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Contributions from
the Column
InWEnt News
Environment in Southern Africa
“E-learning means more work”
Beyond the Washington Consensu
11/2004 |
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[ SANTREN network]
Environment in Southern Africa
The Southern African Network for Training and Research on the Environment (SANTREN) brings together environmental and resource management experts in research, development and education with people who confront environmental issues daily at companies and institutions in the countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). The network conducts research of its own and runs further training courses on environmental issues – since 2001 online.
[ By Kathrin Megerle ]
For months, Zabekwa, a city of 1.5 million people, was plagued by rats. Because the city council had failed to respond swiftly to the sharp rise in population, the local waste disposal service had collapsed, unable to cope with the extra demand. As a result, 3,400 people died of infectious diseases, and Zabekwa, lost its reputation as “Southern Africa’s cleanest city”.
This fictitious but by no means unrealistic scenario forms the introduction of the e-learning course on “Waste Management” developed by university lecturers of the Southern African Network for Training and Research on the Environment (SANTREN) in conjunction with the InWEnt division “Environment, Energy and Water”. In six modules, it familiarises course participants with the basics of waste disposal – addressing the subject from an ecological and social, legal and institutional viewpoint. Three to five hours a week are all it takes to work through the compact modules, do the written assignments and discuss the course material in an online forum with other course participants as well as tutors and experts working in the field of waste management.
Since 1995, some 500 environmental and resource management experts from the realms of research, development and training have been comparing notes in SANTREN with practitioners at companies and institutions. The network's move in 2001 to offer its courses online was well received: “It has lots of advantages”, says Zambian geologist Thomson Sinkala, who was involved from the outset in the development of SANTREN e-learning programmes. “The modules can easily be done at work and require no formal timetabling. Line-manager approval is not necessary. Working with computers and internet has a modern image and permits cooperation across the borders of the SADC states.”
”Blended learning”
However, SANTREN's first e-learners encountered quite a few difficulties. The whole course was designed to be conducted online. But there were technical problems even on registration. Most participants' internet connections – if operational at all – were far too slow to handle the multimedia content of the course. So the course modules today are not only posted on the internet but also burned on CD-ROMs and sent to participants by post. Communication between participants and tutors is mainly done by email – the most reliable communication channel in Southern Africa. E-learning also became “blended learning”.
With no practical content and no personal contact, the educational outcome was found wanting. At the same time, there was a big risk that only a fraction of those who enrolled would remain active participants through to the end of the course. Consequently, the self-study work on the course modules is now “blended” with a workshop lasting up to a week. It is staged not at the start of the course nor at the end, but two thirds through. “This has the advantage that all participants have a good grounding in the subject when they come to the workshop, they have already learnt a thing or two in the chat forum and their motivation for the rest of the course is boosted by meeting the tutors and other participants and the first-hand experience they get from the excursion,” Crispin Kinabo says.
The geologist from Daressalam University is manager and teletutor of the blended learning courses on “Waste Management” and “Air Pollution”. And he is very pleased with the e-learning platform used for the SANTREN courses: InWEnt's “Global Campus 21”. “You can see that e-learning has now progressed well beyond the pilot project stage”, he says. As in other parts of the world, it is increasingly normal for computers to be used as a training tool by the kind of people targeted by SANTREN at companies and institutions in Southern Africa. Most universities in the region are setting up their own e-learning platforms. Which also has drawbacks for SANTREN. “In the past, e-learning was an exciting prospect, something we could use to boost participants' motivation”, Kinabo says. “Today, we have to generate interest by course content alone.”
New didactic
Doing so takes a great deal more input than the project group imagined at the beginning. “It is not enough to be an expert in a field,” says Kinabo, “you also need to understand the didactic differences between a presence-based and an e-learning programme.” While a slip of the tongue by a lecturer in a workshop can be queried and quickly corrected, errors in e-learning modules can have dire consequences. They confuse participants and, in the worst case, require the course to be cancelled. “The effort that goes into preparing an e-learning course is much greater than that required for a presence-based programme,” says Zambian course coordinator Thomson Sinkala. It took two whole years to develop, test and optimise the modules of the four blended learning courses completed so far. After all, SANTREN course authors and managers work only part-time.
The courses are also very demanding for the tutors. Facilitating a chat forum calls for much clearer questions than chairing a discussion in a seminar room. And email queries and assignments require swift response. Otherwise, participants become frustrated. Communicating in writing takes a great deal more effort than a face-to-face interview between tutor and participant.
All of this cannot be organised without reasonable compensation. SANTREN members developed the e-learning courses on a voluntary basis or for only a small fee. The motivation came from being part of a new and exciting educational venture and from the spin-off benefits for their academic careers. Now that the pilot phase is over, that incentive is no longer there. “Authorship of an innovative e-learning programme looks good on a CV “, says Crispin Kinabo, “but there is no prestige in crafting a second or third repeat.”
Generating awareness
Therefore, priority is now given to marketing the courses. Because of tougher environmental laws and controls in most of the SADC states, upgrade training with an environmental focus is set to play an increasingly important role – but the fact is not yet fully appreciated at the companies and institutions that will be affected. Willingness to pay for the knowledge such training provides is thus low. So SANTREN faces the difficult task of first having to generate awareness of environmental issues before it can offer its courses as a solution to the training problems they present.
The importance of the courses is underlined by personal success stories, such as that of Eugene Selengia, quality manager at Raffia Bags, Tanzania's leading manufacturer of grain and fertiliser sacks. As a participant in the SANTREN “Waste Management” course, he saw the problems of his native Daressalam clearly reflected in the description of the fictitious Zabekwa. “The course gave me the arguments I needed”, he says, “to persuade my bosses that we ought to have a recycling plant to deal with our waste”. And the argument that carried the most weight was that investment in the environment would have a positive impact on export opportunities. The entire quality management system at Raffia Bags is now ISO 9001 certified.
Kathrin Megerle
is a staff member of the InWEnt division “Environment, Energy and Water” working mainly on the SANTREN project.
kathrin.megerle@inwent.org
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