E-learning Is Wishful Thinking, Magoha Should Come Down To Earth

President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni of Uganda, when his wife, Janet Museveni (the Minister for Education) insisted that Ugandan students had to do their exams, the old man gave one of the best replies that I think Kenya should have taken notes.

Museveni told his wife to stop talking of normalcy in a time of abnormalcy. He said these are abnormal times and people should take abnormal measures. “There is time for everything. This is not the time for exams.”

In Kenya, one Professor George Magoha, the Cabinet Secretary for Education has insisted that students must sit their Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) and Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE).

According to our very own “good” Professor, the students in Kenya have been busy, in the last 40 days of Covid-19 learning and studying via online platforms including YouTube, Zoom, Webinar, Radio, Television, and WhatsApp.

At one time, the CS for ICT Mr. Joe Mucheru, loudly, without blinking, on live national television, confirmed that indeed students (children) were receiving high-class education through “live video streaming”.

The two Cabinet Secretaries seemed clueless of reality. They are busy using their own marking schemes of how they live with their own wives and children to level every Kenyan to their level.

George Magoha and Joe Mucheru think if they have WiFi (probably paid by the poor taxpayer), every Kenyan has. They think if they own smartphones with the latest technology, every Kenyan should too. They actually think every household in Kenya has electricity.

Does Magoha know that the majority of pupils and students are in rural areas? Does he know that in some parts of this country, to make a call, people still scale the mountains or climb on trees?

Does Magoha know that there are families in this country that do not own any form of electronic? Does he know that with Covid-19, many families in Kenya are more worried about their next meal than purchasing data bundles for their kids?

I think most people in this government are obsessed with assuming things are normal when they are not. They are playing the ostrich theory of hiding their heads into the sand, this time not hopping the danger will pass but assuming that there is no danger.

Our primary and secondary sons and daughters should not be driven into early graves with the stress of an exam they haven’t prepared for. Those shouting that education is going on have their kids in international schools and to them, that is where every Kenyan child is.

Universities

Kenyan universities have terribly failed in initiating e-learning for their hundreds of thousands of students. Even those with bold writings on gates as “University of Science and Technology” have nothing to show for apart from the name.

The few that have tried to use such applications as Zoom have failed like never before. They want to charge students for tuition fees during this time but decide to use the free version of Zoom that only gives 40 free minutes.

Lecturers who are holding online classes are ending up either talking to themselves or to three of four students. Universities assume that each of their students has a smartphone/laptop and can afford the internet for streaming.

Some universities have taken a good step by partnering with telecommunication companies such as Telkom Kenya and Safaricom to have them supplied with “affordable data bundles”. But how is the student going to benefit from that? When a lecturer has a stable internet, what makes one think that the student will automatically have one?

Kenyan universities have failed. When the pandemic is over, let them sit and reflect and normalize the use of technology. In the current world, we should not be talking about “introducing online classes”, they should have been there like yesterday.

Magoha and his choir members should come back to earth.

READ: Telkom Kenya Records 50% Spike In Data Subscription