Quality assurance is key to sustainable blended learning

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, university campuses across Africa have been urged to shift their teaching and learning online to stem the disruption to learners caused by nationwide lockdowns of institutions.

As restrictions ease across the continent, institutions that have quickly adopted online and blended learning interventions in the first half of 2020 are presented with an either-or conundrum: retreating to a singular focus on classroom-based teaching or continuing and further investing in wholly online or blended learning offerings.

Other emerging world contexts are grappling with similar issues, including large population countries such as Brazil, India, Indonesia and Pakistan. The consensus seems that blended learning is the most likely change among institutions, which by most accounts is defined as up to 79% of teaching and learning being conducted online.

Over time, naysayers have lamented that online learning lacks engagement, is impractical (for example, there are no lab-based activities), requires large and costly bandwidth (connectivity) and brings more problems than solutions to a resistant and disincentivised faculty.

Not surprisingly, many of these issues have resurfaced in the present day, with uneven connectivity being particularly relevant.

Connectivity issues notwithstanding, important voices in higher education including Philip Altbach and Hans de Wit and John Daniel have rightly remarked that online learning is not, nor never should have been, deemed an overnight solution.

Online learning requires institutional vision and investment, proper pedagogical training, thorough (contingency) planning, varied instructional design, technology-oriented learning outcomes, reliable infrastructure and ample learner support.

Put another way, online learning requires good quality assurance.

A viable quality assurance intervention

The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) has been supporting the quality assurance component in the Partnership for Enhanced and Blended Learning (PEBL) project, centred in East Africa.

The project is led by the Association of Commonwealth Universities and is supported by Strategic Partnerships for Higher Education Innovation and Reform under the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (although the latter is now being folded back into the Foreign Office).

PEBL is focused on building the capacity of 23 universities in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda to develop and deliver quality blended learning courses (note: we recognise that online learning and blended learning are different, but the quality assurance argument applies to either mode).

The uniqueness of the network is that courses are to be shared across institutions – and national boundaries – to duly leverage the comparative advantage of a given institution’s subject area and to address the shortage of experienced faculty across the East African Community.

As open educational resources, the courses are suited to ‘plug and play’, enabling contextualisation to satisfy institutional credit hours and assessments as well as for cultural reasons.

The first of three batches of courses are freely available at OER Africa and can be re-used, adapted and re-distributed.

Whether online or blended learning, quality assurance processes for such off-campus arrangements should foster a sustainable mode of delivery that safeguards quality of content development and delivery (including mechanisms for refinement), well-trained faculty, adequate infrastructure and reliable (if not ubiquitous) learner support, among other inputs.

To enhance the quality assurance mechanisms and outcomes in PEBL, COL has been engaged in a comprehensive exercise to develop a quality assurance rubric for blended learning, an institutional quality assurance review tool for blended learning and the development of improvement plans to address, and work to ameliorate, any institutional shortcomings in their blended learning initiatives (such as staff training and learner support).

Under the guidance of COL, all blended learning courses are (and will be) benchmarked against the rubric and subsequently refined; and all institutions are conducting internal reviews on their readiness for blended learning delivery. The product of these interventions will result in the drafting and executing of improvement plans to be carried out over the next 12 months.

Both the rubric and the review tool have been developed and-or assessed by partners in the 23 institutions belonging to the PEBL network, along with the technical partners, which in addition to COL and the Association of Commonwealth Universities, includes Kenya’s Commission for University Education, the Staff and Educational Development Association and the University of Edinburgh.

Beware the quick fix to the pivot online

In the bigger picture, any institution’s rapid pivot to online or blended learning should be met with caution. While feasible through a variety of platforms, it is becoming increasingly clear that such learning expands far beyond uploading PDFs, posting videos and enabling discussion forums. Instead, it requires a fundamental shift in teaching and learning that must become more learner-centred and embedded with adequate learner support.

The shift needs to be mandated by institutional leaders, particularly if online interventions are to mature as integral components of an institution’s learning ecosystem.

Without a view to sustainability, institutions will likely retreat to a ‘business as usual’ approach to learning that is more teacher-centred than learner-centred. The problem, however, is that such 19th century learning is increasingly impractical in the 21st century.

Reticent institutions will be exposed to any subsequent disruption and may exacerbate the otherwise poor quality of teaching that has been reported in African institutions and which the PEBL project is focused on addressing.

Starting with sound quality assurance, continued dedication toward online learning will require strong and consistent political will, more funding and a certain risk tolerance to nurture learners with skills necessary for 21st century employment.

Any institution’s risk management strategy will now need to address how it will maintain a cohesive and good-quality learning environment if and when the next pandemic, recession or natural disaster occurs.

Indeed, the disruption to higher education caused by COVID-19 is of a magnitude unseen in the post-War era. Yet, as enrolment in higher education continues its upward trajectory – with some of the greatest enrolment gains occurring or forecast in Africa – institutions need to invest in online and blended learning with vigour.

Campus-based solutions won’t be sufficient for the imminent surge of Africans seeking enrolment in African institutions.

The gradual shift to online learning and its rapid rise amid COVID-19 are a global phenomenon. Of the nearly 20,000 post-secondary institutions around the world, how many will now shy away from online learning? Will governments make concerted efforts to support online and blended learning, especially for their publicly funded institutions?

The new narrative in higher education will be centred on current interventions and future mitigations. If we distil this down to online or blended learning, carefully considering how an online intervention should unfold requires referencing tools, best practices, etc.

In this instance, the quality assurance tools developed by COL under the PEBL project are proving to be viable instruments that can enable and ready an institution, faculty or individual lecturer to engage in online and blended learning with purpose and a vision to enhance the learning experience, including the circumvention of future disruptions.

University leaders must note and give quality assurance processes the seriousness needed to build sustainable online or blended learning offerings in their institutions.

Dr Kirk Perris is adviser: education at the Commonwealth of Learning. Professor Romeela Mohee is faculty member in the faculty of engineering and former vice-chancellor at the University of Mauritius. Another version of this article was first published as a blog on the Commonwealth of Learning website.