#National Council for Higher Education Archives - Uganda Christian University Partners

UCU student at stalls during 2025 exhibition

By Christine Mirembe
At 10 a.m. on a Wednesday, a bus parked by the gym on the Uganda Christian University (UCU) Mukono campus was filled with students and their bags, art pieces, computers, robots and more. It was March 26 as they headed for participation in the 15th National Council for Higher Education (NCHE) exhibition, held this year on Kamukuzi grounds in Mbarara.

Neither too sunny or rainy, the climate provided a soothing atmosphere for the exchange of innovation and vision with the theme of “Strategies, Challenges and Best Practices for Artificial Intelligence Integration in Higher Education in Uganda.” UCU was one of the 37 universities sharing from March 27 to 29 for an audience that included potential students and their parents.

UCU, a first-place winner for five previous years, took second place this year to Mountains of the Moon University in Fort Portal, Uganda.

UCU was represented by 50 students from various schools and faculties, including the School of Law; School of Business; School of Social Sciences; School of Education; School of Journalism, Media and Communication; Faculty of Agricultural Sciences; and the Faculty of Engineering, Design and Technology. UCU student exhibitors were led by staff members, including the Deputy Vice Chancellor (DVC) for Academic Affairs, Rev. Assoc. Prof. John Mulindwa Kitayimbwa; the DVC for Finance and Administration, David Mugawe; and the Dean for the School of Business, Vincent Kisenyi.

The following is a summary of some of what UCU shared:

School of Journalism, Media and Communication
Meant to display how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is integrated in their various disciplines, AI tools in the media like Perplexity and Otter AI in print were the focus. Perplexity provides instant summaries of an article or webpage, sharing the information most relevant to a search, whereas Otter transcribes audio to text. Intrigued parents and students continuously approached the journalism tent to see what was happening with the screens, mixers, microphones and cameras.

Timothy Okurut, one exhibitor, said attendees were especially interested in his demonstration of vlogs, a video documenting thoughts, opinions or experiences.

“We had an overload of students at some point,” he said. “Space between the stalls would crowd up, and I would not have room to do the recordings at one point.”

Tirzah Atwiine, right, explains some of what she has learned as a student within UCU’s Faculty of Engineering, Design and Technology

Faculty of Engineering, Design and Technology
From sleepless nights of planning to 3D design printing, Tirzah Atwiine from the Department of Computing and Technology displayed an English AI-powered, voice-activated humanoid robot that responds to questions. She built it using a learning language model called Lama, and used an open AI Application Programming Interface (API) key to get data to train it. This humanoid responds to many questions, including those about geography, mathematics and literature. Her inspiration came from wanting a late-night study buddy who would interact when the human prepared for an exam or a test.

“Most people were excited because it’s a fully functioning robot that can move and do different things,” Tirzah said. “The parents and lecturers were interested in it and said it was very nice and innovative.”

She said she hopes to partner with Makerere University that is working on a Luganda data set, enabling the robot to speak in that tribal language.

School of Business
The display connected to local business relationship building, demonstrating how students can help businesses with accumulating and using their data.

Elvis Segawa was among students who showcased how these amounts of data can be integrated into Marketwise, an AI tool allowing analysis, sorting and summarizing data. The display was in collaboration with computer science students.

Faculty of Agricultural Science
“Working water” is a method of cultivating plants without soil. The agriculture students displayed a hydroponic system that they integrated with an alarm sensor that uses AI to detect change in the water levels, thereby alerting the farmer to add more water.

Uganda’s agricultural sector is challenged by limited access to extension services, meaning farmers lack crucial information and support, which hinders productivity, leading to low yields and impacting food security. To tackle this, this faculty came up with a UCU Farm Chart.

“This UCU Farm Chart is where we put all the information from our sources,” said Joy Kirabo, an agricultural science student. “They (farmers) are able to access all the materials using this chart and if they have any questions, they are able to ask and get answers immediately.”

Kirabo added that people were amused, especially by how the hydroponics system worked. They gazed at how the water levels rose and dropped and also came running whenever the alarms went on to see how more water was added. Students are optimistic that this project can go beyond school and be adapted by farmers around the country.

School of Law
Edonu Emmanuel, Turiho Danita and Eugene Kironde represented law. The trio presented an AI-powered chatbot that incorporated a number of cases and legal material from Uganda. Particularly, they were trying to solve the problem of the lack of AI chatbots that had been trained on Ugandan jurisdiction material.

“Through this, we were able to collect datasets that were particularly designed to record legal material,” Eugene elaborated. The end goal was to help law students to read case material in a short period of time.

Their biggest challenge, however, is that Uganda does not have a number of data sets and data material for legal cases. There are only a few repositories like the Uganda Legal Information Institute (ULII), a website with quite a number of cases that law students usually access in research.

“The issue was for us finding one repository that had a number of data points,” Eugene said.

School of Education
This team showcased a health link app created by an AI tool called Jotform. The purpose of this app was to enable UCU students to access health services online rather than trekking to the Allan Galpin Health Center for any health concern. Here, the doctors are to be accessed online. By the time of the exhibition, this app was still at basic level as it had not yet been linked to Allan Galpin. For future prospects, they intend on following up and linking the app so as to serve its intended purpose.

The awards were presented in three categories: 1) tertiary institutions; 2) provisional licensed universities and other degree award-winning institutions; and 3) public and chartered universities, where UCU was categorised.

“I think it was a very successful event,” said Dean Kisenyi. He also mentioned that while UCU ranked second, it was the top among private institutions.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

To support UCU programs, students, activities and services, go to www.ugandapartners.org and click on the “donate” button, or contact UCU Partners Executive Director, Mark Bartels, at m.t.bartels@ugandapartners.org.

Also, follow us on X (formerly Twitter), Instagram and Facebook.

e-Learning compatible with multiple devices that can be accessed by both staff and students. COURTESY PHOTO/UCU Law Society

(NOTE: This article was written before the Uganda National Council for Higher Education gave late August 2020 approval for UCU to offer on-line courses.)

By Alex Taremwa

On Friday, July 3, 2020, my good friend Rebecca Karagwa, a recipient of a generous Uganda Partners scholarship, should have graduated with her Bachelor of Laws from Uganda Christian University (UCU). Only that did not happen. After waiting for online exams in vain, she celebrated anyway. She cut the cake and ate it.

Her official school completion was delayed partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic that forced schools shut but also due to the Ugandan education system technological limbo in 2020. Since the colonial era, classroom instruction in Uganda – even at top government-supported universities like Makerere University (the 8^th Best in Africa according to recent rankings) has been a blackboard and chalk affair.

While students in countries like Rwanda begin to interact with computer technology as early as primary school with the help of education tablets that the government freely distributes, it is common for a student in Uganda from a rural area like Kazo to join a university without ever touching a computer.

UCU Students browse online reading material in the UCU Hamu Mukasa Library. COURTESY PHOTO/UCU E-Learning

I write from experience. Before I joined UCU in 2010, the best I knew about a computer was to correctly identify the mouse, keyboard and monitor. It was the first-year, UCU Basic Computing Foundation Course Unit that moved me to computer literacy; I scored 98%. This is true today for many students at Ugandan universities.

While the Ugandan government directed that Information and Computer Technology (ICT) be taught compulsorily at secondary level, most schools in rural areas and some in peri-urban areas have at most eight functional computers to be used by a population of 800 students or even more. At the maximum, each student will have interfaced with the computer for about five full hours in a term. To say that this time is insufficient to create any sort of mastery is an understatement.

Nevertheless, students move on to the universities where some semblance of e-Learning can be felt. Lecturers often send course material on Email and can ably grade assignments through academic systems such as Moodle. But from experience, both students and lecturers confess that the traditional approach where assignments are typed and printed is more “effective” than the modern style because the latter requires an internet connection or a physical presence at the University where one can access free Wi-Fi.

But there is an even bigger reason. Most of the courses taught at universities had not been customized for online delivery. When you visit the Uganda National Council for Higher Education (NCHE) website to see the listed of accredited online courses for universities, you’re met with an empty list. There is, however, a list of new guidelines that the NCHE is mooting to furnish universities in a bid to support their customization of online programs.

Online programs have to be immersive and interactive to compensate for when the students are not physically present at the university as the case is now. The challenge is that neither the university nor the government can guarantee that students will have access to a computer and stable Internet to support this kind of learning.

Statistically, only 42% of Ugandans are connected to the Internet, according to the Uganda Communications Commission. This represents 19 million of the 45 million Ugandans. If you break this figure further, the biggest concentration of Internet users is in Kampala, Wakiso, Mukono, Entebbe, Jinja and other major towns, but most of the rural countryside where the students are during this lockdown is largely uncovered.

To worsen matters, Uganda has the most expensive Internet per megabyte of all the countries in East Africa. It doesn’t help our case that social media platforms like WhatsApp, on which students are currently interacting as they hope for take home exams, also attract a daily tax.

It would have been better and cheaper for the government to lift tax on social media to promote learning via smartphones on Facebook Live and YouTube but instead, the government is settling to buy two radio and television sets for each of the 140,000 villages in the country. While this happens, universities like the United States International University in Africa in Nairobi, Aga Khan University and other ultramodern institutions have already closed their semesters successfully by administering exams online. All the institutions had to do was to use part of the students’ already paid tuition to activate for them data bundles with which to access, write and submit the exams.

Together with an e-Examination system that closed submissions after the permissible three hours, the universities were able to avoid physical access to the premises, keep COVID-19 at bay and still successfully close their academic calendars with minor interruptions.

Selfishly though, the government has refused to allow institutions like Uganda Christian University (UCU) that have the necessary infrastructure to support e-Learning to proceed with their academic calendar, claiming that some students who are in rural areas will not be able to access the learning material – even when the very students petitioned the Speaker of Parliaments seeking permission to sit their exams and move on with their lives.

Uganda has attempted and failed twice to allow finalists to return to their respective institutions of learning to write their examinations. Information from the corridors of power now has it that the government is mooting to force a dead year on students like Karagwa that were hoping to graduate simply because there is no infrastructure to support e-Learning.

As long as COVID-19 is still a global pandemic, education in Uganda will remain on halt and even when schools resume in the near future, e-Learning will remain a far cry until the technological barriers to uptake are addressed.

Alex Taremwa is a journalist, a graduate of UCU and an MA student at the Graduate School of Media and Communications (GSMC) of The Aga Khan University in Nairobi.

+++

To support Uganda Christian University programs, students, activities and services, go to www.ugandapartners.org and click on the “donate” button, or contact UCU Partners Executive Director, Mark Bartels, at m.t.bartels@ugandapartners.org.

Also, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Tag Archives: #National Council for Higher Education

Artificial Intelligence focus of annual Uganda university showcase

Barriers to integrating e-Learning into Uganda’s education system