A Sketch Map of Digital Learning in Africa: 2010-2030

Every day is Digital Learning Day at EduTrust Foundation. To spice up our regular schedule, last Friday—27 February—we joined the world to mark Digital Learning Day. It is a day set apart to celebrate the use of digital technology in learning. So, last Friday, we kicked back and had a fun exercise sharing our experiences and stories about digital learning. Remarkably, our fun exercise turned into a sketchy but useful map of digital learning which helped us to assess where we’re coming from and what lies ahead. We are as much interested in preparing for the future and shaping it as we are in anticipating it.

We started from the present situation of digital learning (2020), then we traveled back in time to 10 years ago (2010), and also projected into the future 10 years from now (2030). It is almost shocking and certainly revealing how things can change in our lives in a space of two decades, and the change continues in incremental proportions. We concluded that there has been a lot of progress and improvements but some challenges remain. Are we poised to overcome the challenges in the future?

Read on to find out more and share your views with us.

? The Present (2020)

We all are best friends with our smartphones and devices. I mean, most of us spend more time connecting via our smartphones with our Instagram and Facebook friends and our WhatsApp contacts than we spend making direct contact and having face-to-face conversations. YouTube, Snapchat, DSTv, Tik-Tok and vskit videos now take the place of regular entertainment, stand-up comedy, rom-com and real-life shows. And these are only a few of the favourite things that one can do with a smartphone. It’s not all bad, really. In fact, anyone from any part of the world can showcase her talent, skills or knowledge to the whole world. It opens us up to a whole world of opportunities to share, learn, interact and interconnect which was not open to us 10 years ago. What we have created today is a world of “mediated communication” where a digital or internet-enabled device facilitates connection between the subject and the object in most interactions.

When it comes to learning and education, however, we can all agree that we are yet to fully integrate and tap the benefits of digital technology. Some schools are on board the digital bandwagon, but public primary schools have not even started the conversation of whether, why, how, when and to what extent digital technology can enhance learning in the early formative years. Many secondary schools in urban areas have ICT centres supported by either their Old Boys’ or Old Girls’ Association, PTA, the government, an NGO, a foundation or a development partner, where students learn Computer Science and computing skills. However, most of the ICT centres are yet to be connected to digital libraries and global resources and tools for both teachers and students which have the potential to transform learning and spark creativity beyond what is taught in the classroom.

In our universities, access to digital learning is mostly Pay As You Go. Most students have smartphones, tablets, laptops and other devices. Curiously, most of the time students are engaged on social media and other fun sites or watching football or movies rather than exploring the infinite potential for learning available on the net. So we asked “Why?” and in answering that question, we identified 3 main reasons for the trend.

? First is the prohibitive cost of streaming educational videos, downloading content or subscribing to learning sites that are not free. The design and format of most learning content puts the cost of accessing them beyond the reach of the average student. Simply put, WhatsApp and Facebook are cheaper.

? Reason number 2 is the opportunity cost for students to do other things that are more fun and less mentally tasking than learning or studying. This is the distraction factor. If it’s not FUN, it’s not ON. At least not for a long time. Learning requires focused attention. Many students tune OFF of educational sites and learning content because they are not as fun, engaging and interactive as the alternative. It takes a lot of mental stamina for a student to stay tuned ON to study in an ocean of countless distractions and cheaper fun options.

? Number 3 is that the reward system for sticking to educational content online is not as immediate, cumulative and (curiously) peer-acknowledged as the reward system for, say, winning a tournament on Android games, Candy Crush Saga, Xbox or PlayStation 4. More so, it is not yet integrated into schoolwork, test scores or exam scores. As long as students do not see any immediate, direct and measurable benefit from it other than just being a nerd, they are likely to go with cheaper and more fun.

Our take: Learning and educational resources must be increasingly accessible (in our hands, literally), affordable (cheaper), relatable (more fun), rewarding (our basic instinct) and usable (user-friendly) for them to be actually used and maximized by students and teachers alike.

 ← The Past (2010-2020)

In the last 10 years, digital awareness and use of digital technology have grown in the educational sector in Nigeria. Back in 2010, access to digital technology was a big deal. At the university level, GSM was like pure water but most students did not have smartphones and laptops. Those that did were the exception. Digital banking, online shopping, Facetime, even Facebook and Skype were for the Big Boys and Big Girls. At this time there was no WhatsApp or Instagram or Snapchat. Google Search was still alien to many of us. As Okey Uzoechina aptly captured in the book, Future Governance, writing your Project in final year or even conducting research on a topic back then meant long and painfully slow hours of “night browsing”. The reverse is now the case.

I remember my days as an undergraduate student of Economics at Anambra State University (ANSU) between 2013 and 2016 where we had an ICT Centre (Afrihub) which was used mostly for tutorials and conducting GST examinations. That system had major accessibility challenges; we had unsteady power supply and very slow and unreliable internet network for the school community because the infrastructure was constantly overloaded. This example highlights teething problems and institutional failure to provide adequate facility and access to digital learning opportunities. On the flip side, about 70% of the students owned or had access to a smartphone or smart device, about 50% had laptops. Students still relied on their own resources to access learning content on the internet for assignments and research even though such cost was usually captured in tuition fees. As I remember, most students also used their devices for things other learning.

A significant trend in digital learning in the last 10 years is the rise of African digital learning platforms. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) like EdX, Coursera, Udemy and Udacity had taken off in the US and Europe in the same period. At home, African ICT innovators and EdTech entrepreneurs are going the extra mile to make learning resources more relatable and useable by Africans. So today, in addition to global learning platforms, we have our own Slatecube, Gidi Mobile, Eneza Education and others which are designed to cater to the peculiar needs of African learners and the learning environment.

Challenges remain, however. Number 1: data is not cheap (as per student level) and offline platforms and resources may have limited functionality. They are not as interactive and real-time feedback is disabled. Data subscriptions are becoming more affordable with time and with more open and competitive markets and we expect this trend to continue into the future.

Governments and institutions of higher learning are also adjusting to the global move towards digitization by adopting enabling laws, policies and practices. For instance, Section 6 of Nigeria’s National Policy on Education 2013 makes elaborate provisions for upscaling digital learning in our education sector. Minimum requirements for coursework, assignments and standard examinations such as JAMB, UTME and NECO are now going digital. Students are already tuned ON to the digital wavelength. An important gap that must be breached in the digital wavelength is to improve the digital skills of tens of thousands of schoolteachers at all levels to make the best of tools and resources for teaching and learning.

Our take: Life is getting better. Learning and educational resources are now more accessible and are becoming cheaper to access and more user-friendly. However, there is still a huge deficit in bridging the digital divide between students and teachers and making educational resources more affordable, relatable and rewarding.

→ The Future (2020-2030)

With incremental advancements in ICT and digital learning, the future is limitless. A lot is changing and more changes will come. 10 years from now, it is predicted that 80% of global learning will be digitized, 90% of jobs globally would require digital skills, and our conventional educational curriculum will gradually become obsolete. This is good news. However, this means that we need to keep pace with the dizzying speed of development in the ICT sector; and the education sector needs to keep pace with the dizzying speed of development in other sectors that have traditionally become early adopters of ICT and new technology such as banking, commerce and entertainment. Anything less and we will fall far behind.

In many parts of Africa, higher education institutions now see the practicality and wisdom in getting connected to global digital libraries and academic databases such as JSTOR and ScienceDirect as a way to complement the stocks in our physical libraries and expand access to learning resources in all disciplines. By way of institutional subscription, millions of books, journals, articles, collections, dissertations, presentations, videos, demos and other resources become accessible, affordable, relatable and useable by the students and teachers. As more people get tuned ON, digital learning becomes more efficient, effective and expedient.

Our take: By 2030, life will be nearly unrecognizable from where we are today. We’re talking about self-driving cars, regular space travel, 3D printing and (possibly) on-demand download of entire topics and subject areas into our brains with little or no “mediated communication” via any device. Digital learning will become the norm and not the exception. Many schools, school communities and urban centres in Africa will be fully integrated and compliant with digital learning.

??? What is your take on the future of digital learning? Share your thoughts.

 EduTrust Foundation Mapping

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