Empowering Africa Through eLearning

According to ECA consultant on National Information and Communication Infrastructure (NICI) policies, Prof. Clement Dzidonu, "African universities risk the danger of loosing their revenue base if they don't adopt e-learning strategies and catch up".

In a presentation during a session entitled, 'Meeting the Challenge of Adopting ICT in African Universities', chaired by ECA during the first official day of the e-Learning Africa conference, Prof. Dzidonu who is also the founder of the Global Village University, added "foreign universities are introducing better, varied and relevant courses through e-learning that are much cheaper than those offered at home and they will draw African students away, causing a major crisis for the revenue base of publicly run African universities".

However, there are some African countries that are forging ahead with the introduction of an e-learning culture in their universities, based on national ICT strategies and education policies.

In a presentation by Maggy Beukes-Amiss, coordinator of the University of Namibia's e-learning centre, said "Namibia is proud of the establishment of an e-Learning Centre (eLC) that is a multi-stakeholder centre to host all e-activities of all educational institutions in the country on one common Learning Management System under the auspices of Namibian Open Learning Network Trust (NOLNet). The stakeholders include NAMCOL, the Polytechnic of Namibia, the University of Namibia, the National Institute for Educational Development (NIED) and the Ministries of Basic Education and Higher Education.

She reiterated, "this initiative stems from the Namibian ICT for Education Policy that is also derived from the national ICT policy, and is therefore in tune with the aspirations of the country".

Speaking at the same session, Prof. Amos Thapiso of the University of Botswana, said "eLearning at the University was aimed at advancing student-oriented, active, open, collaborative and life-long teaching-learning processes as a result of an aggressive strategy for technological transformation over the last two years".

He further added, "the e-learning Support Centre has been used to train more than 30% of the academic community of 680 staff in various educational technologies using more than 60 targeted workshops. Additionally, there is a dramatic increase in the use and demand by students for access to the Internet and specifically the World Wide Web".

The University of Cape Town has a similar e-learning initative, however, one of its lecturers Tony Carr said that there were no incentives offered to University staff who undertook e-learning activities, stating, "there was need for curriculum support structures for e-learning as well as champions and leadership by educators".

However, Prof. Dzidonu emphasized the stark realities facing many other universities on the continent in terms of free acess to connectivity by students. Referring to ECA's SCAN ICT project, he said, "there were only 2% of students in Ghana, for instance that had free access to computers and the Internet with a computer-student ratio being around 100." This, he stressed left little room for e-learning to thrive and "strong government intervention offering investment in the area of e-learning was needed".