What+will+work+for+Africa?


 * In the developed world: **

Retaining online students in higher education is multifactorial with internal factors identified as being more influential (Park and Choi, 2009). Successful strategies share these characteristics:
 * the institution will have an attrition management plan
 * enrollments are managed so that the course can be responsive to learning needs and characteristics
 * the institution employs course design that allows information about the learners to be collected
 * the institution will personalize and tailor learning experiences.


 * In Africa: **

Much rests on environmental, political and social situations that are out of the control of individuals. T he learner and external factors create greater barriers for online learners and addressing internal factors is more challenging for institutions in Africa.




 * So, how might it play out? **

One hypothesis is that Africa will follow the same approaches to online higher education that the developed world has. There is evidence of policy-makers “jumping on the bandwagon” the same way that institutions did in the early days of online learning in the developed world. This could mean that the African students’ access to online courses will follow a similar pace and error rate, and with the same attrition rates, as the developed world.

An alternate hypothesis would see African learning communities evolving strategies to suit their local contexts more rapidly than the developed world has done and compacting the timeframes involved in realising the potential of online learning. There are certainly opportunities for corporations to use their money wisely and set up home-grown courses that lever off the all the best that is known about education to make life-saving changes in Africa. Africa may also benefit from its prior lack of higher educational resourcing because there is an opportunity to build integrated regional, national and geographical solutions.

Another possibility is that the provision of higher education to those in Africa may bypass the processes that the developed world has set up. The complexities and inequities for the developing world are well documented and there have been a variety of ways trialled (radio, television) to educate citizens (Gulati, 2008; Wright and Reju, 2012; Xin, Jian and Yanhui, 2010). The graph below demonstrates what African elearning practitioners see as being the changes in learning technology in Africa.

 Isaacs S, Hollow D, Akoh B, and Harper-Merrett T., 2013 Findings from the eLearning Africa Survey 2013., in Isaacs S (ed) 2013. The eLearning Africa Report, ICWE: Germany <span style="color: #272627; font-family: Frutiger-Light,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5;">Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs)

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 140%;">With this in mind, fully online courses as used in the developed world may not be the way learning technology develops in Africa. What if it abandoned the concept of enrollments and graduations and concentrated on sharing knowledge via Open Educational Resources (OER's)?

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<span style="background-color: #c0c0c0; color: #0000ff; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 140%;">What do you think will happen?