Development of a virtual space for online supervision and mentoring as a novel architecture for learning and improving the quality graduates studies in Africa
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Date
2014-07-25
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African Biodiversity Conservation and Innovations Centre
Abstract
The quality of tertiary agricultural education is critical because it determines the expertise and competence of scientists, professionals, technicians, teachers, and civil service and business leaders in all aspects of agriculture and related industries. It raises their capacities to access knowledge and adapt it to the prevailing circumstance, and to generate new knowledge and impart it to others. Unfortunately, the quality of graduates is deteriorating as universities experience overwhelmingly high lecturer-to-student ratios and declining public funding yet the agricultural labour market is increasingly demanding more fit-for-purpose graduates. There is also evidence of agricultural labour markets expressing low confidence on the graduates (RUFORUM, 2009), primarily as a result of insufficient supervision and mentorship. Employability of the graduates is thus diminishing when they are most needed to drive the agricultural innovation processes in order to revitalise agriculture, boost economic recovery and growth and hasten attainment of the MDGs. The demand for tertiary education has continued to rise (World Bank, 2009) and subsequently, the number of both public and private Universities is increasing tremendously. However, the majority are overwhelmed by the worsening lecturer-to-student ratios with some lecturers now supervising up to 20 graduate students over one academic year. For instance, annual growth in graduate student population at Egerton University and JKUAT in Kenya increased from 45% in 2003 to 110% between 2007 and 2011 without a corresponding change in the number of supervisors. This is dramatically weakening the quality of supervision and mentorship of graduate students. There is a consensus amongst recent studies, such as those by the InterAcademy Council and the Commission for Africa, that urgent action must be taken to restore the quality of graduate and postgraduate agricultural education in Africa (FARA, 2006). The Commission for High Education in Kenya (CHE) recommends lecturer-to-student ratio of 1:10 for applied, pure and natural sciences but all the public universities only meet 44 to 58% of the required number of lecturers (Gudo et al., 2011). With this overstretched supervision capacity, the quality of the graduates and their research products is adversely affected. This is evidenced by high level of plagiarism in Theses and papers submitted for publications. This situation also lengthens the time to graduation (TTG). As universities struggle to cope with the surging numbers of graduate students, many faculty staff continue to use the conventional learning, teaching and supervision approaches based on face-to-face encounters between the students and supervisors. This is quite demanding both in time and financial resources and there is an urgent need of innovative approaches to effectively mentor and supervise the graduate students. The development of virtual online supervision and mentorship approaches therefore offer a complementary method to face-to-face contacts and are more cost-effective with wider reach and could improve the quality of graduates studies. Their use is favoured by the increased public investment in fibre optic cables and promotion of ICT.
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Journal article
Keywords
Online supervision, Online platform, Online learning, Quality teaching, Africa
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