Blended learning is the future.

Blended learning, a combination of classroom training and e-learning may bridge the gap between the present and the future of education

Prince Gora

When the national lockdown came into effect at the end of March 2020, we all thought that it was a matter of weeks before we returned to campus again. But, it didn't turn out that way as COVID-19 cases and deaths spiked and the lockdown kept on being extended. It soon became apparent that institutions had to adjust and adapt to the new normal so, everyone hastily moved online. The shift to emergency remote teaching and learning has been a crash course for many universities and colleges, and many have achieved things previously thought impossible. 

Though it allowed for progress, online learning soon proved to have many shortcomings of its own. In our case, not only did we find ourselves lacking the necessary technology, infrastructure and electronic gadgets, we also faced challenges with basics like network accessibility and electricity. Mobile data and Wi-Fi proved to be too expensive while practical disciplines like engineering and medicine saw little to no progress at all.

With the advent of the vaccine, it is therefore not surprising to hear people insinuating that we should go back to how things were before the COVID-19 pandemic came. The argument is understandable but, I believe that going back to the status quo is folly. 

While digital learning has shown that it cannot completely replace face to face teaching, it’s difficult to find an area of higher education where digital teaching and learning has no role to play at all. What we need to do now is to take advantage of the best of both worlds and embrace what is called blended learning - a style of education in which students learn via electronic and online media as well as traditional face-to-face teaching. When blended learning is done well, digital and in-person delivery can enhance each other.  

A blended learning model is undoubtedly a great way to augment the learner’s experience, but its advantages go beyond that. Academic research suggests that blended learning gives learners a more comprehensive understanding of course content as it offers the learner convenience and flexibility; it broadens the learner experience by supporting anytime, anywhere learning, and reshapes the role of the instructor. Essentially, through blended learning, online and instructor-led training is complementary and creates an integrated learning environment. Blended learning also reduces face-to-face training costs, such as travel, accommodation, and printed teaching materials. 

Another reason for not reducing schooling to interaction with a computer (even if it were possible) is that doing so limits the opportunity to learn important human skills and attributes like kindness, humility, sharing, support, etc. We humans are social and develop by interaction with each other in the material, corporeal world. Real-world interaction is enjoyable and pleasurable, as well as being developmental. Human children learn to be intelligent, empathic, and considerate through interaction with adults and peers. Thus, interaction within the family and beyond is essential for humanity as we know it.

While allowing learning to continue, blended learning will enable institutions to gradually move away from traditional face to face teaching to more sophisticated online methods. This gradual adaptation will also allow the government and institutions to ensure that all students can fully access the benefits of digital teaching and learning. 

The most significant barrier to online learning has been digital poverty. For every student to be ready and able to learn digitally, they should be provided with an appropriate device; good connectivity; reliable back-up when things go wrong; relevant software; a trained teacher; and space in which to work in. While the government, institutions, NGOs and well-wishers try to make that a reality, we need to embrace blended learning.

First published on March 31st, 2021 in The SAFRAP Newsletter Volume 2: Issue 2 of March 2021 titled Education Reloaded.

WWMD - What Would Mako Do?

 Written by Descent Collins Bajila and edited by Prince Gora.

Just a few hours after Makomborero Haruzivishe was arrested on February 18th, Thandekile Moyo asked a pertinent question. She tagged a few friends on Twitter and posted, “Dearest comrades, I only have one question for you, for us. WWMD? Were it you in prison right now, WHAT WOULD MAKO DO?

The question provoked a lot of people who pestered her for answers and the way forward until she was compelled to post again, “Friends have been messaging me since yesterday. What needs to be done? What can we do? Good people, we all know what needs to be done. We all know what Makomborero has done for us. We all know that the hashtag won`t work. This is the hour of reckoning!”

I have tried to meditate on the question and I feel very challenged. For nearly 8 months, Mako has known that his day with the police is coming. He knew that it was not a question of ‘if’ but of ‘when’ they would pounce on him. At one time I met him with Youngerson Matete and Takudzwa Ngadziore and sensed that he was conscious of the fact that he could be arrested any minute from then but still he would not shy away from the duty of perfecting the revolutionary mentoring of his successors in the student movement. 

He knew that he could be arrested if he attended comrades' court appearances but still proceeded to do that on countless occasions. He knew that he could be arrested if he appeared at funerals and bereavements of comrades, but still he travelled to mourn and give solidarity to the Dinar family in Gutu, the Dzamara family in Mutoko, the Siziba family in Bulawayo and that is to mention but a few of is selfless such sacrifices.

The imminence of his arrest never stopped him from giving solidarity to comrades in need. It didn`t stop him from travelling to Masvingo with others to build the Youth Assembly. It didn`t stop him from attending the national council in Bulawayo or from attending countless other party functions. The struggle is his life.

Friends and comrades alike have at one time or another urged Mako to lay low, to tone down his activism. He has given the same reply always, “How do I lay low when Muchehiwa is battling for his life and Taku is in jail? You can`t ask that of me!” When people told Mako to go underground, maybe even flee to South Africa or beyond, he called Thandekile and said, “Mamo, people don`t understand. When Itai disappeared, his mum asked me kuti aripi mumwe wako? She asked me the same when Patson was abducted. Now they are both gone. I owe it to them to keep fighting!”

Comrades, I appeal to all of you, all of us to think of what Mako would do if we were arrested. Would he be in Harare and skip your court appearance? Would he just design a hashtag about your freedom and make you famous? Would he just change his social media profile picture to yours and then continue with his life? Or would he start an analysis of why you did the things that led to your arrest? 

What would Mako do?

Surviving as an outsider.

 Part 1

By Prince Gora

Like it or not, at some point you have felt like an outsider. There are a couple of times that you feel awkward and embarrassed because you just don't seem to fit where you are. Yet, most of the time, that place – the one that has made you feel out of place – is exactly the place you should be at. You want to be there and you know that you must be there. How do you deal with it? How do you as survive as an outsider?

For most of my relatively short existence on Mother Earth, I’ve had to live as an outsider. My intelligence, or lack of, ambitions and aspirations have ensured that many a time, willingly or unwillingly, I have found myself in a place or a position where I am an outsider – a place where I want to be but I still feel out of place. By my own judgements (biased of course), I believe that I have largely been able to consistently overcome the outsider tag. However, I have seen many friends and colleagues fall on the wayside, which is why I would like to share part of my outsider experience and how I have coped.

From what I can remember, I didn’t have a stable childhood. It seems that there was almost always some kind of tension in my parents` marriage since perhaps the time I started elementary school. Whether because of that or due to the fact that I was constantly moving from one place to another (changing schools in the process) or something else, my early years at school were not great, but they weren`t bad either – I was just an average student in literally everything.

A taste of stability would only come when I was eleven, around 2007. I had been moved to my grandparents’ rural home at the beginning of the year when in August, my parents` not so great union came to an unceremonious end. I had dreaded the coming of such a day for a long time and when it came, I cried tears of hopelessness and despair. I had heard too many stories of the life of orphans (which at the time I considered myself equivalent to) and the cruelty of stepmothers and stepfathers. Luckily for me though, that fate would elude me until I was much older; at eleven, I had the privilege of living with my loving grandparents.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have cried then because that day my soul gained something - a relentless fighting spirit and self-belief. Not only did I cry that day, I also asked myself questions that were not of my age - questions about life. Who will I become? I had no clear dream nor plan then but I figured out that whatever it is I would become; I would have to do it myself and, with help from a few guardian angels, that is exactly what I have done.

Since that day, I started to stand out and be counted. I became an accomplished athlete, became more involved in club activities but most importantly, my academic performance steadily took off.

It was at school that I first tasted the feeling of being an outsider. Hitherto, I had been very content with being an average student who just listened in class, grasped the little that I could and moved on with life – never revising notes, never reading further and almost always doing homework at the last minute or at the insistence of a parent. I was content with being on the tail end of the top 10 of the class. But the moment I started asking myself questions about life, I figured out that school would come in handy at some point so suddenly I wasn’t content with being number 9 or 10 anymore, I wanted to be among the best in class. 

But to leapfrog to the other end of the top 10, I had to make some sacrifices. Not only did I have to work harder, I also had to change my circle of friends (maybe that wasn’t necessary but I thought it was and I made the change). On paper, this is pretty easy and straightforward but in reality it wasn’t. To begin with, the guys who belonged to the top 5 of the class didn`t want to be friends with me. I simply wasn’t very valuable to them – I was now working as hard as them, yes, but I scarcely knew anything they didn`t and grasped concepts and solved problems at a far slower pace than they did. But still I wasn`t disheartened, I kept my eyes on the ball because I knew that in a place where even the teacher hardly had a copy of the textbook of every subject, I had to stick around the guys with the knowledge. I didn`t know the phrase then but I somehow understood that only ‘iron sharpens iron.’

My grade seven results (of the chaotic 2008 academic year) didn`t come back great. I only managed a lowly 18 units but I felt pretty good about myself. Not only was this the third highest in class (first had 15, second 17), but I had managed it all by myself because we had had no teacher for the majority of that year. In my class at least, I had been a success because in three school terms, I had moved from ninth to sixth and then to third and by the time these results came out, I was in my second term of secondary school at the end of which, I would – for the first time – emerge at the top of my class.

As with all past achievements, this doesn`t mean much now, it`s no longer so thrilling. But it instilled something in me, it taught me that I could make it even as an outsider as long as I kept the focus and the self-belief. 

When I transferred to Epworth High School for my Ordinary Levels, I was put in the third class even though my results from the previous year were good. Apparently they didn’t consider the rural school I was coming from capable of measuring my true potential. Within a few weeks however, I had to change classes. My school work, which was not yet suffering from student activism and other adult distractions it now suffers from, was too good to ignore. Coincidentally, the school was also just starting a trial run of sciences subjects with its top students and after 3 months, the results hadn`t been great.

I suspect that it was precisely because of these reasons that my then history teacher and class teacher of the sciences class, Mrs. Chipoyi, approached me with an offer to transfer to her class just after break one Thursday. She had consulted with her colleagues, particularly the guys who taught Physics, Chemistry and Biology and had agreed that, if I was up to the challenge, I could make the leap. Beaming in confidence and self-belief and treating every subject with the same weight (unfortunately or fortunately, I have carried the same spirit to university), I embraced the challenge.

I will never forget the disbelief I saw on the faces of my new classmates when I joined their class at 3pm - after my athletics practice - that afternoon. One of the girls actually openly asked the teacher if I was seriously hoping to catch up with all they had learnt in three months. Almost all of these guys had been far better students than me in primary school (I had attended classes with several in the many primary schools I went to) and didn`t want to take me in their circle. 

Well, I didn`t quit my athletics but kept running the 1500m race until I bowed out at provincial level that year and the next. Yet, I went on to become the best student of the school the following year and even had the privilege of heading the prefects body.  I would become one of the two students to pass Physics and Chemistry from that class and the only one to pursue sciences beyond ordinary level.

Once again, I had survived the outsider tag and I would go on to do the same over and over again beginning with my advanced levels.

Part 2 coming soon.

Learning from the best: When Obama lost an election.

When politicians (mostly) who have made it in their careers tell their stories, it's usually about the moments of triumph. Rarely is anything ever said about the moments of despair, the time when these big men almost gave up.

...but we all know that reality is not that ideal. Geniuses they may be but life is never straight forward. This, among other noble qualities, is one of the reasons why I started idolising Abraham Lincoln as a teenager. I found his story remarkable and relatable. The story I am going to share today though is not of Old Abe but of the modern era political hero, Barack Obama (who curiosly also idolises Lincoln). The story is told by the president himself.

 

IT’S HARD, in retrospect, to understand why you did something stupid. I don't mean the small stuff—ruining your favorite tie because you tried to eat soup in the car or throwing out your back because you got talked into playing tackle football on Thanksgiving. I mean dumb choices in the wake of considerable deliberation: those times when you identify a real problem in your life, analyze it, and then with utter confidence come up with precisely the wrong answer.

That was me running for Congress. After numerous conversations, I had to concede that Michelle was right to question whether the difference I was making in Springfield justified the sacrifice. Rather than lightening my load, though, I went in the opposite direction, deciding I needed to step on the gas and secure a more influential office. Around this same time, veteran congressman Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther, challenged Mayor Daley in the 1999 election and got trounced, doing poorly even in his own district.

I thought Rush’s campaign had been uninspired, without a rationale other than the vague promise to continue Harold Washington’s legacy. If this was how he operated in Congress, I figured I could do better. After talking it over with a few trusted advisors, I had my staff jerry-rig an in-house poll to see whether a race against Rush would be viable. Our informal sampling gave us a shot. Using the results, I was able to persuade several of my closest friends to help finance the race. And then, despite warnings from more experienced political hands that Rush was stronger than he looked, and despite Michelle’s incredulity that I would somehow think she’d feel better with me being in Washington instead of Springfield, I announced my candidacy for congressman from the First Congressional District.

Almost from the start, the race was a disaster. A few weeks in, the rumblings from the Rush camp began: Obama’s an outsider; he’s backed by white folks; he’s a Harvard elitist. And that name—is he even Black?

Having raised enough money to commission a proper poll, I discovered that Bobby had 90 percent name recognition in the district and a 70 percent approval rating, whereas only 11 percent of voters even knew who I was. 

Shortly thereafter, Bobby’s adult son was tragically shot and killed, eliciting an outpouring of sympathy. I effectively suspended my campaign for a month and watched television coverage of the funeral taking place at my own church, with Reverend Jeremiah Wright presiding. Already on thin ice at home, I took the family to Hawaii for an abbreviated Christmas break, only to have the governor call a special legislative session to vote on a gun control measure I supported. With eighteen-month-old Malia sick and unable to fly, I missed the vote and was roundly flayed by the Chicago press.

I lost by thirty points, 61% to 30.

When talking to young people about politics, I sometimes offer this story as an object lesson of what not to do. Usually I throw in a postscript, describing how, a few months after my loss, a friend of mine, worried that I’d fallen into a funk, insisted that I join him at the 2000 Democratic National Convention in L.A. (“You need to get back on the horse,” he said.)

But when I landed at LAX and tried to rent a car, I was turned down because my American Express card was over its limit. I managed to get myself to the Staples Center, but then learned that the credential my friend had secured for me didn’t allow entry to the convention floor, which left me to haplessly circle the perimeter and watch the festivities on mounted TV screens. Finally, after an awkward episode later that evening in which my friend couldn’t get me into a party he was attending, I took a cab back to the hotel, slept on the couch in his suite, and flew back to Chicago just as Al Gore was accepting the nomination.

It’s a funny story, especially in light of where I ultimately ended up. It speaks, I tell my audience, to the unpredictable nature of politics, and the necessity for resilience.

What I don’t mention is my dark mood on that flight back. I was almost forty, broke, coming off a humiliating defeat and with my marriage strained.

I felt for perhaps the first time in my life that I had taken a wrong turn; that whatever reservoirs of energy and optimism I thought I had, whatever potential I’d always banked on, had been used up on a fool’s errand. Worse, I recognized that in running for Congress I’d been driven not by some selfless dream of changing the world, but rather by the need to justify the choices I had already made, or to satisfy my ego, or to quell my envy of those who had achieved what I had not.

In other words, I had become the very thing that, as a younger man, I had warned myself against. I had become a politician—and not a very good one at that.

Adapted from; A promised Land by Barack Obama pages 50 and 51

Is it time for the African democrats to take a more militant approach after M7 scored another one for the dictators?

 

By Prince Gora

Bobi Wine (real name Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu) took the African political landscape by storm late last year such that by the time that the Ugandans went to polls on January 14, many democrats, particularly my fellow Zimbabweans, had fallen in love with him. His bravery and style was rightly lauded and many prophesised his victory.

I too added my plaudits to Bobi Wine as I couldn’t help but marvel at his inspiring bid for the Ugandan state house but I was very sceptical about him actually taking over state power. That belief is very unpopular and considered pessimistic by most of my peers but I had and still have solid points to back it up. 

For starters, Uganda has been virtually ruled by dictators since its independence in 1966 including a 9-year calamitous rule of Field Marshall Idi Amin Dada, one of the world’s worst ever dictators. Dictators, as you all know, generally don’t respect nor care about the voice and wishes of the people. Secondly and perhaps most importantly, Bobi’s case is not an isolated one. Nigeria had Atiku Abubakar in 2019 while we had our very own Nelson Chamisa in 2018. All these three men inspired a generation and had most of us believing that change had indeed arrived but in the end it was all too little too late for them because even though they garnered massive votes in the general elections, state power still proved to be elusive owing to one reason or another (that is just me politely saying they were RIGGED out of the presidency).

AU - Authoritarians Union?

The violence - which has been well publicised - instigated on Bobi Wine and his supporters by the Ugandan government has been shocking and the internet blackout of the country is known as well. It is for these reasons that one finds it mind-boggling that the EAC (East African Community) and the AU (African Union) never uttered a single word condemning the actions of M7 and his cabal. But then, again… this is not an isolated case, the dictators’ club kept quite too when Buhari switched off street lights to shoot unarmed civilians and they turned a blind eye during the shenanigans of August 01, 2018 in Zimbabwe.

When you take a much closer look, the silence of the African Union and its regional blocks on critical issues becomes less surprising. In a way, it in fact begins to make sense. These authoritarians lead these organisations after all and it is only natural that they watch over each other’s backs. They are united against change and determined to stay in power.

A democratic Africa, therefore, will not be fronted by the AU or any of the old guard, we - the young people - will have to do it and for that we need to be united and well-coordinated. If we’re not well coordinated as we currently are, then our quest for a democratic Africa will be a very long one.

Should we quit contesting elections?

My generation is understandably frustrated. They want change as soon as yesterday and they want it instantly. Talk about elections to my fellow citizenry and they will immediately tell you about the last rigged one and why they will never vote again.

Many have started calling for a change of tactics and are encouraging activists and opposition figures alike to take a more militant approach. Some have even gone to the extent of declaring that we need to go to war to democratise Zimbabwe.

I want change too but I believe that taking the path that we’re advised to take is to err. Waging a war is not only wrong but it is almost not executable. “ZANU and ZAPU launched a war against Smith so we have to do the same,” they argue. Well, I don`t think so. Firstly, such an action is against democratic values and secondly, while Kaunda and Machel welcomed Zimbabwean soldiers into their lands back then, I doubt that Edgar Lungu and Phillip Nyusi will do likewise today, for example.

Way Forward: Should we just resign to fate then?

The answer is NO. We need to keep fighting but we need to forge new strategies, strengthen our ties with other democratic forces, be realistic and patient. I believe that democracy will eventually prevail but it won’t be instant and instant doesn’t last anyway...look at the November coup for example. 

I will end by quoting Bill Gates who said, “Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.’’