Online education role in reforming higher education in Somalia

by

Abdiasis Jama

to

Pure training center in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a degree of BBA

July, 2021

Abstract 

This study evaluated the relationship between a student’s understanding of the lesson and communication with the teacher in Online course at East Africa university in Somalia. A total of 95 students in the final semester participated in the study. Using simple random sampling, 45 students were randomly selected for answering the research question. Data was collected using a closed-ended questionnaire that contained seven items and cross-sectional design was used. Using the SPSS statistical software, Spearman correlation analysis was performed to measure the direction and magnitude of the correlation between student’s understanding score and communication with the online teacher. Results showed that there is a positive correlation between a student’s understanding score and communication with an online teacher with a larger correlation coefficient. It is recommended to improve communication between the student and the teacher throughout the online course in order to enhance the student’s understanding of the course.

Keywords: online education, communication, understanding, correlation 

Introduction 

Educational scholars, policy makers, and independent teachers, are claiming that advancing online education will be key to improve learning behavior of somali students in higher education fields. Others had learnt that when there is pandemic, online education will prevent disruption of traditional in-class lessons and will help continuation of the learning materials. According to an online survey done by Pure training center had (2020) revealed that more than 60% of the Somali students in higher education prefer independently learning online education. They believe that online education helps in their understanding of the concepts as long as proper communication is established between the student and the teacher

Studying the role of online education in reforming higher education is an important ingredient in order to convince universities to invest a lot in this area and also for policy makers to establish guidelines and standard to ensure high quality of online education

The purpose of this survey is to test the relationship between a student’s lesson understanding score and communication with an instructor in 100 students that finished an online semester at East Africa university in Bosaso. Lesson understanding score is the dependent variable on numeric scale. Communication with the online instructor is the independent variable and defined on Yes/no categorical scale 

Research question

1. Does a student’s understanding score relate to having communication with the lesson instructor in an online teaching environment at East Africa University?

Literature review  

Online education evolution and its role in reforming higher education had been studied by many scholars. In Pakistan for example, a number of factors that link online education with students’ background such as computer literacy, creativity, motivation among students were evaluated (Akhter & Mohmood, 2018). Others have studied financial investment in improving online teaching is important in order to reform higher education and provide to students and education adminstrators innovative ways of learning and teaching (montelongo, 2019). How teacher monitor and examine student’s understanding of the online material had been evaluated (Abdiasis, 2020)

In past studies, although much effort had focused on impact and experience of applying online education in higher institutes, less was studied on effective ways of implementing online education to reform higher education such as maintaining constant communication between the student and teacher to enhance lesson understanding by the student in online environment 

Method

This study was conducted at East Africa university located in Bosaso, Somalia with a population estimated to be 5000 students. The number of female students attending the university had increased and now there are as many female students as there are male students 

The survey questionnaire targeted students studying currently at the university irrespective of gender. After one month, 90  students at East Africa university returned the questionnaire which was designed on surveymonkey.com and administered on the researcher’s website. Using simple random sampling 45 students of age between 18-35 were selected to exclude possible outliers. Of these 45 students, 25 were female while 20 were male, 65% were in their final semester while 75% were aged above 20

Data was collected by means of a survey questionnaire that contained seven items. The items included factual information such as university name and semester level. It also included yes/no. It is the first time this questionnaire was used. Thus it was not tested in past studies. The content validity was established by making sure data matched with research variables was collected. Closed ended questionnaire was used because of convenience and cost effectiveness. It was cross-sectional as data was collected at one time

Reliability of the instrument was established using Cronbach’ alpha wa obtained 0.9 after using three random samples of the data collected by the instrument and high reliability was observed 

Results

The study was conducted using Spearman correlation coefficient and selecting test significance level 5%. After data entry into SPSS and analysis, the result obtained was (r = 0.8, p = 0.001). Table1 shows the Spearman correlation SPSS output and figure1 shows scatter plot of the research variables. The scatter plot shows the correlation between student’s understanding score and communication with the online teacher is positive

Discussion  

This study demonstrated that communication between the online teacher and the student is important in order to enhance a student’s understanding of the online course. Given that the participants were in their final year of university indicates that participants had enough knowledge to fill in the questionnaire and provide highly accurate responses. Future research will explore further the experiences online teachers gain when ensuring the student understand the online course better 

References

1. Akhter, H & Mohmood, M. (2018). Study of the Impact of Online Education on Student’s learning at University Level in Pakistan. International Journal of Distance education and E-learning, 3(2), .

Appendix

List of tables

List of figures