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My name is Jerome Terpase Dooga. In my native Tiv language, we say “Msugh za van” which means ‘welcome.’ I am aware that many people desire to teach online, many more have had false starts in doing so. So, if you are looking forward to this seminar, tell us what you do, what your challenges are with teaching online, and what you expect to get out of this seminar.
My names are Kolawole Akinjide ARAMIDE, a Research Fellow with the Centre for Educational Media Resource Studies, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. What i consider the most important challenges of using technology to facilitate online teaching in my institutions include the apathy of the educators to technology, poor attitude of students towards accepting technology to facilitate learning while they prefer to use it for other engagements, mostly social. The issue of affordability of data tariff has been a major reason given by students for not being able to participate in online teaching and learning processes. In the course of teaching some of my courses, I have tried to use the whatsapp which is one of the most commonly available platform among the students to engage them in what i called ‘Guided Enquiry’ to know the lwvwl of understanding of some of the concepts taught during face to face engagement but found that only few of the students are active on this platform, I have also tried to bring in the use of skype to engage in teaching the students but it may interest you to know that only few of the students have skype id. On the other hand, the fact that the university has not accepted technology as a formal means of engaging students is also a major problem. However, I am trying my best to ensure that my students accept online facilitation by including online participation as part of the final assessment for my courses. I hope that this seminar will open my eyes to other means of online facilitation sir.
Thank you Kola for those expressions. Your observations sound very familiar in the context of Higher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa. All the frustrations you describe, and more, will be experienced. This seminar suggests some reasons why it is so, and propose that if the approach to be highlighted is adopted, many of the challenges will reduce, and some may even disappear (of course not cost of internet connection). Of course, some of the complaints are merely scare-crow excuses, and cost of data is one of them. If the more critical issues are addressed, people will complain less about inability to afford connectivity.
I’m Peter Aborisade, teaching at The Federal University of Technology Akure Nigeria. I do have some experience of teaching online – my courses in English for Academic Purposes are online with my colleagues teaching 4000+ students/session. We adopt the Blended Learning mode that combines f2f with online. This mode enables us to make up for the shortfalls in technology infrastructure amongst other benefits. We hold in-house professional development seminars from time to time.
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