Higher education stakeholders have been challenged to relook at university policies and to come up with a roadmap to enhance their use of information and communication technology (ICT) to deliver better teaching and learning.
Speaking at the eighth annual forum of the East African Higher Education Quality Assurance Network (EAQAN) in Kigali, Edward Misava from Aga Khan University’s (AKU) Network of Teaching and Learning challenged education practitioners and quality officers to leverage technology to promote interactive lectures for active learner engagement in higher education.
“We must promote learning using new methods and techniques otherwise higher education will be rendered useless,” he added.
“There is a need to support professional development of faculty and staff to embrace technology for knowledge construction and designing of products for learning.”
The annual forum was organized by EAQAN, a network of quality assurance practitioners in the East African region with this year’s theme being ICT for Quality Higher Education and Expanded Access - Leveraging Technology for Effective QA Systems in East Africa.
During the forum, AKU was acknowledged for its contribution to EAQAN, where Dr. Tashmin Khamis, Associate Vice Provost, has been a past President of EAQAN (2014-2016) and led on the development of its first Strategic Plan.
“The focus of AKU’s technology in teaching and learning initiative is to create an enabling environment for faculty and students to use appropriate technologies for enhancing learner engagement,” said Dr Kweku K Bentil, the Vice-Provost of AKU, East Africa.
“The use of blended learning approaches and technologies, flipped learning, and integration of Virtual Learning Environment have enhanced knowledge creation capabilities by giving both teachers and students skills and tools to produce and share content in multiple formats, such as videos, podcasts, digital stories, for teaching and learning” added Dr. Tashmin.
“As a part of the policy, all graduate and undergraduate programmes are expected to have an online presence, through the use of a Virtual Learning Environment, by December 2019,” Dr Bentil said, adding that a digital literacy curriculum is being designed for AKU students.
The forum brought together vice-chancellors, deputy vice-chancellors, quality assurance officers, and education officials from over 80 universities across East Africa.
Other activities at the event included paper presentations on various topics, networking sessions, training workshops to build capacity on enhancing quality practices in teaching and learning and roundtable dialogues involving vice-chancellors and deputy vice-chancellors as well as Chief Executives of all the Higher Education Commissions in East Africa and the Inter University Council of East Africa (IUCEA) on issues related to the quality of higher education in East Africa.
