Universities had to deal with many anxieties and uncertainties during the early days of the COVID pandemic. One of these was how to move all of their teaching online. For some, the process was fairly simple as they had already been offering blended online and in-person lessons.
But many were caught on the wrong foot. We wanted to know how the pandemic had affected training and technology adoption by lecturers at open distance learning institutions in Africa. To find out, we conducted research at two of the continent’s biggest open distance universities – one in Nigeria and one in South Africa.
We found that, as was the case for many higher education institutions, neither institution was ready at the start of the pandemic for the move to entirely online teaching. This is even though both universities in our study were already using some online learning management…
