Honia-Heal Afrika Initiative (HAI)

By the pen of Gĩtaũ wa Kũng’ũ.

With all the atrocities of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the best lessons the world learnt is that the process of teaching and learning can also be conducted online.
Many institutions of higher learning especially, continued with teaching and learning activities through the institutions’ e-learning portals. Examinations were also conducted online and the schools academic almanac were barely affected for the institutions that integrated e-learning.
The media also integrated programmes during daytime that facilitated teaching and learning to primary school pupils. In the programs, a teacher would take pupils through particular lessons at particular times of the day.
The telecommunications service providers, for example Safaricom also gifted daily internet bundles specifically to be used for browsing education service provider networks. In fact, they were branded ‘Education Bundles’. Many students used these bundles to advance their academic progress. At the time, there was no physical attendance to schools due to government restrictions, as a measure of combating the prevalence of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
Coming back to the topic of interest, the COVID-19 pandemic laid a strong foundation for the development of e-learning. This set the pace for investors and policy developers to integrate designs that complement the advancing science, digital technology, especially Information Technology (IT) to improve public sectors such as education.
Such developments has seen the rise of several online learning service providers such as Elimu Library, eLIMU, Elimu World, Elimu TV and others.
However, one distinctive e-learning service provider really caught my attention on the course of the research for this article. The platform offers online courses for the CBC program.
The CBC Elimu Portal offers even free courses on the various new Competence Based Curriculum (CBC) courses, including the Technology Education and others.
With the advantage of many parents now owning smartphones, some parents are creating accounts for their children in the CBC Elimu Portal and using the e-learning materials provided by the website to improve their children’s academic well-being.
The course materials offered have integrated audiovisual contents that are appealing to the young learners. The e-learning service provider has also enhanced the course development with very prolific assessment tests at the end of every topic.
Going through the website, I was inspired that the future of education in Kenya can go digital.
Teachers can use the CBC Elimu Portal’s course materials to complement the existing CBC syllabus materials offered by the government in teaching their students.
The future of the Kenyan education system would go digital if the Ministry of Education can also create a Department of E-learning so that the CBC system can have greater impacts on the new generation that is becoming tech-savvy at a very tender age. In fact, Computer Studies is one of the CBC syllabus.
Schools with computer labs can also integrate the use of IT in their teaching and learning methodology for all subjects, not just for the Computer Studies syllabus. The government must ensure that all schools have working computer labs to develop e-learning.m