By Patty Huston-Holm
On a Saturday and at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time and via Zoom, the niece of one of my Uganda Christian University (UCU) students in silliness stuck out her tongue at me. I playfully stuck mine back. Then, in a time zone eight hours later, Prisca Nandede, a sociologist pursuing a UCU Masters in Development, shooed away the niece and a younger nephew hanging on her neck, as we got down to business.
Such is how I did my work – coaching doctoral and masters level students about writing and research – virtually in the Covid-restricted learning environment of 2020.
It was a setback. I didn’t want to teach this way.
The beauty of being on the ground, engaging an entire classroom and praying one-on-one with a struggling student was replaced with text in emails, unfamiliar names asking questions in an e-learning platform and faces blurred through wireless optics via Zoom across the Atlantic Ocean. The pandemic that beached me in the state of Ohio USA did the same but in closer proximity to other UCU lecturers and students.
Misery does love company. But as a volunteer faculty member, I took no solace in the worse suffering of my East African colleagues who were without teaching jobs or teaching with greatly reduced pay. Nor did I relish the shared desolation of students struggling even more to have jobs, put food on the table and access technology to learn and get a degree.
We were in the same e-boat, keeping afloat as best we could.
My course was optional – a seminar, actually – and free of charge to post-graduate students. It was a research and writing seminar designed to help them with their dissertations and theses. Since 2015, I lead the training in person alongside faculty within the UCU School of Research and Post-Graduate Studies (SRPGS). The summer of 2020 was to be a time to focus on a train-the-trainer model in which Ugandan scholars would assume greater ownership of this assistance to students and to their research supervisors.
When leaving Uganda in February 2020 after seven weeks of face-to-face assistance in Mukono and Mbale, I promised Dr. Kukunda Elizabeth Bacwayo and Dr. Joseph Owor to be back in July. As we exchanged hugs and smiles, we knew nothing about a deadly virus drilling into our countries with economic, educational and health consequences.
Starting in mid-March 2020, the coronavirus changed life – and the delivery of education – as we knew it. In both the United States and Uganda, the emphasis was on a greater shift to on-line learning with the realization that the students most financially and technologically challenged would encounter the greatest obstacles.
For my seminar, the content was much the same as what I delivered in person for six years. The focus was on guiding students through the components of the UCU Academic Research Manual with strategies for good writing, quality research and plagiarism avoidance mixed in. My new delivery model involved 16 virtual lecturers on 20 different topics. With eight lecturers from North America and eight from Uganda, we recorded subject matter experts in business, social work, theology, law, education, engineering and journalism, among others. Through YouTube videos of under 15 minutes each, they provided a real-world context for academic learning. We conducted live zoom chats with professionals. We offered e-badges and e-certificates for students successfully completing the quizzes and short writing activities.
From mid-September to mid-December 2020, there were more than 100 students enrolled into the 24-7 e-seminar. Roughly half of those engaged in the content at some level. Nine got certificates. Five, including Prisca Nandede, took advantage of my free services as a virtual writing/research coach.
During that Saturday Zoom session, we discussed Prisca’s research topic about how a woman’s participation in the economy impacts her spousal and overall family relationships. Prisca, in her early 40s and working with the Uganda Ministry of Water and Environment, also shared her passion for her job and her concerns about the health of some family members, challenges with technology in Uganda, fears of pre-election violence, remembrances of living in Mbale and Masende and her love of Christ.
While realizing that quality is often more important than quantity, I shared my disappointment with student participation in the e-seminar. I expressed hope for better engagement in the next seminar – March 8 through May of 2021. I asked Prisca for advice to reach and help more students.
For the students and their teachers struggling with on-line delivery, she said, “They need to understand that we all have to adapt (to change) at a certain point.” Concluding our one-on-one Zoom session before the ending prayer, Prisca, one of the UCU students who persevered (i.e. Romans 5:5 with a message of hope) to finish the pilot e-seminar in December, issued this reminder: “It all comes down to God – His plan for us.”
I look forward to what He sets before me in this next 2.5 months.
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For more of these stories and experiences by and about Uganda Christian University (UCU) staff, students and graduates, visit https://www.ugandapartners.org. If you would like to support UCU, contact Mark Bartels, Executive Director, UCU Partners, at m.t.bartels@ugandapartners.org or go to https://www.ugandapartners.org/donate/
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