By Dele Omojuyigbe
Beyond the Mil Mascaras mask fastened on everyone’s face now is a fresh challenge thrust on the education sector. The ruinous coronavirus pandemic has locked down schools physically but luckily, not ideologically. School session is running in a novel way and with attendant new challenges. Online learning has hit the world in one fell swoop. All academic institutions are in the race together, except, perhaps, the ones on strike. For the advanced world, online learning may not be unusual. But for us in these parts, it is a new world.
The pace of teaching online is slower, nevertheless, who complains! There is no better option for the abnormal season yet. So, students and lecturers face the new experience together. It is an onerous task for students who have to stay at home alone and listen to their lecturers’ voices on whatsapp. They have no classmates to interact with or nudge to ask questions. The regular classroom razzmatazz is gone and it is evident from the lectures taken so far that students are struggling to adjust to the new practice. Some of them are strong academically only when they have the opportunity to wriggle in the midst of their colleagues. That is obvious. But the opportunity beckons to them at this time to learn to work alone and cultivate independent mind.
It is a new world indeed. Classes do not have students’ full attention. This is rather unfortunate. Online learning requires higher commitment, having lost the privilege of practical classroom engagement which makes lectures livelier and comprehension easier. Classes have been dull to a certain degree. Students demand time to internalize lecturers’ voice notes before they can ask questions. That takes time and sometimes makes classes a monologue, whereas students’ active participation is required in all classes.
Lecturers too are learning fast with the new teaching approach, trying to see how they can reenact some of their physical classroom engagements. Ironically, such enactments are still distant. Some of them have applied all known techniques of internet teaching – notes, voice, videos, graphics and illustrations – to keep students awake and help them have a dose of normal classroom feelings. Still, learning is slow, though faster now than when it began. It has actually been a scenario of toddler-parent guidance so far in some classes.
Lecturers talk more now. No lecture projection, no slides and no marker usage! The power of eye contact is nullified by distance. Coronavirus created the gap. Gesticulations are gone. These are extra-linguistic devices used in teaching. Some lecturers, possessed by gestures in class like a spirit, usually pace up and down lecture rooms sometimes, explaining ideas with such movements. They throw one arm up; kick the air; look into the eyes of students occasionally; twist their eyes; frown; smile; point at something or someone; or even holler to correct. Those techniques have, sadly, been lost to COVID-19. In the interim, they have resorted to using direct language to convey their messages. They paint pictures, use descriptions, use illustrations, use examples and avoid ambiguity and idioms.
It is a new day, indeed. Unfortunately, the new experience is a long journey to internet accessibility, a non-negotiable condition for effective teaching! One other problem is poor network. And yet another is high poverty rate. Most complaints about online learning are tied to lack of money. Some students don’t have enough data for their classes. So they dash into class, make themselves noticeable, greet the lecturer openly and disappear after a few minutes. Some do not have android phones, while some are just trying to come up to whatsapp, a major application for teaching. Epileptic power supply makes battery charging an issue in some areas and makes going for lectures a fearful experience, for both students and lecturers.
Where do we go from here? Online teaching is a good development if the conditions are right. We can only trudge on and hope for better days ahead. However, one’s prayer will just be that the better days will not be long in coming.
- Omojuyigbe is Deputy Provost Nigeria Institute of Journalism, Lagos