Saide presentation at the ICT in Higher Education Conference, 14 - 17 September 2012, Kempton Park, Johannesburg. Theme: "An African Perspective". Presentation on the challenges and opportunities for ICT integration in Higher Education. It includes case studies on PHEA ETI and OER Africa.

1. ICT Integration in Higher
Education:
Challenges and Opportunities
Greig Krull
Saide
15 August 2012

2. Agenda
• Context – Motivators and Constraints
• ICT Integration in the areas of Higher Education
– Research, Teaching, Administration
• Challenges and Opportunities
– Environmental, Institutional, People, Technology, Learning
• Case Studies
– Partnership for Higher Education
– OER Africa
• Discussion

3. Key Trends in Higher Education
People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and
wherever they want to
Technologies used are increasingly cloud-based, and notions of IT
support are decentralised
World of work is increasingly collaborative, driving changes in the way
student projects are structured
Abundance of resources / relationships via the Internet is increasingly
challenging us to revisit our roles as educators
Shifting education paradigms to include online learning, hybrid learning
and collaborative models
New emphasis on more challenge-based and active learning
The NMC Horizon Report: 2012 Higher Education Edition

4. Significant Challenges
Economic pressures and new models of education are bringing greater
competition to higher education
Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag the emergence of new scholarly
forms of authoring, publishing, and researching
Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in
every discipline
Institutional barriers present formidable challenges to moving forward
with emerging technologies
Challenges for libraries and university collections: how scholarship is
documented, and the business models to support these activities
The NMC Horizon Report: 2012 Higher Education Edition

5. Context
1. What is your biggest motivator to integrate ICT into
your teaching and learning?
2. What is your biggest constraint to integrate ICT into
your teaching and learning?

6. Motivators and Constraints

8. ICTs in Higher Education Areas
Research Teaching
Administration

9. How do you use ICT in?
1. Research 2. Teaching
3. Administration

10. ICTs in Higher Education

11. Types of Challenges
Environment Institutions
People Technology
Learning

12. Environmental Challenges
• People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever
and wherever they want to
• Limited Regional Infrastructure
– Electricity
– Access to resources
• High cost of bandwidth
• Sustainability
• Lack of national development, education and ICT policies

13. Environmental Interventions
• Articulate a vision and a strategic framework for harnessing
the potential of ICTs to address a country's development
challenges
• Government focus on overarching and guiding national
telecommunications and ICT policies, particularly as they
relate to ICTs in education
• Increase access to broadband
• Partnerships between institutions, governments and
businesses

14. People Challenges
• Not all staff are ICT literate and can teach using ICT tools
• Extra effort and time involved in using technologies
• Lack of readiness of students to use technologies
• Shortage of people with technical skills to maintain ICT
systems

15. People Interventions
• Develop internal capacity in the use of ICT
• Staff
– Implement incentive systems that promote the use of ICTs
– Provide prior training for faculty when introducing ICTs
• Students
– Provide support and training for students

16. Institutional Challenges
• Major financial investment needed
• High cost of acquiring and maintaining ICTs
• High cost of content (e-journals, digital libraries)
• Some substitution of capital costs for labour
• Consistency across departments

17. Institutional Interventions
• Vision and commitment of the leadership to deploying ICTs
• Require strong institutional policy (resource allocation)
• Regional approach for joint negotiations on the cost of
bandwidth
• Promote collaboration among higher education institutions in
all ICT-related activities
• Identify ways in which the application of ICTs will significantly
enhance the research and teaching capabilities
• Look for freely available resources e.g. e-journals

18. Technology Challenges
• Reliability and Security
• System / Data Integration
• Limited bandwidth
• Inexperience in procuring appropriate ICT products and
services
• Use of unlicensed software can be very problematic

19. Technology Interventions
• Create a technology plan that includes long term budgeting
• Funds and staff available to sustain investments in ICT
infrastructure and support systems
• Enhance bandwidth/connectivity through the acquisition of
suitable infrastructure
• Understand total ownership cost (acquisition, installation,
power supply, maintenance, replacement, training etc)
• Piloting (test the efficacy of a technology)
• Possible sharing or coordination of ICT usage with other
institutions

20. Learning Challenges
• Delivery methods – online, blended etc
• Learning technology that is not used effectively
• “Dumping” content
• Content not adapted to the technology and context
• Limited interaction between students and teachers/tutors

21. Learning Interventions
• Review student needs, technology and content availability
• Customise learning content appropriately
• Produce high quality content with sound instructional design
• Effective interaction of students with content, fellow students
and teachers/tutors during the learning process

22. Summary
• HEIs should integrate emerging technologies into their
policies and programmes
• Identify the specific roles of ICT in enhancing research and
learning capabilities
• Provide for adequate infrastructure backed by capacity
building
• Enhance ICT though inter-institutional collaboration
• Success depends on sound financial and pedagogical planning
• Wide adoption of ICTs calls for mindsets and skill sets that are
adaptive to change

23. Case Studies
Partnership for Higher Education in Africa (PHEA)
Educational Technology Initiative (ETI)

24. Project Objective
“To support interventions in universities to make increasingly
effective use of educational technology to address some of the
underlying educational challenges facing the higher educational
sector in Africa”
The strategic objectives of the PHEA ETI are to:
• Support teaching and learning initiatives that integrate educational
technology
• Promote collaborative knowledge creation and dissemination
• Refine institutional systems so that they support teaching and learning
more directly
• Research and report on educational technology activity in African
universities

25. Universities Involved
University of
Education
Winneba (Ghana)
Kenyatta University
University of Jos Makerere (Kenya)
(Nigeria) University University of Dar es
University of (Uganda) Salaam (Tanzania)
Ibadan (Nigeria)
Catholic
University of
Mozambique

26. Project Examples
• ICT and Elearning Policies
• Implementation of Moodle VLE
• Online courses and interactive e-content
• Portfolios
• Digitisation of Exam Papers and Theses
• Migration of courses from Blackboard to Moodle
• Open Courseware
• Video and Audio Lectures
• Executive Information Systems
• Research Papers: Gender ICT Perceptions, Elearning Adoption

27. Achievements
• Institutional commitments to ICT growing – has led to policies
at some institutions
• Strong focus on deployment of ICT to tackle teaching and
learning challenges:
• All institutions using Moodle
• Some deployment of other technologies (mobile, radio, e-portfolios)
• Extensive growth in number of online courses produced
• Growing use of online courses on campuses
• Research via case studies and external evaluation

28. Lessons Learnt
• Working through rigid hierarchies creates problems in
communication and implementation
• Often Educational Technology units are marginalised
• Capacity development is a key need, including ability to design
projects
• Lack of institutionalised incentives for academic staff to engage
with educational technology
• Limited ICT infrastructure remains a major barrier
• Institutional commitment to ICT needed through presence of
supportive ICT policies and ICT Funding

29. Conclusions
• Basic problems such as limited bandwidth and intermittent
electricity place significant limitations on the potential for
growth
• However…
• Telecommunications capacity is growing rapidly
• Expanding range of devices at reducing costs
• Explosion of available quality content online that educators
and students can link to
• Need governments and institutions to continue investment
and focus on ICT use in higher education
See the results: www.oerafrica.org (follow links to the PHEA Educational Technology Initiative)

30. Open Educational Resources

31. A resource
Citation: Tony Mays 2011

32. An Educational Resource
• What is the name of the
bird in the foreground
of the picture?
• Can you name 3 other
varieties of this kind of
bird?
Citation: Tony Mays 2011

33. An OER
• What is the name of the
bird in the foreground of
the picture?
• Can you name 3 other
varieties of this kind of
bird?
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Unported License
Citation: Tony Mays 2011

34. A remixed OER
• The yellow hornbill shown left is one of four
varieties of hornbills common across sub-
Saharan Africa. The other varieties are the
grey- and red- hornbills and the much larger
ground hornbill.
• As the name suggests, the large horny bill
is the key characteristic of the species. What
does this suggest about their typical diet?
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported
License
Citation: John Doe 2012
Photo: Tony Mays 2011

35. Definition
“Open educational resources are educational
materials and resources offered freely and openly
for anyone to use and under some licenses to
remix, improve and redistribute.”
Wikipedia: OER, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources

36. MIT OpenCourseWare, http://ocw.mit.edu/

38. OER has the Potential to
1. Increase availability of high quality, relevant and need-
targeted learning materials
2. Reduce the cost of accessing educational materials
3. Allow adaptation of materials and possibly contribute to
enabling learners to be active participants in educational
processes
4. Achieve collaborative partnership of people working in
communities of practice
5. Provide educators with access, at low or no cost, to the tools
and content required to produce high quality educational
materials

39. Creative Commons Licenses

40. A spectrum of rights
Public
Domain
least restrictive
X XX
most restrictive
All Rights
Reserved

41. Challenges
Licensing and
Finding relevant /
Copyright
quality resources
Clearance
Policy implications
Adapting or for ICT and
remixing resources Intellectual
Property

42. Summary
• Technology must be seen as a supportive tool
• The use of technology needs to add value
• Adequate infrastructure is needed
• Capacity building is a key focus
• Collaborate with others and learn from experience
• Emergence of OERs can support the trend to introduce elearning
• Become adaptive to change

43. Discussion
Thank you
greigk@saide.org.za
greigk_za
Greig Krull
www.saide.org.za
www.oerafrica.org
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

44. References
• Johnson, L, Adams, S, and Cummins, M (2012). The NMC Horizon Report:
2012 Higher Education Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.
• Isaacs, S and Hollow, D, (eds) 2012. The eLearning Africa 2012 Report,
ICWE: Germany.
• Commonwealth of Learning. 2009. ICTs for higher education: background
paper from the Commonwealth of Learning. World Conference on Higher
Education, Paris.
• OER Africa: http://www.oerafrica.org/
• PHEA ETI:
http://www.oerafrica.org/phea/PHEAETIProjectHome/tabid/170/Default.
aspx
• Tony Mays, Saide, 2012, Recapping OER Presentation
• Catherine Ngugi, OER Africa, 2012, Introduction to OER Africa Presentation