Makerere’s Quality Assurance director, Dr Vincent Sembatya, earlier this year revealed that there was a proposal before the university council to replace all evening classes with e-learning.
This revelation comes in, in the wake of a pending strike and refusal by staff to teach the evening classes over unpaid arrears. The shift is meant to solve the drama and politics that have been involved with the evening program over time.
“The move will enable those on the evening scheme to enjoy as much if not more learning time, as their day counterparts, without straining university resources,” Sembatya revealed.
“It is not rocket science that the lecturer who has been busy during the day is exhausted when the evening class settles in for a fresh class at 5pm.”
Dr. Sembatya also said that the university lacked the money to adequately compensate the exhausted lecturers for their labours on the evening programme, and so e-learning is a viable solution.
To show that the university is in advanced stages of implementing the program, he revealed that the introduction of e-learning is already in advanced stages, with several developments already in place.
The e-learning scheme is headed by the deputy principal of the College of Education and External Studies (CEES), Dr Paul Muyinda Birevu and has seen several academic programmes unveiled on a pilot phase.
Dr. Birevu says that the first stride was to update the university ICT policies, properly articulating how e-learning would take place and this was adopted by the university council in 2015.
“For now, we are converting some of the lecture rooms into digital classrooms with interactive smart boards and mounted projectors with support from the African Development Bank.”
The scheme is currently run under the department of Distance and Lifelong Learning (formerly known as a the Centre for Continuing Education). Under this measure, the department will evolve the Open, Distance and E-learning institute, which will coordinate all online learning across the university.
The scheme started by training 40 lecturers in e-course development and many more will be trained over the next year. To ease the transition to e-learning, the African Development Bank (ADB) has donated 100 specialised laptops, which will be used by lecturers to aid e-learning.
Dr. Birevu further revealed that the scheme has been able to ‘online-ise’ the bachelor of commerce (B.COM) programme, which can now be completely done online.
Besides the African Development Bank, the university is getting assistance from the Swedish government among other partners to successful implement the program.
