The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought about major changes in the world’s activities. Particularly in education, teaching and learning is taking place. One major shift is the use of digital technology and it’s advancement during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Schools, Education institutes, teachers, and students have increasingly utilized technology as a way of fostering teaching and learning during the pandemic.
CcHUB Design Lab has explored various digital technologies that are currently shaping the educational space as well as people’s opinions about digital tools and education in Africa. Opinions have been analyzed through Twitter tweets to know the major themes around Education. Recent tweets from all over Africa were gathered using Twitter Search API. Countries with most tweets in a sample are South Africa (8729), Ghana (727), The republic of congo (329), Egypt (190), and Namibia (159).
After data cleaning, we analyzed the dataset by performing LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) on it to produce a topic model. LDA is an unsupervised machine learning, a generative statistical model, to identify latent topic/theme information in large collections of discussions.
Basic and higher education, education system, and digital technology were the most discussed topics around education. This brings to light the importance of technology in learning during the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure social distancing.
The Basic Education virtual presentation was a disaster…I wonder how will they implement online learning…https://t.co/DvolXvkE6R
21Lwazi
Basic education should just forget it sherm, no parent in the right mind will sent their children to school in this pandemic its better they repeat a gradehttps://t.co/8iWXMVlork
Zandie46536804
@DBE_SA The basic education is not ready to reopen schools. All public schools will need extra teachers, extra furniture, extra classrooms etc which are not in place. The minister should not use model “C” schools as the basis for readiness instead use rural and township schools.
Ricoricardm
Basic education. If you send us back to schools just make sure that you have enough resources for safety measures or the department will have to replace me I can’t risk my life and life of my kidshttps://t.co/hSZXX2Hiuq
ZiphoratorSA
@Lesufi @educationgp The time for traditional education as we know it is no more so we have to conform and implement changes with technology and methods of learning.
AyandaSikhosana
Conclusion:
During COVID-19 pandemic, access to basic education in Africa is an important public education challenge. the members of the public expect more resources to be put in basic education. Though some continental initiatives such as (STEM Cafe) of improving the way students learn through better content development, give hope of the continuation of learning while continuing to practice social distancing, the majority of pupils do not have access to a computer or basic internet service (only 167 million of the 1 billion people living in Africa have access to the internet and connectivity)
