Keywords

1 Introduction

The SARS CoV-2 outbreak in January of 2020 caused significant interruptions in the schooling and academic spheres. The lack of continuance of education during the pandemic was a considerable challenge globally, as the pandemic revealed disparities in economies and society (Bozkurt et al., 2020). The continual disruption is markedly affecting learning, the drop-out and return rates of learners, particularly the girl-children (Giannini & Albrectsen, 2020). Disruption in education days leads to loss of educational gains and lowers the performance of learners. Moreover, it has lasting impacts on future careers and financial income. In the context of Namibia, when the COVID-19 numbers increased in the country, necessitating limitations of in-person contact, the Ministry of Education initially issued a directive to schools to engage in e-learning during the first lockdown period (Government of the Republic of Namibia, 2004). However, the Ministry soon realized that it was not possible. The focus of this chapter is to reflect on the decision made by the Ministry on Emergency Responsive Teaching (ERT). We argue that the COVID-19 outbreak presents countries with a glaring reality of an implementation gap that must be addressed. In Namibia’s case, there is a disconnect between a clear understanding of the policy implementation and the reality of implementation preparedness when the directive was given for schools to go online. Furthermore, the events of COVID-19 present a larger question of whether a change is needed in the manner we do school and if the pandemic is sufficiently disruptive to initiate innovation in schooling. In keeping these questions in mind, this chapter reflects on the last year and 8 months, evaluates the Namibian Education Emergency Response Teaching (ERT) strategies, and identifies what needs to take place in Namibia to be prepared for future pandemics.

2 Background

To place the Namibian ICT of schools in context and given the need to shift to remote instruction, we need to unpack the internal and external resources necessary for supporting this transition. We need to understand what aspects of the context (institutional, social, and governmental) affected the feasibility and effectiveness of the transition.

Namibia embarked on an aggressive plan nearly 20 years ago to fully integrate information and communication technologies (ICT) into its education systems as part of the government’s effort to become a knowledge-based economy by 2030 (Vision 2030, 2004). This process included the creation of the Namibian ICT Education policy that the Namibian Cabinet formally accepted in 2004. Accompanying the ICT Education policy was an implementation plan guide, called “Tech/Na!” (Translates into “Technology is ‘good’ or ‘nice’) , which was officially launched in September 2006.

Crucial in the reflective or evaluative process is asking how the grades 0–12 interactions with learners, families, personnel, and local and government stakeholders impact perceived responsiveness to the shift to ERT. To start the conversation, we need to understand the expectations for families, learners, school personnel, local and government stakeholder roles in the implementation of the ICT in Education Policy, the Tech/Na! Implementation plan and related policy documents. The Namibian ICT Policy for Education proposes to prepare all Namibians to participate in a global economy by being computer literate. It also intends to leverage change in the education system through education professionals using technology practices to bring about quality, equity, and excellence.

The Namibian ICT Policy for Education lists six broad objectives (Fig. 2.1), of which the researcher assumes basic understandings.

Fig. 2.1
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The Namibian ICT Policy for Education Goals (MoE, 2006)

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The policy document concretizes the expectations by listing examples of what they hope the technology integration will achieve. In the case of teachers, the policy states that they should become confident in using a computer and other ICTs for educational practices. Moreover, they must prioritize their “knowledge and skills on how to use technology as a tool to support learner-centered teaching, continuous assessment, and other forms of interactive learning are imperative” (MOE, 2006, p. 13).

The ICT policy objectives resulted in ICT standards and indicators for Namibian teachers in the ICTs in Education (ICTED) standards and new professional standards for teachers. A significant focus on teacher skills and a minimal emphasis on providing teachers with hands-on ICT-based experiences for their learners. Teachers are to integrate technology into the curriculum and to develop cross-curricular activities that involve technology. The policy puts forward the idea that technology is an appropriate vehicle to achieve goals of knowledge, equity, quality, and access for all.

In setting the stage and the expectation from the government as laid out above, it is essential to know how the grades 0–12 interactions with students, families, personnel, and local and government stakeholders’ impact perceived responsiveness to the shift to ERT. The lack of the Tech/Na! Implementation plan is only one of the primary reasons for the failure in continuing education during a crisis. Fuhrman et al. (2020) state that it is commonly assumed that more money would buy more educational resources and create better education, which results in better and quality education. However, what is often overlooked is that educational policies are a continuous process and cannot be separated from their execution. As such, communities of practice are crucial in pursuing a shared understanding and sharing practices or common perspectives while implementing policy (Honig, 2006).

3 Evaluation Approach Using CIPP Evaluation Model

The CIPP Evaluation Model guides the evaluative discussion from a policy and practice perspective focusing on Context, Input, Processes, and Product (CIPP) (Stufflebeam & Zhang, 2017). A desktop analysis informs this evaluation where the relevant policies, official communication from the government (especially the COVID-19 briefings), and Ministry of Education communication circulated to the public, schools, and community to parents and community is used to assess the actions of decisions and future planning. The documentation was analyzed, measuring the directives to teachers and schools against the Tech/Na! Framework for implementation indicating the holistic “end-to-end” solution as developed by the Ministry of Education. The areas of the Tech/Na! framework is the educational objectives and expectations, Technology Infrastructure and readiness at school; The technical capacity for maintenance, training and user support, content availability, and educational management. Applying the CIPP questions to the available resources lead to the findings. Additional documentation used were past evaluation reports from external stakeholders and recent data reports collected about the ERT at Namibian schools in the past 20 months.

4 Findings

The evaluation of findings is discussed in light of three categories related to infrastructure, support, and professional development.

4.1 Technology Infrastructure

The first part of assessing the feasibility of the directive is to ask whether the technology infrastructureis sufficient to handle the needs of ERT. Starting by examining the technology infrastructure is important because they are what is needed for successful implementation. The implementation of the Namibian ICT in Education Policy has mainly been a failure since its inception in 2005. Despite sizeable financial allocation in the Ministry of Education budget, the results have not been satisfactory. For example, little of the procured computers found their way to schools and instead, they languished in a warehouse for years (Isaacs, 2008). The bulk of the N$nine million consignment of computer equipment was meant to be distributed to 40 schools but has not reached the intended schools to date. The government proposed the creation of “Namibia’s National Education Technology Service and Support Centre (NETSS) in the capital city of Windhoek. This central technology nexus provides the distribution point as well as the maintenance and technical support for all education technology in Namibia” (Jackson et al., 2011, p. 86). This centre was supposed to aid in the distribution; however, the Ministry had issues in creating the Namibian Education Technology Service Support Centre (NETSS). When they eventually resolved the centre, it was ineffective and lacked the budgetary funding dedicated to repairs and support to the schools. The lack of success was captured in the Global e-Schools and Communities Initiative (GeSci) evaluation report in 2009 concerning the implementation process, which was not positive.

4.2 Technical Capacity

Secondly, we needed to know whether the Ministry support staff has sufficient technical capacity to handle the needs of ERT. In the technical implementation of providing connectivity to the Schools, the Ministry of Education partnered with the country’s Telecommunications provider and established an agency called XNET, whose mandate was to serve as a connectivity provider for schools and educational institutions. XNet was successful in connecting schools to have WIFI, albeit mainly in the administrative block of schools. Many schools still do not know of the discounted pricing provided by XNET for school connectivity to the Internet.

In the beginning phases of the Tech/Na! Implementation external funding was provided for the manager to assist in the implementation process. The manager position was to be integrated into the organizational structure of the Ministry, which did not happen, and this lack of leadership tragedy may have primarily attributed to the lack of implementation of ICTs in the schools.

Further capacity was to be built to develop a database of e-content lesson plans for teachers to use. Initiatives in this regard were individually attempted with Namibia College of Open Learning (NAMCOL), creating content in NOTESMASTER as an open-access learning management system (LMS). NAMCOL is a State Owned Educational institution created to provide learning opportunities for adults and out-of-school youth. The Notesmaster’s initiative in Namibia is one of the winners of the United Nations World Summit Awards 2015, so it seemed logical to expect that it would play a role in the pandemic era education system. Hence, the Ministry expected that the teachers would recommend the NotesMasters as the eLearning delivery of content during the first pandemic lockdown in March of 2020. However, this did not occur mainly because of additional concerns, such as the curriculum not being updated to the newly introduced curriculum.

4.3 Sufficiency of Teacher Professional Development

The third aspect that we needed to know was how to assess the success of the directive and whether the ongoing teacher professional development was sufficient to enable ERT before the pandemic. The National Institute for Educational Development (NIED) has offered various training to teachers in designing learning content and online assessments. Despite budgetary constraints, the training continued despite no local e-content online. The training not only focuses on online material creation but also ICT use and integration in the classroom. The unfortunate situation is that very few teachers are being trained, and it is entirely insufficient to respond to the directive of the Ministry during the lockdown. Many teachers used ICTs during their teacher training, but that does not mean that ICT for personal use translates to teachers being able to create content online and facilitate teaching and learning online (Kacelo et al., 2019).

In the in-service professional development programs, the Ministry has made efforts to empower older teachers to receive ICT literacy training through the International Computers Driver’s License (ICDL) training. ICDL consists of several components to be completed and to write an exam or test to get the certification. Unfortunately, this training initiative has been infrequent and interrupted, and as such, most teachers still need to be trained. It is important to note that ICT use or Technical proficiency (i.e. ICDL training) does not necessarily equate to the cognitive proficiency of teachers to provide e-learning teaching support to learners (Kacelo et al., 2019).

4.4 Experiences of Stakeholders

Fourth, it is most important to find out the experiences of teachers, learners, support personnel, and administrators and what they struggled the most with ERT? Evidence from teachers reveals that the lack of access and connectivity was the biggest challenge amongst teachers and community, learners, and parents. Teachers complained that learners had no self-regulated learning (SRL) and lacked the internal motivation to learn independently (Boer et al., 2021). Teachers recognized that their lack and confidence in using ICTs were highlighted/exposed during the pandemic. The lack of confidence to use ICT and the fear of the CoV-SARS-2 virus infections lead to an inability to teach. Many teachers used their commodities as excuses due to fear. After the failure of the eLearning directive, the Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) strategy resulted in printed workbooks being collected by parents. Additionally, the social media platform, WhatsApp , was used to communicate with the parents when they could not collect learning materials and to send audio recordings to explain the material and give instructions.

5 Conclusions and Evaluation Impacts

When evaluating and reflecting on the events and experiences of the education system during ERTs, we need to ask how we can adapt our processes to respond to such operational challenges in the future. For teachers to be flexible and pliable and still deliver quality education in a crisis is challenging. Investment should be placed in the training of teachers and specifically for teachers to understand systems thinking and develop a more sustainable and uninterrupted approach to education. Schools, principals, and teachers understand their role and function in a larger system that can address the issues of change and adapt fast. Focus on proper ICT literacy training for learners and teachers. The MoEAC can provide ICT equipment, resources, and technical support to teachers and learners, positively increasing the perceived readiness of teachers to teach online.

One way to address the challenges is to create an educational technology/learning design coordinator at schools. This can be a leadership function like the heads of departments but focusing on the school’s instructional leadership. Most importantly, is also asking how feedback from learners, teachers, and school support teams inform ERT needs in the future.

A clear plan to train ICT integration in teaching needs to take top priority. This plan needs to include learning design on creating online materials and online facilitation tools. Teachers also were aware that their traditional teaching style and role would change significantly when they moved to an online platform (Boer et al., 2021). They admitted that they did not have the required IT equipment to teach online. Teachers said that e-learning is helpful to improve teaching and learning but raised concerns about students’ ability to study on their own or to be self-directed in their learning. Concerns were also raised about the learners’ time management skills. Most importantly, teachers believed that community engagement is key to the continuance of education.

Moreover, the integration of technology in schools is a complex process that, if pursued correctly, can yield benefits that can be harvested in emergencies. However, many view technology integration merely through the lens of finances, forgetting that “throwing money at schools” is not always an effective method of solving problems (Fuhrman et al., 2020). Among the approaches that could be employed is more cohesiveness in policies and legislation that would strengthen teacher qualification, regulations for preparation in a pandemic to reduce disruption in education for learners.

Many parents in a higher socio-economic level have taken their children out of “regular” schooling systems and enrolled them into a homeschooling system primarily offered online and web-based. It is crucial in the research of policies and legislation. Deficits of resources and knowledge help partly explain the problems that policies experience in their implementation and resulting in poor performance of learners and a poor educational system. This, however, does not diminish the importance of causal research in what happens in the teaching and learning interaction in the classroom or any other learning environment (Fuhrman et al., 2020). We have very little direct evidence about what teachers do and how their actions affect students’ learning. Such knowledge is essential to develop the right policies, training, and interventions when national and international crises such as the CoV-SARS-2 pandemic occur. Educational policies that marginalize the use of technology in schools fail to take advantage of the tremendous range of skills, experience, and resources that learners bring with them to school (Kozma, 2011). Such educational policies must consider informal learning and the value it brings into a formal learning environment. If governments prioritize educational transformational policies, they need to consider the economic rationale and respond thereto (Kozma, 2011).