While virtual universities and e-learning are seen as the way to rescue the situation, they are not without their fair share of problems.

In the past week, academicians from across Africa were in Nairobi to discuss the challenges associated with virtual universities and to find solutions, one of which has been found to be the need to redesign and harmonise curriculums.

The meeting was hosted by the African Virtual University (AVU), a pan-African intergovernmental organisation established to enhance the capacities of African universities to increase access to higher education and training through ICT.

According to some participants at the meeting, the virtual programmes have been dogged by problems relating to contextualisation of programmes to fit the needs of the specific universities that they are delivered from.

A representative of the University of Zimbabwe, Dr David Mtetwa, said that his university had to tweak the AVU teacher education curriculum to fit its own system.
“AVU aims to strengthen the programmes so that they meet international standards, achieve a unified university system, and strengthened pan-Africanism to enable the building of a system that allows students access to learning and mobility across the continent,” said the AVU rector, Dr Bakary Diallo, at the conference.

He said universities and other experts were holding meetings as part of the harmonisation process in a bid to progressively move away from the use of curriculum entirely designed in Western countries. Dr Diallo further said that AVU was also gearing to assess the quality of distance education and e-learning.

Once the curriculum and modules are standardised, they will be released as Open Education Resources (OER) that can be used by any university in the world, including those that are not members of AVU. The virtual university already has 219 modules as OER hosted on its portal.

The modules have been translated and designed in such a way that they can work across borders and language barriers in Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone Africa.

But even with crucial strides made, such as that of AVU entering into a partnership with the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) in April to promote online learning, mobile learning, and e-learning, a major concern, according to participants at the conference, remains access to the tools of trade — a laptop and Internet connectivity.

The other concerns the tendency of students to be lax in the absence of face-to-face interaction with their supervisors, leading to prolonged studies.

A student from Nigeria under virtual studies expressed the concern by pointing out that she knew of peers who should have completed their studies but had not been able to because of such laxity.

The manager of educational technology and learning resources at AVU, Dr Griff Richards, said it was going to be critical that the project takes cognisance of the aspect of monitoring students’ learning curves and progress.

The AVU was launched in Washington in 1997 as a World Bank project and later transferred to Kenya in 2002 to become an inter-governmental organisation. It has since facilitated training of more than 43,000 students.

The virtual campus is seen as an innovative way of dealing with higher education’s biggest challenges of inadequate infrastructure and staffing. It was hailed as a way of dealing with accelerated admissions to universities.

“The average gross enrolment ratio (GER) in tertiary education for Africa is seven per cent, with Kenya’s at four per cent. The average tertiary education GER for North America is 76 per cent. Yet economists have recommended that for any economy to be globally competitive, there has to be at least 15 per cent GER in higher education,” says the AVU projects manager, Ms Wangeci Thuo.

According to Ms Thuo, in 2011, the organisation, which partners with African institutions of higher learning, especially public universities, concluded its first phase of the project funded by the African Development Bank (AfDB) in 10 sub-Saharan African countries.