 Hello, good afternoon from the afternoon sessions at LSE 2021. I'm Roger Emery, your chair for this afternoon, and I'm delighted to be introducing to you Joanna Wilde and Fiona Candle, who are going to be discussing and how to address the structural inequalities in an expanding digital world. I'll hand straight over to Joanna and Fiona now, and please put your comments in the comments box. Thank you. Thank you very much. My name is Joanna Wilde. I work at INASP, which is an international development organization based in Oxford, and I will be co-presenting with Fiona from the Association of Commonwealth Universities. So both INASP and ACU have been involved in projects funded by Sphere Programme, which is a 45 million foreign Commonwealth and Development Office Fund to support higher education, transformation and sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Middle East. I will briefly introduce you to TESIA project, and Fiona will tell you more about PEBL. So TESIA stands for Transforming Employability for Social Change in East Africa. And the partnership came together to transform learning by teaching for critical thinking, problem solving, redesigning courses, equipping lectures with new pedagogical skills, and making classrooms more than the responsive, and also for new connections with the employers and the communities. In terms of role of technology in TESIA, in a nutshell, digital technology was written in the project from the beginning, and we use technology to enhance face-to-face workshop but also to bridge face-to-face interventions with ongoing, continuing learning through e-mentoring and also communities of practice. From the beginning, we aimed to develop an online course to scale up and scale out our interventions. And when COVID started, we had a really good foundation to make the move to fully online provision. And our teachers were already accustomed with some of the tools we've been using and doing the face-to-face workshop but also in bridging interventions. Now I'm going to hand over to Fiona to talk about PEBL. Thank you, Joanna. The PEBL, or the Partnership for Enhanced and Blended Learning Initiative, works with universities across East Africa to strengthen their capacities to design and implement blended learning. The project supports the development and sharing of quality-assured credit-bearing courses. This is done through a series of interventions. These include trainings on blended learning pedagogy, quality assurance technology, and open education resources. Next slide, please. In addition to the actual aim of the project, which involves growing the capacity of academics to implement blended learning, the project itself has been implemented in a way that it incorporates that in the implementation process. So, for example, most of the major trainings take place online. These were online even before COVID came into the picture. So trainings on pedagogy QA assessments happened online. Workshops were also held online. This was primarily because we were working in four different countries with partners from many different places across the Commonwealth. So trainers were coming in from various places, which is why we had to make sure that these were incorporated and it created the space for academics from four different countries to participate. In addition to the trainings and the workshops, academics who have been in the program have developed blended courses in their respective institutions and using the learning management systems off their institution. So in this presentation, what we're going to do is to focus on discussing structural inequities that have emerged or have deepened really since online learning has been used in the context of East African higher educations as a response to the COVID pandemic. So we reviewed data in our study from evaluation data collected in both projects over a period of six months in 2020 and 2021. But before we go there, I'd like to briefly talk about TEL in East Africa before COVID. INOSP has been involved in delivering online and blended learning capacity development interventions to our partners since 2011 and then on a large scale since 2015. And this allowed us to learn and develop a deep understanding of our audiences and their needs. So we are dealing with face-to-face cultures with strong preference for face-to-face learning. And what it means is that online learning often was not recognized as a valid way of teaching. When online learning was done locally, very often it was just about stuck-not PDF files and PowerPoint presentations and learning management systems were underused. The online training that was delivered by international development organizations or Northern universities had a better stand. However, what we've noticed is that it was always added on top of existing responsibilities. And we had to do a lot of awareness raising and a lot of sensitizations among senior management staff to actually give the lecturers and give the researchers some space to actually learn new skills. Another point is limited access to technology and internet. It obviously differs between countries, between regions, and between universities. But there was always a large amount of people who simply struggled to access internet at any given point in time. And limited digital literacy skills or also challenges of pirated software. So this is what was there before. And so what has happened to tell during COVID? In many institutions in East Africa, COVID literally galvanized educators into adopting online learning for many two reasons. One of them was, especially for private universities, was that they had to move to online learning to be able actually to survive financially and charge students. Secondly, the exposure to online learning raised awareness about the advantages of this mode of delivery. And what would it help is to achieve a better buy-in of senior management in actually supporting and investing in online learning. So there is definitely a set of benefits that we could see in our data. Pedagogical ones, including more independent learning and more focus on learning how to learn, improve digital literacy skills both by teachers and by students, being able to access learning wherever and then also deploying learning to a larger numbers of students at any point in time. A lot of strategic benefits, including provision of widespread internet connectivity, commitment to blended learning in the policies, and acceleration and cascading of in-house training. Logistical benefits included just being able to do one's job and also cutting down time spent on commuting to work for the teachers and for the students, saving money on accommodation. Attitudinal, of course, there's been a lot of attitudinal changes, including government, senior management, teachers and students at an unprecedented really speed of this change. And finally, quality assurance, enhanced focus on ensuring that online teaching and content are of good quality. So on the face of it, it appears to be a win-win situation for institutions, for teachers and for students. However, online learning does have associated costs and limitation, which appear to have taken a backseat in the debate around transformations that are occurring. So today we wanted to draw everyone's attention to the areas of inequity that tell creating East Africa and beyond and how these can have a negative impact on two key aspects of educational provision, which is teaching capacity and learning outcomes. We have identified three areas of inequity, and I'm going to hand over to Fiona to briefly discuss each area together with related influencing factors. Thank you, Joanna. So there are a number of issues that are kind of emerging and inequities are emerging in a number of different areas. One is around learning design and online pedagogy. So one of the major issues that we are observing is around the teaching capacity to move online and there are various different aspects. So what we're really talking about is the ability to adapt teaching approaches to fit the needs of students in this new world that we live in. If teachers do not have the ability to tailor materials and adapt their course designs to fit the context, then that leads to a lot of inequality. Some teachers are able to create the kind of, are able to design courses that are fit for purpose while others are not able to do that. This variation has not just been observed across institutions, but within institutions. One example from the pebble project is that some institutions which are able to train a large number of academics even before COVID emerged, were able to redesign face-to-face courses to fit the online mode. At the same time, there were other universities in the same countries which were not able to do that and emergency teaching was as brought in and labeled as blended or online learning. One of the assumptions that we are observing that is being made by academics and a lot of institutions is that moving face-to-face teaching materials and techniques on to Zoom leads to online or blended learning. And this is causing concerns not just for students but also senior management because these courses are not fit for the new mode. So it's very important that teachers across institutions and across countries even are trained to make this move and not confuse emergency teaching with online or blended teaching. In addition to teaching capacity, there is also the issue of feedback and appropriateness of assessments. So for the longest time in a country, especially those that we work in such as those in sub-Saharan Africa have relied on written exams as assessments. With this new era that we're in, that is kind of being questioned and there are lots of issues that are coming up in terms of online assessments. So that includes the use of the right software, includes teachers having, again, the capacity to assess in the most appropriate way when it's online or blended learning. In addition to that, on the question of feedback, in a face-to-face setting, students can get feedback about their learning and performance in the class whenever they attend class and the teacher is present. Without this live in-person class component, students depend even more on the facilitation assignment clarification feedback from the instructor. That need is even more since they don't get that face-to-face feedback anymore. And what we are observing is that there is also a huge gap in the capacity to give feedback with online and blended learning. Lastly, there is the issue, under this category, there's the issue of student engagement and their levels of confidence. So there are a number of issues here as well. There is, in the online mode, there's sometimes limited space for an individual to communicate, engage, or express themselves via screen as opposed to face-to-face. Some students, according to the data that we've collected, some students are not happy with their experience of the online component or the online activities that they're doing. And this capacity to participate online obviously has something to do with the preference of the student, but it also has a lot to do with the teacher's capacity to create activities that are engaging enough for the student to feel engaged in or to feel very involved in. Next slide, please. Tied to the first point where we are talking about design is the quality of teaching and learning materials. One of the things that we have observed is that when teachers are developing learning materials, such as videos or other kinds of materials, they're not being able to fully assess or not all teachers are being able to assess the appropriateness. So something that we observed is that in a lot of courses that were redesigned, there was a lot of videos that were added in, for example. However, a lot of students don't have access to really good internet. As a result, they were not able to engage with those activities. So there is a real difference in teacher's capacity to understand the context, to understand the needs of the students and provide the appropriate learning materials. And I think lastly, there is the question of quality assurance and this goes back to the previous slide and even this one. When it comes to quality assuring, the design and the actual materials that are being developed for teaching and learning, there is a real gap in an institution's capacity to quality assure that. A lot of institutions have very small quality assurance departments and as a result, they don't have the capacity to do that kind of really rigorous assessments and sort of evaluations that are needed in order to make sure that the content that's being created is appropriate and learner center is able to achieve its objectives. Next slide, please. The last piece really is around access to materials and this goes back to some of the most common things that we have probably all been hearing over the last couple of months, which is around the issue of inequalities in terms of access to equipment, inequalities in terms of access to the internet and this is not just limited within the student population. It also goes all the way to the teachers. We've seen that there is a real difference between the capacity of an institution or the infrastructure of the institution and the internet service in the institution and the internet service that's used by students in their houses or by the teachers in their own homes. And as a result, that's leading to a real inequality in terms of how students are able to engage with these kinds of content and whether they're able to engage to begin with. We have data on students in rural areas having to go to internet cafes, cafes spend quite a significant amount of money to engage with the content the same way as their counterpart in an urban area who might have really good internet connection at home. There's some universities, really well-resourced ones, such as in our case, it was Kenyatta University who were able to provide a lot of gadgets to their students who were able to have partnerships with organizations like Kenned in Kenya to make sure that students and academics have access to the internet and the equipment to learn online. However, many others, even within Kenya, were not able to do that. I think, yeah, we can go to the next slide. Yeah, so what kind of recommendations then would we like to give to funders and to all those who support capacity development in the global south? First, there's a great need for investment in the infrastructure, both at institutional level and actually across institution because there are differentials between teachers and students within the institutions and at national level. Like following, for instance, Kenyatta University for example, other universities could be encouraged and supported in informing partnership with local internet providers just to make sure that all of their students have access to the internet and can access the materials. Another important area of focus is involvement of regulatory bodies to define standards to guide practice of learning design and how to design teaching materials. There are some universities that are more reliant on regulatory bodies, for instance, private universities, but other universities have a little bit more freedom of what they can do. So there needs to be standards in certain place so that not every university is doing something else rather than all universities are confident that they have guidance that they can follow. Another area of focus is incentivizing sharing of teaching materials, either by financial rewards or by other forms of recognition. It all comes down to IP concerns. So there is a need to actually grow awareness around creative commons licensing and the benefits of sharing teaching materials. Finally, there is a great need for capacity development at an individual level, which includes learning design, online pedagogy, technical skills, and ways to scale up the training. So overall, we need to make sure that teachers and students do not associate suddenly online learning with what Fiona mentioned, like Zoom sessions, which is already what is happening and spreading at an unprecedented rate, because it's just easier to replicate face-to-face lecturing over Zoom than using a learning management system and effectively and in a pedagogically sound way. So what the future holds, definitely Tel has produced real benefits for higher education in Africa. There is no doubt about it. However, there are huge differentials between the countries, regions, and institutions, and also within the institutions that are big inequalities. New equities have been emerging and the old ones have been deepening. So there is a need for institutional and national regulatory bodies to pay urgent attention to this, so that we don't enter the risk that what has started as an emergency teachings it becomes really the norm in the higher education in East Africa. Thank you very much. Any questions? Sorry, I was muted then. That's the bane of my life being muted. Thank you very much, Joanna and Fiona. That was a fantastic presentation and really quite a challenging project, I think, working across a number of organisations there. I'm just waiting for questions to come in. I see there's one from Kathy Chandler there, there are opportunities for educators with skills around online pedagogy to support peers either within or between institutions. So do you have institutional or cross-institutional work going on there to support in this project? I can go first. This is a really good question. We have seen some really exciting things in the PEBL project. So there are a number of blended learning experts now in the region, especially in Kenya and Uganda, who are supporting their peers across, not just within their own country, but across the region. We have had a lot of sort of a collaboration that have been emerging and what's really exciting is that it's being led by the institutions themselves. So they are getting in touch with each other, they're getting in touch with us. And a lot of peer learning is happening. Obviously the scale is much smaller than we would like it to be, but absolutely there is a real possibility to expand this and maybe add in a structure that makes this process easier for institutions across the region. And from the TESIA project perspective, that has been also written from the beginning into our project. We work with four universities, two in Uganda and two in Tanzania. And we have also a supporting body, which is association, Affert Association for Faculty Enhancement in Kenya. And they've been working closely with us. What we've been doing, we've been trying to establish early on a community of multipliers within the project. So we were basically gathering together the most enthusiastic, most skilled teachers and asking them to then join us on a venture to actually co-facilitate, to learn the skills and also facilitation and cascading the training within the institution. And in the last year, final year of the project, we got the project that's coming to an end this December, 2021, in the final year of the project we'll be putting all the efforts to try to ensure that there is a sustainability plan beyond the project. And we build a strong partnership and we're looking for opportunities to go beyond East Africa to cascade the training. So the institutions are working together to deliver training opportunities to more teachers within the institutions, but also across the partner countries and beyond East Africa. Thank you very much, Joanna. Thank you Fiona. I'm afraid we've run out of time for any further questions now. So thank you again, Joanna and Fiona for a fantastic presentation and for the contributions from the audience. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.