Online courseware development in public universities in Uganda: the precepts of active, passive and exclusive participation

Abstract

Irrespective of the maturity or infancy of e-learning adoption in a university, the academic staff always have varying levels of commitment to online courseware development and delivery. Some will be actively engaged, some will be passively involved while others will remain ignorant about online courses’ issues. This paper investigates trends in online courseware development in Uganda and classifies emerging participation levels into three, namely active, passive and exclusive engagement. The latter clustering followed a survey of 120 academic staff from six public universities in Uganda, with general findings indicating low participation of instructors in courseware development. For instance, whereas 60% of the respondents had been trained in the use of authoring tools, only about a half of them had continued to use these tools for courseware development. Essentially, the survey revealed that the variation in courseware development engagement is caused by both the individual and institutional strengths (active case) and weaknesses (passive and exclusive scenarios). As such, institutional support strategies for improvement in courseware development for each of these three categories are explored and discussed. Future researchers are encouraged to test the developed institutional support strategies in their e-learning or blended learning practice.