2023-10-18 14:28:22
The reasons for this sad and bitter disorganization could essentially be subdivided into two categories: internal crises linked to the main actors of the higher education system and external crises such as Covid-19 or the recent political situation having caused damage to social and educational campuses.
The most curious thing about this recurring problem with very harmful consequences, especially for students, is our indifferent fatalism or our incomprehensible inability to provide one or more solutions. It is not uncommon to see students, without ever having repeated a year, obtain their Master’s degrees after seven years instead of five, or overlapping academic years or even Master classes which remain until the end of July supposed to be the closing date for holidays without starting classes.
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The purpose of this contribution is not to make a diagnosis of the various ills of the Senegalese public university. Above all, for us, it is a question of analyzing the contribution or the effects or the impact of the adoption of online teaching to initiate at least a real partial solution to the problem of the university calendar. So we would first need to comb through the various initiatives taken within our universities. This is our way of posing the debate which will be open and even contradictory which we hope will be fruitful for better well-being at the university. We also provide readers and stakeholders with a set of proposals, most of which are taken from our research work on the theme of online teaching.
Senegalese public universities all have online teaching platforms. During the period when face-to-face courses were stopped, the approaches to educational continuity differed from one university to another. In some universities, the combination of learning in synchronous and asynchronous mode was recommended while the latter was favored for other institutions. Let us stay in the case of the Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar (UCAD), the largest of all, with realities that are also more diverse and more complex.
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The UCAD academic council which met on June 12, 2023, after the acts of ransacking and destruction perpetrated at the university, made the decision to resume educational activities in a distance learning format and to later face-to-face remediation before learner evaluations. The Distance Training (FAD) platforms are operational at the level of UCAD establishments. They have practically all the basic functionalities of Moodle which is a reference learning platform.
UCAD’s FAD platforms were infrastructures for depositing or storing educational content that students had to download. Teachers submitted their content, each in their own way, and often in a single PDF or PowerPoint file. In this case, what is the difference for the student to go online and find well-designed and very well-structured courses?
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Could we do better or simply can we do better? Obviously yes! It is not late because we will more and more often find ourselves in the need to teach online. We hope that the Distance Training Institute (ISFAD) which has just been set up will provide suitable answers. In the meantime, we make the following proposals.
• Better awareness and training of teaching staff and students are more than necessary. It will be necessary to introduce these players to all the possibilities offered by FAD platforms, from submitting a file to integrating video for example, the tools to integrate while emphasizing the specificities.
• – The implementation of educational engineering within the departments allows for real support from teachers who are not only involved upstream but will be able to qualitatively structure the learning content.
• – An incentive for students to use FAD platforms where they will find well-scripted courses.
• – The establishment of documentation (text, audio, or video) intended for teachers and which covers the main tasks relating to the use of FAD platforms and the related functionalities.
• – The establishment of documentation dedicated to learners for better use of the platforms.
FAD platforms must be supplemented with synchronous and interactive aspects to achieve real online training. Technology makes it possible to have virtual classes that come almost perfectly close to face-to-face teaching conditions with real-time sharing of audio, video, slides, whiteboard, chat, the screen. This is possible even in environments where internet connection is limited.
An online teaching platform offering full functionality is accessible to our universities with well-aware and trained actors, for the interest of the university community especially in times of trouble.
Gervais Mendy and Samuel Ouya
Full professors
Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar
1697639449
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