Becky Hartnup spoke to Khilona Radia about the benefits and limitations of online education, and the extent to which it can enable learning to continue through a pandemic. Khilona provides some suggestions for institutions and providers delivering online education in the current challenging circumstances.
Khilona’s career has spanned entrepreneurship, commerce and biotech. She also trained as a Montessori educator for the love of it, and has always held education as a key to unlocking opportunities. During the hard lockdown in South Africa, she engaged with the Education Community Action Networks in Cape Town to support students, having personally studied remotely through correspondence and online programmes.
Online education has the potential to break the systemic barriers that occur within communities and countries, whether in South Africa or elsewhere. It allows you to engage with content and experts from different parts of the world. Through my own experience of online education, I got to meet with people from Iran and Saudi Arabia, China and Venezuela. In a physical environment there’s a tendency to be drawn to those who look like you.
"A well-structured online course can create a multi-cultural environment that enables you to connect more widely. It exposes you to different perspectives. This improves one’s compassion, empathy, and sensitivity to how others live their lives, and the challenges they face."
For me, the diversity of cultures and perspectives was a stark contrast with the insular, segregated education that I experienced growing up under apartheid. Each race had its own Education Department and standards, with people of colour usually left with reduced state subsidies and resources. Online education opens up possibilities around cultural awareness, and allows access to approaches in problem solving that go beyond the experience of local teachers. This remains important in South Africa. We remain an economically disparate society, with a high Geni co-efficient. While children are now able to attend multi-racial school, the old apartheid legacy of race-divided areas still impacts schools one can attend.
Furthermore, economic inequality is still a barrier to learning. Often, there is no device or perhaps one device in a household and it is shared among parents and siblings. Smart phones remain a luxury, together with access to data. While I was studying my undergraduate degree, I could not afford internet access and utilised what was available at the University libraries. In South Africa, costs relating to internet access is much more expensive than in the UK, for example. For many, the costs are prohibitively high. Although some schools are offering online classes, not everyone can afford to buy the data. Or even if a student can get online, their living conditions preclude effective learning – they are living in an overcrowded tin shack, the TV is turned up so granny can hear, siblings are quarrelling...
"The ability to learn is so limited by the environment you are living in."
Even access to electricity is inconsistent in South Africa. Due to issues with our power stations, we live a life with regular loadshedding, where the electricity is cut off for a couple of hours every day. This makes online education a no-go. During my online course there were times when I couldn’t attend lectures or I missed assignment deadlines because I couldn’t get online.
The Covid-19 crisis has had a huge impact on the many people in South Africa who rely on a daily wage and receive no support. Various projects have gotten underway by communities and local NGOs. I’ve been involved in CapeTown Together, which is a Community Action Network where better off suburbs are paired with suburbs in need, and people have come together to support those who need the most help. It started out with collecting and packing groceries and making sandwiches, and ventured into education. How do we start sharing information to people who have limited access to internet, who don’t have the necessary devices? How do we enable them to study? While online content can overcome geographical boundaries, the economic barriers limit this in countries like South Africa and make it more challenging.
We partnered with organisations such as Outliers and schools like Bishops Diocesan College and others to put together thousands of booklets. These were printed and distributed with stationery together with the groceries supplied by the Community Action Networks. Kath Kenyon, who runs a small cottage school for special needs kids set up a Google classroom and collated information from teachers all over into the various grades. This became a resource hub for those who were able to access it.Even the children and young people can see the urgent need and want to help. For example, a group of boys, Rohan Naidoo, Luke Rissik, and Khelan Dheda, came together and built a website called notesshare.org to enable peer-to-peer learning and note sharing from well-resourced schools to the rest of the country.
"They recognise that quality learning material is critical for education."
Unfortunately, despite their best efforts, their site has grown beyond their current skill set and they are now looking for a developer that can assist with the volume of data.
At a country-wide level, Vodacom, the mobile phone operator, have set up an e-school. Notes, worksheets and videos can be accessed via a smart phone, data free. Video recorded classes are also streamed on TV. But you need access to a smartphone device or a TV. Furthermore, they can’t provide the interaction or two-way checking of understanding that you get with online education through group work, quizzes and forums for example.
The universities in South Africa have worked with the same challenges in providing online tutoring and are now opening up very slowly, with limited numbers of students on campus. By January, everyone should be back in, provided we don’t get a second wave. Technology will nevertheless be important to keep education moving forward and has the potential to do so much more.
"Globally if we could get online education right it would open up the doors of opportunity to so many people."
A few notes on spreading online education:
1. Be culturally aware
As an education provider, you have limited ability to influence the environment your students are working within. But you can be sensitive to it. If you deliver online learning, make sure your lecturers are aware of the local constraints that students face so that they can be understanding. If you have students on campus, your infrastructure may be a lifeline for them, even if face-to-face teaching is shut down. Making content freely available to your students is important, but it needs to be accessible on a mobile or cell phone – these are so much more prevalent than laptops. And it needs to be available offline. and it needs to be on the cloud so they can move from one device to another.
2. Social connection
As I see it, online learning must enable one to connect socially. Your peer group is so important. It’s important to be aware that people behave differently in different environments. Some people are quite reserved in online conversations but are happy to talk in physical socials. Institutions providing online learning need to include socials and ice breaking activities to help students build a wide informal network in addition to their own study group. When building connections, students need to be more alert to the traits that matter; reliability, accountability. These become more important in an online environment. WhatsApp was absolutely critical to my learning because that was how we communicated as a team. Now it would probably be via Discord!
3. Preparing your students
Online learning requires additional skill sets from your students. It takes a lot of self-discipline and self-management. In a normal educational environment, your behaviour is very visible; you’ve got your lecturer and your peer groups keeping tabs on you. With online learning you’re not monitored by anyone else. That is challenging for 18-year olds coming out of a traditional student environment. They are just about getting their heads around someone not keeping tabs on them. It has helped teach some kids to work more efficiently, as they have greater focus and their time management has improved. However, where possible, they need to begin with a blended learning option to get them started. Obviously in the current situation that may not be possible, so the induction becomes more important. It needs to speak to the institution’s method of delivery, and provide guidance. This means providing guidance on working in groups, on using collaborative software, on managing difficult conversations online. The student experience of online learning is a triangle: the students, lecturers, and the online learning team. This needs to be joined up so that learning content fits the mode of delivery, and that the technologies support the learning goals. Submitting assignments and receiving feedback needs to be easy and give a uniformity of experience.
4. Online teaching
How do you engage learners online, whether they are eight years old or eighteen? How do you manage it so you are engaging with every kid and not just those who want to speak? For traditional teachers there are a number of challenges. Quality resources are essential, but access is not necessarily affordable. EdTech suppliers in better funded parts of the world need to be aware of this, and support initiatives that sponsor access. In online teaching, students often turn their videos off to save bandwidth, which makes it much harder for teachers to pick up visual cues. Teachers I speak to have described multiple apps that they use for multifaced engagement. In my experience, the best teachers are relaxed about the technology and accept that they can’t control everyone in the class. Instead they focus their effort on checking ‘Did you get that concept? Did you understand?’.
5. Building digital skills
The structuring of your student experience should make sure the students are engaged not only online, but also in their environment and with their local or subject related community – and learning skills that will be useful to them in real life. The careers element of my course, for example gave me the opportunity to connect with leaders. It encouraged the development of digital literacy skills for accessing content, communicating and collaborating. Studying online enables you to engage confidently in an online environment – which is so important now.
Education is so important. It is uplifting for individuals, but also has an economic impact on the country. Online providers have the potential to transform lives, but there are still many challenges to overcome in South Africa. The more that educational providers understand these challenges, the more likely that they can innovate and provide educational solutions that are a good fit and can really make a difference.
This piece is part of our Perspectives series. Higher Education is changing fast, moving beyond emergency online teaching to provide a robust and satisfying student experience. As your institution plans to manage the challenges of this uncertain environment, stay aware of how others are responding. Each week we’ll share insights and discussion including student views, research, and interviews with academic leaders. Sign up for the series using the form to the right.
About Khilona:
Khilona Radia's career has spanned entrepreneurship, commerce and biotech. She also trained as a Montessori educator for the love of it, and has always held education as a key to unlocking opportunities. During the hard lockdown in South Africa, she engaged with the Education Community Action Networks in Cape Town to support students, having personally studied remotely through correspondence and online programmes.