote of gratitude to the panellists and the moderators of the two sessions, namely Professor Ahmed Bawa, USAf's CEO and Professor Francis Egbokhare, President of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, respectively, Mr Iloh said he believed that if all the proposals made during these conversations were acted upon, they would go a long way in making African institutions better. Noting that collaboration had come out very strongly, he encouraged every institution to prepare itself to get the optimum benefit of collaboration.

Mr Iloh said he foresaw conversations such as these being taken forward. He said he hoped similar engagements would attract as good, if not even better attendance in future.