We've gone and digitised primary education before university

The government has spent — and will continue to spend — billions to integrate ICT in our primary schools courtesy of the laptop project.

In another eight years, these young pupils will enter secondary schools and then join our many local universities.

What will they find in terms of ICTs at tertiary level? Most likely they will experience a "walk-into-the-past" moment, since the level of ICT integration in our tertiary institutions is extremely wanting.

In fact, it would have been worse, had it not been for the efforts of the Kenya Education Network (KENET), a non-profit membership organisation that aims to provide affordable Internet connectivity for tertiary institutions.

Whereas KENET has succeeded in making Internet resources available for research and teaching, there is very little evidence that universities are indeed leveraging and integrating this into their workflows.

This is because universities need a lot of internal infrastructure and capacity in order to exploit the Internet connectivity offered by KENET.

The blame is big enough to spread around. Top on the blame list are university administrators, who commit scant budgetary resources to enhancing ICT capabilities.

This means that lecturers and students may not have sufficient workstations or computer labs to take advantage of Internet resources.

Furthermore, even if lecturers made the decision to buy their own devices, they may discover that they cannot use them in lecture halls that lack basic amenities like power sockets or LCD-projectors.

Many local universities still imagine a classroom to be made up of a blackboard, four empty walls and students. This faulty thinking implies that lecturers are conditioned to deliver lessons in the same way that they were delivered 30 or 60 years ago.

OUT OF SYNC

This is where the next blame falls. This so-called "chalk and talk" approach, where the lecturer acts as the single source of knowledge, is completely outdated.

More often than not, the lecturers' source of knowledge is limited to the "yellow notes" they perhaps inherited from their own lecturers more than one generation ago.

Today’s lecture halls should be highly ICT-integrated so as to enable the lecturer to deliver a highly digitised learning experience to students.

The lecturer is no longer the single source of knowledge, but is instead a facilitator and guide to the up-to-date knowledge reservoir known as the Internet.

Instead of walking around with old yellow notes, today’s lecturer should upgrade to a laptop and walk into a classroom that is sufficiently wired and equipped to connect to relevant Internet resources.

Once the basic principles have been explained, lecturers should encourage students to interact, review, explore and solve problems by referencing online resources. This enriches and expands the knowledge and creativity of the students.

Today more than ever, the world’s complex problems require the multidisciplinary, collaborative approach inherent in digital teaching and learning frameworks.

Education, particularly at tertiary level, should never be about what the student crammed from the lecturer, but rather about how they used that basic knowledge to tap into the Internet in search of solutions to pressing problems.

Unless and until tertiary institutions understand this and make deliberate efforts to invest in digital learning frameworks and platforms, our students may graduate with a mentality that is out of sync with the modern world.

The ICT push may have started with primary schools, but it is also high time we embraced technology in teaching at our institutions of higher learning.

Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT. Email: [email protected], Twitter: @jwalu