Making the most of an ‘equal opportunity pandemic’

A wide-ranging webinar on COVID-19 and higher education in Africa revealed that while higher education leaders recognise the challenges ahead, particularly in the shift to greater reliance on digital education, they are determined to see the pandemic as an opportunity for positive change.

Rather than viewing the coronavirus as a nuisance, African universities could use it as an opportunity 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”, according to Professor Benjamin Ola Akande, assistant vice-chancellor for International Affairs – Africa, at Washington University in St Louis in the United States.

Speaking at a webinar last month on the topic of “COVID-19 and Africa's Higher Education System: What is going on?”, Akande described the virus as “an equal opportunity pandemic” that was impacting all institutions in Africa, and the world, at the same level.

He argued that COVID-19 had brought to the fore two types of institutions: those successful in pivoting towards pandemic-related challenges in areas such as medicine, health, infection, vaccine development and a different kind of curriculum; and those willing to revert to pre-pandemic behaviour.

“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.”

Arguing that there was no better time for institutions to consider their investment in blended education, Akande suggested universities look at four critical areas: the development of a new techno-centric approach to teaching; the design of a curriculum that best addresses current and future challenges; intentional engagement of students; and development of new business models to ensure relevance.

The two-day webinar, organised jointly by Nigeria’s Centre for Higher Education, Innovation and Development (CHEiD) in collaboration with Business Day Nigeria, (the webinar sponsor) and Universities South Africa (USAf), attracted 348 participants from 19 countries, representing Africa, Asia, Europe and North America.

Over the two days, participants shared some of their experiences in dealing with the pandemic, discussing issues ranging from the challenges of digital learning to the benefits of institutional collaboration and the role of effective leadership.

Greater urgency in experimentation

University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) Vice-Chancellor Adam Habib said while his university had been experimenting with different mechanisms of online learning prior to the outbreak, the pandemic had forced a more urgent exploration of alternative teaching platforms.

For example, Wits was now considering whether the university’s perennial problem of overly large classes could be addressed by shifting those classes to an online platform while face-to-face teaching is retained for group learning, tutorials and other mechanisms – thus transitioning towards a blended learning experience.

Arguing that students and staff would henceforth be working “in a very different environment”, Professor Aziza Ellozy, associate provost for transformative learning and teaching at the American University, a private institution in Cairo, said it was time for students and academics to aspire to fluency in digital learning and teaching.

“Unless they learn to collaborate digitally with other cultures and other people, they will be gravely disadvantaged,” she said.

However, higher education institutions are notoriously slow to change and an injection of resources is required.

Ellozy said her university’s Centre for Learning and Teaching, which focused on faculty development, had over the years been building academics’ expertise in using technology in teaching. This placed the university in a better position when COVID-19 broke out, because some of their academics had already been using technology in teaching.

But there was still resistance in some quarters, she said, necessitating the introduction of a 12-day training programme for staff that ran 12 hours a day. Out of a total of 750 teaching staff, the university was able to reach 540 members in that period. Even with the better-than-average level of preparedness, the university still experienced challenges, including a drop in quality of teaching and learning, as well as an increase in academics’ workloads.

“Faculty did not realise that going online did not mean replicating what was happening face-to-face, and that under these circumstances, they had to readjust both the delivery and method. The main lesson we drew from our monitoring was that if you are going to go online, even if it is blended, the design of the course is very different; that is where the challenge comes in. So, you need to support faculty especially with the design.”

Although alive to the value of digital learning, webinar speakers showed they were not blind to the challenges attached to its implementation, particularly in Africa.

Social justice issues

Dr Linda Meyer, USAf director of operations and sector support, said: “We’re looking at online learning to solve this very peculiar problem, when Africa is sitting with a 24% connectivity rate. In South Africa, fortunately, we have a 67% connectivity rate.”

She said South Africa was also facing “real social justice issues” when it came to students being forced to adopt remote learning when they do not have electricity or ready access to the internet. Meyer said there was a danger of digital learning in an unequal society becoming “fictitious plasters or bandages” applied to a specific problem.

She said there were other challenges facing students as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, it was possible that employers might question the quality of the education received by the “Class of COVID-19”. Institutions themselves were under serious financial threat owing to the inability of students to pay fees or demands from students for refunds.

“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.”

Meyer called for pragmatism in universities’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing the need to distinguish between solutions to immediate challenges (for example, connectivity issues, the cost of data and students’ access to teaching and learning resources); and more long-term challenges (for example, access to open resource material).

She also supported the idea of exploring partnerships to ensure increased access to open resources and collaborative opportunities for academics, as well as the development of networks of institutions to share teaching and learning resources, curriculum design, support programmes for at-risk students, the prevention of capital outflow from Africa, and the optimisation of investment in local systems.

Universities as nation-builders

USAf CEO Professor Ahmed Bawa, who was moderator on the first day of discussion, called for a more nuanced approach when he suggested that the imperative to embrace online learning in its totality might come at the expense of other core functions of universities such as nation-building, socialisation and acculturation of new generations of intellectuals.

“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 in physical spaces. If higher education institutions switch completely to online delivery of the curriculum, how will they mediate their other core function of nation-building and the socialisation and acculturation of new generations of intellectuals?” he said.

“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,” he added.

Professor Sandy O Onor, deputy senate committee chair for Nigeria’s Higher Education and Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) and a representative of the Nigerian government in the COVID-19 discourse, said there was a need for technology to 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 in the wake of future crises such as COVID-19.

“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.

He also called for greater faith in the capacity of African scientists and intellectuals to respond to Africa’s challenges and use their acquired education to develop local initiatives and remedies to local problems, including a cure for COVID-19.

“It is fundamentally wrong to unquestionably adopt solutions from Europe and America and impose them in Africa,” he said.

Professor Yakubu Ochefu, a long-time vice-chancellor of a community university and currently secretary to the Committee of Vice-Chancellors of Nigerian Universities, urged university leaders to recognise the economic crisis created by the coronavirus, and to acknowledge that funding that was previously available to higher education was likely to dry up in future.

He called on 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 crowd sourcing, crowd sharing and crowd financing environment and related best practices, in order to get ourselves out of this situation”.

Quality

Professor William Bazeyo, deputy vice-chancellor for finance and administration at Uganda's Makerere University, emphasised the importance of careful planning to ensure quality of online programmes and online assessments.

“We must assure our students that our chosen models of online assessments are carefully planned, otherwise people will question the quality of our degrees,” he said.

While Bazeyo called on governments to support higher education institutions in their transition to the blended teaching-learning mode of the future, he said it was important to be selective and informed.

“…We need to prioritise – which courses can be successfully delivered online and which cannot? How shall we examine them to assure our market of continued quality? We must also work closely with all stakeholders. Consumers of our education must know how we deliver our curriculum. All of this needs to be done in phases, not abruptly, for success.”

At the end of the day, each institution had to embrace the challenge of experimenting with different things to discover what worked best, said Habib.

“I do not think we will ever go back to the previous normal. In the long term, we are heading towards blended learning. We just need to understand the proportions, the balances and how to navigate from one to another.”

Ellozy argued that it was possible that universities might improve on a number of fronts as a result of the current “emergency”.

“… We might be able to deliver better face-to-face teaching in a blended learning environment. I’ve found internet-based learning to be the best way to provide for the biggest number of students, and to also mitigate inequalities.”

However, universities would need to put in a lot of effort and continuously evaluate what they are doing to in order to keep improving, she said.

’Mateboho Green is the head of corporate communication at Universities South Africa (USAf). This is an edited version of her articles which originally appeared in USAf’s Daily Higher Education News.