A look inside UNZA’s e-learning policy

 By VICTOR KALALANDA, January 7, 2021

A statue of a clumsy graduate by artist Henry Tayali has partly become an icon of UNZA

As I saunter along under the tree canopy, sandwiched between lush, healthy lawns that lead up to the antiquated building, what welcomes me is the chatter, not of birds, but of humans.

I vividly remember this scene from three months ago when I visited the more than three decades old University of Zambia Department of Media and Communication Studies, as academic staff worked at brisk pace.

Walking quietly through the Department’s narrow and only corridor, I was caught up in the crossfire of lecturers’ voices.

I decided to eavesdrop.

“Excuse me, I can’t get you,” I heard a female lecturer say, apparently addressing her student, asking them to turn on a microphone.

Before I was done recording this conversation, I heard another voice, this time of a male lecturer.

“So I’ll be uploading these notes on Moodle this week,” he said, in a tone that suggested he was ending a class.

The interchange of voices and clicking sound of electronic gadgets went on for the time that I was at the Department, and this is what the University of Zambia calls e-learning, a robust intervention implemented across the university to ensure continuous learning in the face of COVID-19 and its frustrating restrictions on physical gatherings like university lectures.

What I overheard—Moodle, microphones and electronic gadgets—constitute a decision made in April last year by the University’s ad hoc senate committee on COVID-19, which recommended that lecturers must use Moodle as the main online teaching platform after the University was closed in March due to the harrowing global health crisis.

“[The] committee reported to management of the University to have programmes uploaded on Moodle learning platform. The committee (advised) that UNZA sets up support teams for each of the schools,” discloses Dr Jonathan Tambatamba, the University’s director in charge of quality assurance.

As arguably the undisputed leader in the higher education industry in Zambia, UNZA responded to the pandemic without shilly-shallying—in the manner of a reflex action, though with exemplary thoughtfulness—protecting the student-lecturer relationship from termination or extermination.

In the absence of physical contact hours, therefore, UNZA continued to fire on all cylinders in terms of teaching and research, as well as community service made through contributions to COVID-19 science in the country.

Acting on the recommendations of the specially set up committee on COVID-19, UNZA rolled out a massive online skills training for its more than 6,000 lecturers and tutors, upskilling them in the most effective way possible using videos and literature as facilitated by resident experts from the University’s quality assurance department, library and the Centre for Information Communication Technologies (CICT).

While the web-based Moodle was meant to be the official learning platform, lecturers were allowed to use complimentary technologies like Zoom and Google Meet, all of which enabled academic staff to interface with students from within Zambia and outside, and also upload and share notes in different forms such as text, video or links.

Used around universities internationally as a learning management system (LMS), Moodle had earlier been piloted at the University as part of its strategic plan heading up to 2022, but with the onslaught of COVID-19, the platform’s wide use in the University had to be checked for suitability.

“For us to establish how e-learning was received we did conduct a survey and that survey gave us some information. The purpose of the first survey was to get quick feedback on how students got started with the online learning and how they perceived e-learning and teaching using the online platform,” says Dr TambaTamba.

All registered students were able to use Moodle at any given time and in June the University used a representative sample of this population for a survey which found that 44 percent of the learners had challenges using the LMS.

Armed with this information, the University launched a lecturer appraisal to get student feedback on the activity of lecturers online and also engaged mobile network providers like Zamtel, MTN and Airtel for reduced bundle tariff charges every time students accessed Moodle.

For a third year law student like Danny Chola, who said that “in the few times that I managed to log in on Moodle via a fee paying Internet café, it literally cost me a fortune,” a cost-effective LMS meant everything.

The University went on to scale up online skills training for students and lecturers, according to their needs assessment, with the result that there was outstanding improvement in no time.

The e-learning interventions were largely being introduced while physical and virtual learning went on for graduating and non-graduating students respectively, over a space of about 7 months.

As the year drew to a close and phased opening for all students was imminent, the University set out to do a second survey, this time focusing on the effectiveness of e-learning.

With a parallel study aimed at evaluating lecturers’ performance ongoing, the University was in a continuous state of improvement, with more students finding it easier to use Moodle and expressing confidence about the effectiveness of e-learning.

By the time the University was opening to all students in November, there was enough time to capitalise on physical classes and labs for the entire student population, and also prepare effective examinations that would stand everyone in good stead for the 2021 academic year.

It is important to note that Moodle is not UNZA’s only LMS, as Marjorie Nkamba, the institution’s acting Head of Communication and Marketing, states, “The University has introduced Astria Learning . . . to cater for distance learners and postgraduate students,” s

UNZA’s COVID-19 response strategy has been a net cast wide, demanding lecturer performance on one hand, and maximising learning uptake for the student on the other.

Outside the e-learning interventions, interestingly, the University provided community service by lending its expertise and labs to the testing of COVID-19 samples, offering scientific opinion, developing a ventilator and body sanitiser, among other scientific contributions.

For a national University proving resilient despite all the challenges thrown at it by the COVID-19 pandemic, UNZA is no doubt a model for other players in the higher education industry.