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The COVID-19 global pandemic has significantly impacted education, forcing many institutions of learning to make an abrupt shift from conventional face-to-face classes to Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT). It has forced academics to barge into ERT as an approach to mitigating the impact of the current pandemic on teaching and learning. UNESCO (2020) reports COVID-19 to have negatively affected the learning experiences of undergraduate students in institutions of higher learning across the globe. Since most residential universities engage in face-to-face teaching, a sudden switch to ERT could significantly affect the learning of students at such universities. Ontong and Waghid (2020) see the lack of time on the part of lecturers to prepare for online classes as a significant constraining factor on higher education students’ capacities to learn effectively.
This is the case in Africa, including in Kenya, the context of this present study. The Kenyan Ministry of Education (2020) recently expressed concern over the COVID-19 pandemic’s disruption of learning for “over 18 million Kenyan learners and trainees which is a threat to the attainment of Sustainable Development Goal number 4 on access to quality, equitable and inclusive education”(p.v). As a preventative measure to reduce the spread of the pandemic, the Government of the Republic of Kenya ordered all educational institutions to be closed indefinitely from March 2020 (Ministry of Education, 2020). However, Online learning is not new to the Kenyan context as some universities and colleges in the country had implemented this model before the pandemic (Paschal & Mkulu, 2020). Some universities had introduced e-learning before subscribing to the country’s Vision 2030 of digital literacy (Tarus & Gichoya, 2015; Huho, 2020). However, although these universities were already integrating online learning, institutions throughout the country were significantly affected during the time of COVID-19, primarily because some students did not at the time have sufficient resources for ERT (Bozkurt et al., 2020; Ngwacho, 2020).
The inception of ERT in Kenya, as in many other African countries, has been credited by some as a turning point for digital transformation and an opportunity to embrace and consolidate the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in higher education institutions that have often been criticized for their lamentable slow pace (Bozkurt et al. 2020; Tam & El-Azar 2020; Ontong & Waghid, 2020). ERT has certainly opened up opportunities not only for curriculum content developers but also for the establishment of higher educational institutions in remote areas where learners can be taught online (Huho, 2020). However, these affordances also present universities (particularly in Kenya as a developing country) with distinct curriculum implementation challenges. The extent to which university lecturers are managing to create opportunities for their students to interact with each other and with lecturers online, construct meaning through sustained communication, and facilitate social and cognitive presences, is yet to be explored fully within the context of ERT in Kenya. Three elements, social, cognitive, and teaching presences, together constitute the cornerstone of Garrison, Anderson, and Archer’s (2000) Community of Inquiry (CoI) theoretical framework for creating meaningful and collaborative online learning. These authors, and those who subscribe to this theory, consider these to be essential for establishing an online community. Stenbom, Jansson, and Hulkko (2016) see an effective online class as one that enables students to interact with all three presences to achieve meaningful and collaborative learning in a distance education context.