By Jerome Terpase Dooga
Introduction
The University of Jos has pursued initiatives to integrate educational technology or elearning to enhance the teaching and learning experience and expand the possibilities and frontiers of academic research. Now, another giant stride has been made: the University has introduced mobile learning. This article examines how it all began.
An Abridged Historical Background
The University of Jos has been making efforts to implement eLearning for over a decade. eLearning is the pedagogical and methodological approach to teaching and learning that incorporates some form of technology mediated artifact to support, enhance or expand the possibilities for the learner and in some cases ease the work of the instructor. Web-based educational technology especially makes it easier to share learning resources, set up collaboration between learners and affords the instructor greater opportunities to scaffold individual and group learner activity. At the University of Jos, several years of donor funding from Carnegie, Hewlett Packard (HP), the World Bank and (in the last year and half) the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa Educational Technology Initiative (PHEA ETI) have provided both the structures and skill-base to enable lecturers engage with students on Moodle, the University’s official Learning Management System (LMS) and on other platforms such as Classroom Presenter in Mathematics.
The Need for eLearning
The need to re-think alternative modes of learner engagement arose out of a number of factors: the escalating student enrolments in the face of stagnant and progressively diminishing institutional infrastructure, such as lecture halls, teaching staff, labs, etc; the growing diversity among learners; the availability of technologies that have potential for learner engagement, and the desire to adopt teaching practices that are in tune with current academic practices in the global academic community.
Obstacles to Implementation
Although many acknowledge that technology-mediated learning is one way of addressing some of these educational challenges, Faculty uptake has been slow, mainly due to scepticism from stakeholders as well as distrust of the enabling/supporting technology structures within the system. For instance, many are not sure the University network is vibrant enough to support elearning. Others complain that power supply is too unreliable to meaningfully engage in serious and sustained academic engagement using elearning. Still others worry that the University does not have sufficient computers for every student. Some complain that lecturers and students do not have the needed skills to manipulate computers for learning, even if these are available. There is even a section of the community that is yet to be convinced that elearning has any useful contribution to academic teaching and learning or has a place in higher education at all.
Early Adopters (Guinea Pigs)
In spite of all these concerns, the Departments of English and Mathematics have taken up the challenge and introduced blended elearning in some of their course offerings, providing their departments as guinea pigs to test the initiative on their platforms. The blended approach combines face to face (f2f) instruction with online interaction. One advantage of the approach is that it is largely asynchronous, meaning that learners do not need to all go online at the same time to carry out an activity. It is therefore possible for learners to meaningfully share available institutional computers, to cope with power outages, and make progress even with slow internet connection and unstable computer networks. These two departments have become both early adopters and champions, and as is the case with guinea pigs, they are surfacing the challenges of adoption through their practice, engaging with the possibilities and determining what has worked, what will work, as well as what is not workable. Other departments and faculties now standing by and watching will benefit from the results of this experiment.
eLearning in the Department of English
In the Department of English, The English Language I and II (ENG 101 and ENG 102), Discourse Analysis (ENG 306) and more recently Principles of Translation (ENG 518) have been taught using the blended approach. Since 2007, the number of students in the Department who have experienced some form of blended learning in three of the courses has averaged 350 each session. Students are able to access lecture notes on Moodle, the Learning Management System thereby freeing the face to face (f2f) meetings in class for meaningful listening and active engagement, instead of the distraction of trying to copy imperfect notes. The system has also made it possible to set up active and meaningful student peer-to-peer engagement using Online Forums. This feature has been especially successful in the Discourse Analysis course, where it has been repeatedly and extensively used. Students have also used the online learning platform to carry out practice self-tests to build their confidence and provide formative self evaluation of their learning process. It has also been used for quizzes and graded student assessments. Students are also provided with links to other online websites that provide additional resources, drills, illustrations and demonstrations (see especially the ENG 101 site). Still, there have been problems.
Challenges to Student Training
At the start of each semester or session, students enrolled in courses which have been designed for the blended format are registered online for the courses. In addition, such students are given orientation in the use of Moodle. Such orientation covers such topics as, student username and password, how to login, how to change password, how to access lecture notes and other online resources (journal articles, etc), how to use the Forums feature, how to use the self-test quizzes, how to ask questions using the mail feature in Moodle and receive instructor feedback and how to submit assignments online in Moodle. Over the years, this student enrolment and orientation has suffered a major setback: Many students join the class late, sometimes several weeks into the semester. They thereby miss the orientation. Second, as a result of such lateness, they have to be registered online individually, piecemeal, which creates enormous logistic problems for the instructor. Almost every week, a student shows up requesting to be registered online. Moodle has a feature for self-registration, but with many students having no prior knowledge of computer use, it is challenging if they are asked to self-register. In some institutions, the Management Information System (MIS) student registration database automatically enrols students online in the courses they have selected. It is hoped that such synchronization will soon become possible and thus solve this problem. In more recent times, a new problem arose that threatened students’ continued engagement with elearning in the Department of English: The problem of insecurity.
Introducing mLearning
In asynchronous blended elearning, students engage online after their lecture hours, usually in the evenings and on weekends. However, the recent Jos crises made it dangerous for students to venture out of their accommodations to access the internet. At the same time that this challenge was becoming apparent, a new possibility began to emerge. More and more students were acquiring mobile phones that had capacity for internet connectivity. Thus students began to complain of their inability to access the internet. Some said they could see the site, but were unable to access resources or carry out any activity. Upon investigation, it turned out that these students were using their hand-held devices, such as mobile phones. But Moodle had not been configured to be accessed on mobile devices. So, the University elearning team went to work.
Early in January 2011, the MLE (mobile learning engine) feature was integrated into Moodle. This feature opened the way for students with mobile applications which have internet access to access learning resources in their course, collaborate in group work with their peers, carry out self-test quizzes online, ask questions on the subject matter and receive feedback on their phones, sometimes in real time, write and submit assignments anywhere, anytime. It also drastically diminished the problem of inadequate computers and epileptic power supply, since internet access could be achieved on mobile phones. Most of all, it means that now, all students who have an internet-active phone can use such a device, not only as a social tool but also as a functional learning tool. Up to the time this article was prepared, students of the Department of English were the first (perhaps even the only) ones using the mobile feature, especially in the postgraduate translation course and the first year courses. With these efforts, surely, learning English has become easier.
• Jerome Terpase Dooga is of the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Jos, Nigeria. Email: zwakausu@gmail.com; zwakausu@yahoo.com; doogaj@unijos.edu.ng Phone: +2348036286166
