Neil Butcher is currently working as an OER Strategist with SAIDE on its new OER Africa Initiative, which is funded by the Hewlett Foundation and is managing the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa’s Educational Technology Initiative. Here he makes the case for keeping a focus on more simplistic and realistic solutions when harnessing technology in African Higher Education.

Realistic goals for eLearning

There is an ongoing debate in Africa about whether or not it is necessary or a priority to invest in using information and communication technologies (ICT) in education. This seems the educational equivalent of discussing whether or not clothing and shelter are important for human societies. People have been using technologies to facilitate learning since we began writing on papyrus. Education systems rank amongst the biggest and most critical in any country – and central to them is creation and sharing of knowledge. To imagine running them without using those tools that have been essential to the explosion of the knowledge economy and that have proven productivity and efficiency gains when deployed to support the operations of large-scale, complex systems seems almost laughable on the face of it. The question should be: how do we most appropriately use ICT to help to meet educational needs and solve educational challenges? Unfortunately, though, many educational leaders – whether they be government officials, university vice-chancellors or deans, or school principals – still place little emphasis in using ICT to help to run their systems.