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Executive summary

According to Kolesnikova (2010), the spread of Internet-based information sources and communication technologies requires educators to rethink their methods and goals in order to maximize the potential of the new opportunities. This is imperative of Uganda as well because of the challenges faced when providing higher education in tertiary and universities. Among these are lack of academic structures, poor infrastructure, lack of books, failure to pay tuition fees as well as social issues related to the family. Providentially, the widespread internet distribution by MTN, Airtel, Africell, Smile, UTL telecommunication companies, communication technologies and mobile devices in Uganda would be used to avail opportunities for higher education for those that qualify using open education (OE). Open education is recommended because study materials and study progress can be easily accessed, assessed, regulated, monitored and facilitated using digital platforms. Moreover, it can be assumed that all the targeted learners own a smartphone or more. Study devices will this not be a challenge.

Taking advantage of Open Educational Resources (OER) and, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) which the academic institutions in developed countries have freely availed to promote all education for all would be an enhancement to Uganda’s higher education.  However, the success of Open education lays on a strong political will which will influence the structural, cultural and agential factors that can enable the adaptation of open education through policy. It is on this basis that this report is addressed to the Uganda National Council for Higher Education (NCHE), which was established to implement the University and Other Tertiary Act of Parliament (2001) as the regulator of higher education. The NCHE is in position to advocate, implement and monitor the establishment of open education in Uganda.

 

The Transformative Role of Higher Education in National Development

Uganda’s vision is “A Transformed Ugandan Society from a Peasant to a Modern and Prosperous Country within 30 years”. In the country’s vision, core projects have been identified for example a hi-tech city, large irrigation schemes, mining industries, airports, oil and gas, and nuclear power among others. These projects require high skilled human capital, yet the results of the 2014 census showed that it is inadequately skilled labour force (Uganda Bureau of Statistics 2017).

According to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) (2017), indicate the number of students enrolled in Uganda ‘s tertiary education level, as a percentage of the population of official school age (for the tertiary level) was only four percent. Overall only 11% of the population aged 22-25years had completed tertiary and university education. Moreover, youths (persons 18 – 30 Years) constituted 23% of the total population. Moreover, in the same report, it was observed that those who attained higher education had higher levels of income and opportunities to create jobs. This implies that in order develop, the government of Uganda must invest in higher education.

Commendable efforts have been made in this regard, though have yielded minimal results due to overwhelming challenges and minimal resources invested. In his paper about the challenges facing Universities in Uganda, Ssengendo (2012) enumerates a litany of challenges affecting both public and private universities. These include: lack of funding, shortage of academic staff, demotivated staff, the poor quality of students who lack adequate writing, speaking and social skills, failure to manage human diversity, competition, brain-drain, unprofessional conduct on the part of some staff,  sexual harassment, selling and purchasing of marks,   examination malpractices,  marking the scripts. Poor facilities, lack of adequate lecture rooms, library space, and related academic structures like offices and furniture. These are in addition to high levels of poverty where many students fail to raise tuition fees as well as meeting their basic needs to keep them at university. All these impede universities to give quality education, research, innovation and community services. Given the significance of higher education to national development, it is timely for Uganda to adapt open education for its higher education section because it can mitigate most of the challenges above.

Understanding and Justifying Open Education 

According to Opensource.com (2019), open education is a philosophy about the way people should produce, share, and build on knowledge.  Proponents of open education believe everyone in the world should have access to high-quality educational experiences and resources and they work to eliminate barriers to this goal. Such barriers might include high monetary costs, outdated or obsolete materials, and legal mechanisms that prevent collaboration among scholars and educators. Precisely, open education implies of education for all, open access to programs, open access to courses, open course material, open research and open data. This affirms what Nyaberg (2010) illustrates as being open to a) educational resources, b) learner’s needs, c) learning services, d) teaching efforts and e) employability capabilities development. Open education is effected through OERs and MOOCs.

For Van Damme (2017) Open educational resources are digital learning resources offered online (although sometimes in print) freely and openly to teachers, educators, students, and independent learners in order to be used, shared, combined, adapted, and expanded in teaching, learning and research. They include learning content, software tools to develop, use and distribute, and implementation resources such as open licenses. The learning content is educational material of a wide variety, from full courses to smaller units such as diagrams or test questions. It may include text, images, audio, video, simulations, games, portals and the like. These are used by OER initiatives given by Coursera, BCcampus, Futurelearn and openlearn.

Open education is made possible through an evolution of educational technologies such as projectors, desktop computers, radio, television. The virtual learning environment VLE online tutor forums. Right now, we have mobile learning devices such as cameras, smartphones, laptops and tablets. Through research, open education has adapted more interactive technologies which combine some technologies and can allow groups to work spontaneously from different spaces at their convenience. Among these are padlet, thinglink, Web.2.0 facebook, Whatsapp, twitter, blogs.

 

Not different from the traditional face-to-face system, open educations pedagogy is informed and informs learning approaches of cooperative learning, constructive learning, individual learning, collaborative learning. All these are informed through learning theories of cognitive, connectivism, behaviour and social constructivism theories. It is for this reason that open education operates in a cycle, especially at the level of OER. Hodgkinson-Williams, & Arinto (2017) show that OER is a component of open education cycle which is comprised of:

1.      Conceptualisation phase (planning what OER and which pedagogical strategies are most suitable for which context)

2.      A Creation phase ( development of original material for self use)

3.      Use phase (use or “locate” modified),

4.      Adoption phase (being customised, revised or modified or both. Remixed with more than one set of OER)

From the above image, we can affirm that open education does not in any way compromise academic quality. It is critically designed and regulated through creative commons licenses. On the introduction of OER in Uganda, it would be ideal to use of the creative commons license called Attribute-ShareAlike 2.0. Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0). Under this license, one can share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. The OER in this arrangement can also be adapted (remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms if one follows the license terms of attribution and share-alike. I recommend this CC license because, through attribution, it ensures the required academic quality by preventing the temptation to plagiarise. It also allows commercial use whereby based on the intensified need for OER, through the UNCHE, private practitioners can be engaged and regulated in reproducing and distributing to remote areas at a subsidized fee. This would promote innovations and job creation to the remote areas where otherwise nobody would be motivated thus excluding the rural areas from participation in open education.  Besides it is a tendency of Ugandans to value and sustain something they have spent money on, than not.  Furthermore, based on the study in Portugal’s public universities, it was found that academic staff want to be acknowledged when they have produced OERs (Cardoso, Morgado, Teixeira, 2019). The acknowledgment in Uganda is also a basis for academic promotion, the chosen licence would motivate staff and build scholarship but also promote academic mobility.

 

Benefits of Open Education

Open education if adapted in Uganda would enable many potential candidates that qualify for tertiary or university education to get a quality education. Similar challenges in Uganda were prevalent in New York City where 54% of the students in the City University of New York (CUNY) qualified for financial aid because were from the minority and poor groups. However, with the adaptation of OER pedagogical approaches by introducing Zero Textbook Costs (ZTC) courses, many students were able to save money and spend on other costs to keep them in school. The student confessed to accessing OER on their mobile devices and improving in their academic performances.  The adaptation of OER through ZTC, enabled the university to save $9.5m and impacted 76000 students in the first year of the project. Moreover, they were targeting 260000 students in the second year of the project (Brandle, Katz, Hays, et al 2019). This success story of Open Education Practices (OEP) would be benchmarked to Uganda and would solve many problems and enable more students to get higher education.

Kolesnikov (2010) urges that open education is good for people who seek to; upgrade the level of their professional and general education, to acquire an education of the needed level by enrolling in any educational institution of the open type, as well as  maintain one’s ability to compete in the labor market. Faced with the challenges of universities in Uganda, adoption of Open education would be helpful in various courses. This is because open education integrates formal education, informal education, continuous education, professional education apprenticeship and edutainment. Society being dynamic, open education provides room for continuous learning to update knowledge, skills.

 

It also allows one to get exposed to international affairs and approaches. It also avails room for self-study, especially in languages. Often times, Ugandans have been limited due to lack of knowledge of another foreign language except English. This denies them opportunities to work the United Nations or in other countries which are not anglophone. With open education, enthusiastic students may learn other foreign languages like French, Spanish, Chinese through self-study. This has been successful in a South University of Thailand, where students use Tell-Me-More (TMM) a language learning technology to teach themselves English. Although the study indicate that the students needed a lot of self-discipline to learn and master the language, to the extent that some did not achieve their goals, several were proud they succeeded (Gyamfi, Sukseemuang,  Tantiwich, and  Kaewkong,  2019).  Through self, study, the students will add value to themselves out of their own initiative. This implies that if adapted, Ugandan human resource would be open to working in another country, thus promote labour mobility, increase on the possibility for foreign income exchange and well as benchmarking technologies that can improve on the country’s development.  Open education is not limited to students alone, it is equally beneficial to staff especially academic staff.

 

For academic staff, OE allows access to global networks which are good to benchmark and share modern pedagogical, research and publication skills.  Open education leads to the emergence of new kinds of professional and pedagogical activity and new specialties. It is on this basis that Van Damme (2015) urges that OER support innovative pedagogies through changing the role of learners from passive consumers to active producers, fostering peer-to-peer learning, stimulating problem-based learning, enriching learning resources through collaborative practice and enhancing the social and emotional context of learning.

Policy Factors enabling the creation, use, adaptability of open education

Orr, Rimini and Van Damme (2015) argue that policy support is necessary for OER to reach their full potential as a social innovation. To this aim, policymakers should focus on the OER funding, OER use, the regulations for their production and providing a central repository for openly licensed OER. In Uganda, despite the significant of OER in solving challenges of higher education, without the political will, it is unlikely that OE can be sufficiently adopted. In the same way, Hodgkinson-Williams, and Arinto  (2017) also present factors  influencing OER as are 1) structural factors,  2) cultural factors and agential factors as illustrated in image below:

 

 

From the above image, we can affirm that although open education appears to solve many problems in the traditional system, it is important to note that it is not a magic bullet. It will only be functional until some factors are in place to enable availability, use, and sharing of OER. Among these are:  Infrastructure (ICT, Internet connectivity, electricity), financial resources human resource, ongoing research, educational technology networks, educational technologies logistics, publicity, the right attitude, good governance, ethical behavior, functional stakeholders’ networks e.g. ministry of education, education institutions, industry, and NGOs, Public service and employers. The UNCHE, therefore, must devise strategies to ensure publicize the advantages of open education, its justification as an alternative paradigm as well as making a proper design for its adaption, implementation and monitoring. As an innovation in the education sector, it is important to benchmark open education practices from other countries in order to minimize the risks or mitigate them. 

 

Risks of Open Education

Based on the context of Russia,  Kolesnikova (2010), observes that  despite the benefits of open education,  having open access to the international educational space also increases the degree of professional and personality risks. The fact that open education automatically implies internationality, Uganda needs to take caution on these risks for it is not immune. The other danger Uganda would have it that there is a possibility of taking on old models which developed countries dropped due to several challenges. This would be the first risk that Uganda should watch out. Other risks as presented which Uganda would also suffer are: Information overload, temptations for various kinds of cultural expansion, loss of loss of focus (globalization versus localization debate) and culture shock from the encounter with educational practices on a fundamentally different level

There is also uncritical borrowing of educational models without consideration of existing traditions and possible consequences that can lead to the destruction of one’s own cultural identity.

The syndrome of project network “dependency,” a habit of constantly taking part in all kinds of international educational demonstrations and events as an end. It has been observed that in some universities, the staff does not give physical presence for they are more on travel than in class. This is fatigue but also compromise academic quality though, in reality, these movements make the university profile ranking higher. It may be beneficial to the university but not allow learners to benefit from the availability of their lecturer.

There is a risk, on the nature of information shared. Since time immemorial, all communities have had secluded information that can be accessed through socially acceptable ways such as initiation, ordination, circumcision, and graduation. However, in OER, such information is not clearly protected and perhaps might lead to abuse or misuse.

The other risk is a failure to ensure quality whereby teachers are not trained in open education practices, which may lead to challenges of methodological confusion.  This will be made worse by unfortunate realities of most lecturers not being sure of their tenure. The majority are part-time or on contract, therefore, this uncertainty makes most of them pre-occupied by thinking about means of survival. It is unlikely that such the academic staff will do the needful to develop, use, or remix OER. This was already found by Hodgkinson-Williams, & Arinto (2017) who carried out empirical research and found out that adoption and use of OER in the global south is already lacking as presented in the image below.

With the above observation in the image, it is possible to open education will not be contextualised, to solve local problems and may not thus contribute to national development.  The UNCHE ought to influence the availability of funding, human resource acquisition, and other basic infrastructure if open education is to be adapted and to be functional.  

Conclusion and the way forward

In a recap, it is important to acknowledge that open education is the way to go for Uganda’s high education.  In Uganda, open education is timely because the country has potentials for its use, yet it is facing many challenges in the traditional face-to-face system that impede the provision of quality higher education. Moreover, other sectors which are also important in development such as roads, agriculture, construction, security, health, all demand money on the national budget.  It is based on this that the UNCHE should advocate for open education because as the case was in City University in New York ZTC courses, even in Uganda, some reasonable amount of money will initially be invested in the project but in the short time, a lot of saving will be realized and more learners will benefit. In this, there will be minimizing costs and maximizing academic services and output. We need to acknowledge that based on the significance of education in the formation of human capital and workforce, education needs to be given priority in funding because this investment will give a direct impact to other sectors. As observed early in literature, open education can only be implemented successfully through political will. Despite a few risks, I can affirm that the benefits outweigh the risks. Moreover, the risks would perhaps be avoided if the UNCHE learned from the literature and the OEP of other countries that adapted OE before introducing it to Uganda.  

 References

Bates, T. (2015), ‘What do we mean by open in education?’ [Online].https://www.tonybates.ca/2015/02/16/what-do-we-mean-by-open-in-education/ (Accessed 15^th May 2019).

BCcampus, https://open.bccampus.ca/ (Accessed 15^th May 2019)

Brandle, S., Katz, S., Hays, et al (2019) ‘But What Do The Students Think: Results of the CUNY Cross-Campus Zero-Textbook Cost Student Survey’. Open Praxis, vol. 11 issue 1, January–March 2019, pp. 85–101[Online]. https://openpraxis.org/index.php/OpenPraxis/article/download/956/525 (Accessed 15^th May 2019).

Cardoso, P. Morgado, L, Teixeira, A., (2019) ‘Open Practices in Public Higher Education in Portugal: Faculty Perspectives’. Open Praxis, vol. 11 issue 1, January–March 2019, pp. 55–70[Online]. https://openpraxis.org/index.php/OpenPraxis/article/download/956/525 (Accessed 15^th May 2019).

Coursera https://www.coursera.org/ (Accessed 15^th May 2019).

Future learn https://www.futurelearn.com/ (Accessed 15^th May 2019).

 Gyamfi, G.,  Sukseemuang, P.,  Tantiwich, K., Kaewkong, P.,  (2019) ‘Self-Study with the Educational Technology Tell Me More: What EFL Learners do’ . Open Praxis, vol. 11 issue 1, January–March 2019, pp. 103–116 [Online]. https://openpraxis.org/index.php/OpenPraxis/article/download/956/525 (Accessed 15^th May 2019).

Hodgkinson-Williams, C. & Arinto, P. B. (2017) Adoption and impact of OER in the Global South. Cape Town & Ottawa: African Minds, International Development Research Centre & Research on Open Educational Resources.

Kolesnikova, A.  (2010) ‘The Prospects, Challenges, and Risks of Open Education’, Russian Education & Society, 52:6, 3-20.

Nyaberg, D.  (2010) The Philosophy of Open Education. New York: Routledge.

Open University of UK. https://www.open.edu/openlearn/free-courses (Accessed 15^th May 2019)

Orr, D., Rimini, M.  and  Van Damme, D.  (2015) Open Educational Resources: A Catalyst for Innovation, Educational Research and Innovation, OECD Publishing, Paris.

Ronald, M., (2016) ‘Open Education and the Hidden Tariff. In: OEGlobal 2016: Convergence through Collaboration’, 12-14 of Apr, Krakow, Poland.

Ssengendo, A.,  (2012) Challenges Facing Universities in Uganda in UVCF BULLETIN VOLUME 1  [P.17- 39] https://uvcf.ac.ug/images/UVCF1.pdf (Accessed 15^th May 2019).

Uganda Bureau of Statistics (2017)  The National Population and Housing Census 2014 – Education in the Thematic Report Series, Kampala, Uganda. [Online]. https://www.ubos.org/wp-content/uploads/publications/03_2018Education_Monograph_Report_Final_08-12-2017.pdf