Rwanda recorded its first COVID-19 confirmed case on March 14, 2020. In the move to protect citizens, the Government of Rwanda tightened measures it deemed adequate to mitigate the risks of transmission of the virus; among others, a decision that all schools and higher education institutions (both public and private) would close for an initial two-week period starting Monday, March 16, 2020. The health ministry has announced this is likely to be extended. Currently, all students in the country have returned home, including thousands of them who had just began a new trimester or just started their studies this March in various universities. As the days go by, coronavirus is becoming a global threat; with the number of new cases and death toll rising every day in 170+ countries. In Rwanda, confirmed cases rose to 19 in 8 days; with 680+ people suspected to have been in contact with confirmed cases now under surveillance. No fatality has been recorded in Rwanda. The Government of Rwanda, learning from the experience of other countries, has imposed enhanced measures including a national lockdown for another two-week period starting March 21 at 11:59pm in the effort to contain the spread of the deadly virus. Evaluating COVID-19’s global trend, and within our country in particular, our educational institutions should recognize the likelihood that this new two-weeks period of enhanced measures may even be extended to months before the virus may be cleared within our midst to allow campuses to reopen. Therefore, if nothing is done for students to continue learning in a formal way while at home, we can expect the fact that this global pandemic will shake the education system, especially creating a rush to complete courses and this year’s academic calendar, thus jeopardizing the quality of learning. To cope with such an unanticipated disruption, our universities shall therefore be prepared to embrace online learning which would allow students to continue their studies remotely. Indeed, moving all classes online is a mechanism that has been adopted by many other universities in the world in response to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak. It is good that our universities have also seen urgency for classes to move online, and are calling their lecturers to upload their content to make it accessible to students. The biggest questions would then be: How prepared are they to teach online and successfully maintain the quality that a physical class would bring to a student? The reality is that there is very little or no preparedness; given that online education had not yet been fully adopted as a credible mode of education not only in Rwanda but also on the entire African continent. For example, most of our universities don’t have fully fledged online learning portals; teaching staff also don’t have the necessary tools and they are not conversant with the technology it would take to run from their homes an online class that is lively, interactive, and self-paced for the student. However, not moving online is not an option as earlier noted. Therefore, how can our higher education maintain uncompromised learning in this COVID-19 era? The solution is simple: As we learn best practices from other nations in preventing COVID-19 transmission, our personal opinion is that it would be of paramount importance for our higher education to also adopt global working solutions that are already working, to prevent COVID-19 consequences on our education; not pretending to start our own solutions that were otherwise in the development or testing stages. Learning platforms such as Coursera have already developed quality interactive, self-paced courses taught by reckoned professors from hundreds of world-class universities such as Yale, MIT, Stanford, John Hopkins, HEC Paris, Duke University, Fudan University, just to mention but a few. Such learning platforms are fully equipped to bring about the quality of learning that a physical class would have to offer to get a degree credit from a world-class university. Recently, this leading online learning platform, Coursera, has launched its Coronavirus Response Initiative to help colleges and universities to minimize the impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak on students, where Coursera community of world-class partner universities teamed up in a global effort to assist universities and colleges worldwide to deliver courseware online; providing free access to Coursera for Campus for any COVID-19 impacted college or university worldwide. This means that our local universities can now subscribe to Coursera for free, and our lecturers would instantly get their students to take online all modules they had to teach this time through credit courses from global top-ranked universities. As announced by Coursera, this COVID-19 solidarity offer would among others allow our colleges and universities to have access to 3,800 courses in over 400 specializations, with up to 5,000 free licenses for enrolled students per college. Institutions may enrol students in courses from the current time to July 31, 2020 and learning time will go until the end of September 2020 with month-to-month extension depending on their needs. In addition, the universities would have access to enterprise-level admin tools, analytics, and online support access. With all these benefits, there is no doubt that our higher education system can benefit from this offer that about 1,000 universities are set to be subscribing on a daily basis given the initial massive response. By embracing such top-rated online learning solutions, Rwanda universities can provide students with an opportunity to continue pursuing their studies from home through high quality, interactive and self-paced online courses bearing international credit. For example, a student with three courses can take one course by Yale University (USA), another by University of London (UK) and another by the University of Alberta (Canada). Opening Rwanda to such learning environment would certainly help us our nation to keep quality online learning, and open doors for internationalization of our students and graduates after COVID-19 is over. Prof. Pierre Damien Habumuremyi, is an educational leader and a political science expert and Patrice Habinshuti is an international development expert The views expressed in this article are of the author.
