The Open University of Tanzania (OUT)

1. The Open University of Tanzania (OUT) By Professor Tolly S.A. Mbwette President, African Council on Distance Education (ACDE) and Vice Chancellor, Open University of Tanzania (OUT)E-mails: vc@out.ac.tz, tolly.mbwette@out.ac.tz, tsambwette@yahoo.com DEVELOPMENT AND EXPLOITATION OF ICT INFRASTRUCTURE AND SERVICES FOR IMPROVED TEACHING AND MANAGEMENT OF RESEARCH IN AFRICAN UNIVERSITIES

2. PRESENTATION OUTLINE Introduction Organisational Design Variables The Critical Role of Strategic Plan Some Reflections on Internationalisation The Role of ICT Policy and ICT Masterplan How can ICTs Improve Teaching and Management of Research & Publications Importance of Partnership &Collaboration Conclusion

3. Introduction The essential features of a well designed African higher education institution were first presented in form of an organisational design model (Luhanga et al, 2003) and it has been refined over the period of the last eight years (Mbwette, 2006) and (Mbwette & Ngirwa, 2011). These features were refined to capture the effect of globalization and internationalization of higher education by adding the quality assurance and control aspect in the overall design environment to the model.

4. Organisational Design Variables • The original model (Luhanga et al, 2003) had specified five design variables that included: • The legal regime, • The organisational structure of positions, • The organisational structure of the participatory organs (committees), • The operational policy and procedures, • The strategic planning framework including effectiveness of monitoring and evaluation.

5. Organisational Design Variables Contd… The model is assumed to be well designed to deal with both the micro as well as the macro environment surrounding as guided by its vision. The intensification of national, regional and global competition has led to the necessity to benchmark all operations to the proven best practice that at times may even be difficult to agree on.

6. The Critical Role of The Strategic Plan A well prepared institutional Strategic Plan (SP) of any higher education institution is one whose preparation is coordinated or guided by an external team working with a small internal team for purposes of ensuring long term sustainability through the resulting capacity building.

7. The Critical Role Of The Strategic Plan Contd… In addition, the manner of drawing up the SP as well as updating it must entail a participatory approach to ensure it is owned by the stakeholders and particularly if the institution intends to apply the Open Performance Review and Appraisal System (OPRAS) to mainstream the monitoring and evaluation of the SP.

8. The Critical Role Of The Strategic Plan: Contd… In this particular case, one would expect that in order to reflect the desire of the institution to internationalize its operations (i.e. programmes, modes of delivery, demography of staff and students and all outputs); its vision as well as one or more of the strategic objectives will be expected to explicitly reflect this desire to internationalize.

9. The Critical Role Of The Strategic Plan Contd… In addition, the strategic objectives and the strategies will also have to state explicitly the desire to improve its Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure and services for purposes of enhancing the quality of teaching as well as the management of research and publications in the university.

10. Some Reflections On Internationalization It is important to briefly reflect at the outset, the complexity of defining well what is meant by the term “Internationalization” as propounded in literature (Knight, 2007 & 2011 and De Wit, 2011). The two preceding authors have cautioned on the many interpretations of the so called myths or misconceptions associated with the use of the term “Internationalization of Higher Education”.

11. Some Reflections On Internationalisation: Contd… Overall, the two authors distinguish the many motives and approaches to internationalization as being grossly affected by globalization that is often accompanied with intense competition and more diverse market forces that are becoming more difficult to predict.

12. Some Reflections On Internationalisation: Contd As such, the approach of mainstreaming internationalization within the institutional plans seems to be considered to be more holistic in terms of ensuring better quality outputs and higher competencies of the staff and students.

13. The Role Of ICT Policy and ICT Masterplan In order to address the critical issues that emanate from the institutional SP using ICT, it is necessary to prepare an ICT Policy that defines the manner in which ICT infrastructure and services will be deployed in the university. Often issues of ownership of the different data bases and its overall management including security provisions are covered by the ICT policy. All aspects of its use as well as potential misuse are articulated in this document that again must be prepared in a participatory manner.

14. The Role of ICT Policy And ICT Masterplan: Contd… All by-laws guiding the use of ICT infrastructure and services are also pronounced in this document. The declarations of how the university will utilize the ICT services to improve its teaching as well as the management of research and publications through computerization of relevant data bases will be included in the ICT policy document.

15. The Role of ICT Policy And ICT Masterplan: Contd… It is also customary to prepare an accompanying detailed technical document titled ICT Masterplan that explains exactly how the aspirations stated in the ICT policy document will be technically achieved using which technology and which design topology.

16. The Role of ICT Policy And ICT Masterplan: Contd… Any African university that is desirous of exploiting well the ICT infrastructure and services ought to prepare these two documents (ICT Policy & Masterplans) and to ensure they are well linked to the institutional SP to ensure a high level of ownership to guarantee success in implementation as well as in monitoring and evaluation through systematic deployment of OPRAS or any other system as explained above or as narrated in literature (Mbwette & Ngirwa, 2011).

17. How Can Well Planned and Deployed ICT Infrastructure and Services Improve Teaching and Management of Research and Publications in African Universities? In discussing these two key issues, one has to be aware that unless the desired improvement of services in a university is planned and implemented systematically as narrated, the mere installation of ICT infrastructure without any clearly defined purpose as well as the purchase of ICT equipment may not guarantee improved service delivery.

18. How Can Well Planned and Deployed ICT Infrastructure and Services Improve Teaching and Management of Research and Publications in African Universities? Contd… When one considers teaching in a futuristic manner, it is important to be fully aware that the old systemic gap in the mode of delivery between residential universities and the fully distance or open and distance learning mode is now non-existent due to the fact that a modern teacher is not expected to give extended lectures to students who have access to countless sources of electronic information and hence blended learning is the recommended sustainable future approach.

19. How Can Well Planned and Deployed ICT Infrastructure and Services Improve Teaching and Management of Research and Publications in African Universities? Contd… The issue at hand is to accept the reality that modern teaching only requires introductory explanations to the students on the learning objectives and learningoutcomes followed by periodic guidance to the students when and if they need it. As a result, a teacher is expected to facilitate a student to access information sources (be they hard or soft copies) and hence one has to be aware about this paradigm shift to student-centred learning.

20. How Can Well Planned and Deployed ICT Infrastructure and Services Improve Teaching and Management of Research and Publications in African Universities? Contd… It is important to be aware that, any provision of ICT infrastructure and services must be geared towards facilitating students to learn or innovate on their own for most of the time. Therefore, students have to be guided to assess how much new knowledge they have gained through the self assessment tasks and problem solving types of assignments even if the problems set are entirely hypothetical.

21. How Can Well Planned and Deployed ICT Infrastructure and Services Improve Teaching and Management of Research and Publications in African Universities? Contd… The availability of reliable ICT services can then ease the students access to the chosen institutional electronic platform or the LMS (recommended to be of free open source) that has to be deployed by any modern university to ensure students can get all information without necessarily attending classes.

22. How Can Well Planned and Deployed ICT Infrastructure and Services Improve Teaching and Management of Research and Publications in African Universities? Contd… In turn, students should be able to ask questions and the facilitators/teachers have to respond to them promptly using the electronic platform, LMS or indeed any other recognized electronic means i.e. Blackberry, Mobile phones,Twitter,You Tube, Facebook, Ipads I - phone or indeed any other social media that is formally recognized by the university and linked to the university electronic platform.

23. How Can Well Planned and Deployed ICT Infrastructure and Services Improve Teaching and Management of Research and Publications in African Universities? Contd…

24. How Can Well Planned and Deployed ICT Infrastructure and Services Improve Teaching and Management of Research and Publications in African Universities? Contd… Room must be created for teachers and students to have electronic dialogue to allow teachers as well as fellow students also to learn from the students since learning is nowadays considered to be a two-way process. This requires that universities provide basic computer laboratories for students who cannot buy their own but for the others, the university should provide secure wireless services and assist students to negotiate purchase of personal laptops and/or desktops or any other electronic gadgets for daily use from local private providers as for example recently done by the OUT Student Union abbreviated as OUTSO.

25. How Can Well Planned and Deployed ICT Infrastructure and Services Improve Teaching and Management of Research and Publications in African Universities? Contd…. Its however cautioned that the management of the university must assist the students to negotiate the terms of such a computer supply service to minimize the chances of students being swindled. Integration of mobile phones or other electronic communication facilities with the university electronic platform (or LMS) after negotiation with such providers as mobile phone companies is also recommended because the ownership of mobile phones by students is almost universal in most African countries.

26. How Can Well Planned and Deployed ICT Infrastructure and Services Improve Teaching and Management of Research and Publications in African Universities? Contd… What is also critical to learning is the ability of the university to computerize students records such that students can check their results at will through web based students academic records that also allow for timely issuing of progress reports as well as the transcripts which currently take too much time to generate in some African universities. Research data base can also be similarly transformed.

27. How Can Well Planned and Deployed ICT Infrastructure and Services Improve Teaching and Management of Research and Publications in African Universities? Contd… Caution must be exercised here to ensure the unit that is responsible for processing students records is properly placed at a secure location in the university organisational structure to avoid any chances of pilferage of students records if such a unit is not securely sited. Common benefits of use of ICT include the possibility for the university to enhance its teaching using multi-media technologies in areas that are difficult to demonstrate during conventional lectures.

28. How Can Well Planned and Deployed ICT Infrastructure and Services Improve Teaching and Management of Research and Publications in African Universities? Contd… So from this brief account, it is quite clear that the days of lectures dominating teaching and learning are quite short-lived and current lecturers have to prepare themselves to become learning facilitators in the near future or else they will have to change jobs or end their contracts prematurely.

29. How Can Well Planned and Deployed ICT Infrastructure and Services Improve Teaching and Management of Research and Publications in African Universities? Contd… In terms of internationalization potential, it is quite clear that a university that is operating in a national or regional environment that is properly supported by national ICT networks of Universities, Higher Education and Research institutions (NRENs) will fare much better in terms of facilitating electronic learning than otherwise.

30. How Can Well Planned and Deployed ICT Infrastructure and Services Improve Teaching and Management of Research and Publications in African Universities? Contd… In addition, the link up of all African NRENs with other global networks like GEANT 2 will also improve access to many electronic resources thus making research much easier to conduct as well as sharing the knowledge generated almost instantly.

31. How Can Well Planned and Deployed ICT Infrastructure and Services Improve Teaching and Management of Research and Publications in African Universities? Contd… The control of plagiarism will also be much easier once the global linkage of all NRENs is attained. With respect to research and publications, the approved institutional policy and procedures will facilitate preparation of research and publications data bases guided by those policies as well as the ICT policy that will have to be appropriately prepared. Its implementation will also have to be guided by the ICT Masterplans of African universities as narrated above.

32. How Can Well Planned and Deployed ICT Infrastructure and Services Improve Teaching and Management of Research and Publications in African Universities? Contd… Access and effective management of such a data base will be guaranteed even for students who may be located far away from the university as long as intermediate electronic means of counterchecking the possibility of deceipt are built in the topology of such an ICT service and infrastructure. However, lately it appears that a number of African countries are facing serious energy shortages that if these are not redressed soon, energy may be on the critical path of African universities wishing to exploit the full power of ICT in an attempt to enhance teaching as well as management of research and publications for staff or postgraduate students.

33. How Can Well Planned and Deployed ICT Infrastructure and Services Improve Teaching and Management of Research and Publications in African Universities? Contd… It is also necessary to build capacity to install and manage solar energy back up systems that can assist to bridge the periods when the national grid is down for reasonable durations not exceeding six to eight hours consecutively. In addition, existence of NRENs as well as regional ICT networks like UBUNTUNETALLIANCE improves the ability of Universities to share information as well as checking for plagiarism assuming most if not all would computerize theses, dissertations and publications.

34. How Can Well Planneda and Deployed ICT Infrastructure and Services Improve Teaching and Management of Research and Publications in African Universities? Contd… Finally, it is important to stress the need to continually train and retain ICT human resources with special performance-based incentive schemes that must be put in place by innovative African universities because the salaries paid by most public universities cannot guarantee their retention in the long run. In addition, the practice of rotation of duties of ICT experts should be utilised to minimize boredom with routine duties.

35. Importance of Partnerships and Collaboration African universities have to be aware that partnerships and collaboration with equally minded and well managed universities within their nations as well as in their regions or even at global level, can be very beneficial in many ways. In the first place, it gives an African university the opportunity to learn from one another apart from the added capacity to enrol more students in areas where a collaborative arrangement supported by ICTs can at times facilitate such a development at minimal costs including sharing of human resources at a distance.

36. Importance of Partnerships and Collaboration Contd… Furthermore, it gives the African university the possibility to benchmark with the partner universities and hence leads to improved quality of its outputs assuming the collaborating universities have a more comprehensive quality assurance framework. Other benefits of collaboration and partnerships can be in terms of sharing the electronic resources of the collaborating institutions and thereby giving staff and students of the partner universities a broader range of resources to learn from.

37. Importance of Partnerships and Collaboration: Contd… The issue of sharing the costs of access of some electronic resources as well as the possibility for the website of an African university facing power shortages being mirrored in the website of the collaborating university with more reliable power sources. As explained above, when universities collaborate at global level, the control of plagiarism (all round!) will be much better than when they operate in isolation.

38. Importance Of Partnerships And Collaboration: Contd… The above outlined are only a few benefits of partnerships and collaboration which the author feels are necessary for ensuring effective internationalization of the African higher education.

39. CONCLUSION I hope the above highlighted well tested practical considerations will assist African universities to exploit well ICT in order to improve teaching and learning as well as the management of research and publications, be it for staff or postgraduate students. In this way, African universities will then have the potential to participate in any form of internationalization efforts that a university may desire to be part of.

40. THE END Thank You For Your Attention !!