The obliteration of national boundaries to create a global village has reduced, if not taken away, the stress required to acquire several critical services. Today, the world is literally at people’s finger tips. With innovations like the internet, one finds himself on a Japanese market buying a car, another on an American market searching for shoes, yet another is transported to China, to look for furniture, while in the comfort of their living room or office.
However, despite the convenience that such innovations ensure, one cannot overlook the negative implications of such a frenzy. With the ability to access online education from institutions around the world comes questions of authenticity of students’ academic work and the quality of the education offered.
Take a student who is studying through e-learning. To begin with, the learning submission of assignments and in some instances, the writing of examinations is done online. The writing of the thesis or dissertation, in most instances, is started and completed online with minimal correspondence between the student and the supervisor. In a few instances, the student has a local supervisor to check his or her work, but that is done at a minimal scale. Usually, this local supervisor is there in theory. My concern at this level is how the institution ensures that the work, a thesis or dissertation, that is produced, is purely authentic and fully authored by the student.
There are several examples of people who studied online, but when the time to submit their dissertation came, they submitted work that was written by someone else, and they managed to get away with the best grades. The same is the case with assignments. The question is, what are these institutions doing to combat this high level of plagiarism and academic theft? What is our own National Council of Higher Education doing to end this malpractice? Is its mandate only to provide accreditation to institutions that are physically present in Malawi? And if this is the case, is it not yet time to cast the net wider and ‘censor’ some of these bogus online platforms masquerading as institutions of higher learning, which have no regard for academic ethics and standards?
As a nation, if we continue to neglect the harm that such institutions are causing to our young and developing minds, what nation are we creating for the future? If we continue to compromise on issues of quality at the expense of promoting access to education, are we not shooting ourselves in the foot in the name of levelling the ground on which our academic feet are standing?
The atrocities committed by such institutions are endless. There is complete lack of seriousness in handling students’ grades because the students are many and they have no solid systems in place to distinguish one student from another. In the end, some students fail to graduate because their grades could not be traced. If they are lucky, these students are asked to resubmit their assignments or projects. The unlucky ones are automatically withdrawn. This is regardless of the fees that the students paid, which at times, is in foreign currency.
Get me right, I am not against e-learning or acquiring any form of education using an online or distance learning platform. Personally, I am aware of a few institutions that offer quality education via the distance mode, be it online or through postal exchanges. I am also aware of the challenges that the nation faces when it comes to providing enough space in our public colleges and universities for Malawian students to access higher education. But our plight should not be a scapegoat for lowering our standards in the name of trying to provide education to all.
Having worked in an institution offering quality distance education, I am aware the advantages that such an education provides. I am also aware of the negativity that most traditional education proponents have towards distance education. Largely, this is because most of them have gone through the traditional form of education, with a teacher right in front of them, teaching them the ABCs of life. Very few from this crop would fully embrace and accommodate change. But change in the modern era is something we must embrace, and quickly too, if we need to move forward, but at the same time, we need to be careful with what we are changing and the impact of the change on our lives.
If properly handled, e-learning is a great alternative to reducing the congestion in our public and private institutions. It would be a great way of saving the nation from the shame of failing to build more public institutions and the tragedy of wasting our taxes on rehabilitating the almost collapsing infrastructure in the already existing colleges and universities. And who doesn’t need a life saver when a great calamity looms?
Imagine having a generation of students who are able to attain education while sitting in front of a computer at home. Imagine the diversity in the thinking of students who share an online classroom with students from other countries and are able to share practical examples from around the world?
What we need for this dream to materialise is a serious ‘police’ that will stand on the two legs of quality and accountability while not neglecting the focus on access. Otherwise, it would be better to have a handful of serious-minded universities that offer quality education than have a bandwagon of universities that capitalise on the unavailability of tertiary education in the country to make hefty their pockets while producing inch-baked graduates.
It is also unfortunate that some of these problems can be traced in colleges and universities that are physically present in Malawi. The surprising thing is that such kind of institutions still find their way onto the accreditation list, yet the standards of education they offer are quite pathetic.
As a country, we need to be strict on standards, and these need not only be for Malawian institutions, but even those that offer online education. Research is needed on how such institutions run their programs and an evaluation made on how such programs benefit a Malawian student and the nation as a whole. Otherwise, we risk being swept underfoot while we snooze, dreaming and building castles on the shores of access to education for all.
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