Institutional support needed for professional development

Continuing professional development for higher education cannot be treated as an individual responsibility. Dedicated institutional support is essential, according to Tony Lelliott, a programme specialist at the non-profit educational trust the South African Institute for Distance Education, or Saide, in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Participation in continuing professional development by higher learning institutions requires a clear incentive as part of the institutional policy, he said.

Continuing professional development needs to demonstrate immediate utility to be appealing, and time needs to be allocated to allow participation and self-study.

However, digital transformation can be compromised where connectivity is less than optimal, Lelliott said during a presentation about Saide’s work on digital transformation in higher education in the SADC region at the Southern African Regional Universities Association’s Colloquium 9, ‘Regional Collaboration for the Digital Transformation of Teaching and Learning: Experiences from SADC’, held on 1 July 2021.

The purpose of the colloquium was to share examples of regional collaboration in digital transformation teaching and learning, to reflect on the rationale for regional collaboration and to consider enabling conditions for successful regional collaboration.

Lelliott emphasised the importance of open education resources, which is part of Saide’s mission, in promoting blended or online learning courses, saying that it provides an opportunity to promote resource-based learning approaches, has the potential to offer quality courses, promotes information literacy skills among students, and allows assessment for and of learning.

Digital learning and teaching deficits

The open education resources learning pathways include finding, adapting, and publishing open content (piloted in 2020); designing for learning and communicating research findings (piloted in 2021); and currently facilitating online learning, developing open access resource-friendly policies, and open learning.

The limitations of digital learning and teaching, Lelliott said, is the lack of equity and accessibility to technology among institutions; poor infrastructure in terms of Wi-Fi, bandwidth and devices; low computer literacy among students; low digital capabilities and technical issues; no curriculum (topics relevant to online learning); isolation (little or no interaction); and a lack of self-discipline in terms of time management.

About assessment strategies, he said Saide has been supporting universities to develop and use quality assurance frameworks for blended or online learning.

“Our open education resources African initiative focuses on continuing professional development for staff for higher education institutions.”

Ephraim Mhlanga, programme specialist for quality assurance at Saide, said the organisation ensures threshold standards to uphold quality education. Where online learning is concerned, Mhlanga said student support should be thought about first. There should be no information overload, and appropriate learning design is essential.

In the Saide programme, he said, students are provided with a clear picture of what the course involves, what is expected of them, and how they will be supported.

According to Mhlanga, the interface has no information overload and has internal links to the necessary additional information. The course designs promote and support collaborative learning, because “online courses should be creative in problem-solving, teamwork and technology skills”.

Polly Gaster, a communication specialist and action researcher who has been working in the field of information and communication technologies (ICT) at the Eduardo Mondlane University (EMU) Informatics Centre in Mozambique since 1998, spoke about capacity development for digital transformation of learning, teaching and research. She said the university rolled out online learning immediately the COVID-19 pandemic started.

Reaping rewards

Gaster said EMU’s education technology course, or Ed-Tech, is a five-year collaborative project (2017-2022). “The programme was initiated due to the low level of technology literacy.”

The main objective of the course is to improve the institutional and research ICT infrastructure and human capacity to develop a robust environment for using technologies in research and teaching at EMU by 2022.

Strengthening the framework for sustainable change through research training, institutional development and cooperation mechanism is also an objective.

The three outcomes so far are:
• A critical number of researchers and educators improved productivity and the quality of their work through the integrated use of educational technologies and ICT tools;
• Investment in planning, modernisation and expanding ICT, infrastructure, equipment and management contributed towards implementation and to EMU’s research and education goals and the need for reliable and adequate ICT access; and
• Foundations were laid for consolidating ICT-based methodologies and approaches as change agents for EMU.

Vali Issufo, a lecturer in the engineering faculty at EMU, said that, following the onset of COVID-19, the university enabled lecturers to use the Ed-Tech course designed for blended learning. The university is now moving to reinforce the infrastructure, and progress has already been made in several areas, including the management of bandwidth.

Issufo said the biggest challenge is the sustainability of internet bundles which are very expensive. “We are still using emergency online learning and not fully blended online learning.”

Tony Carr, a senior lecturer at the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching at the University of Cape Town, said e/merge Africa has been engaging education institutions through online seminars, workshops, courses, conferences and research mentorship.

It is an educational technology network, mostly for educational technology researchers and practitioners, that focuses on professional development in African higher education.

During 2020, the programme had 1,145 active members, 22 events and processes in English, and 19 Arabic events, representing 26 African countries.