Delivering lectures via YouTube to reach students when campuses closed in Kenya

Professor Audrey Mbogho is an Associate Professor of Machine Learning in the Department of Computing at University States International University-Africa in Nairobi, Kenya. She has taught and worked in Kenya, South Africa and the US for the last 15 years.

When COVID -19 forced universities to close on in March 2020, there was very little time to transition to online teaching. Prof. Mbogho wanted to find a way to simulate her in-person teaching in the new remote and online learning environment that she and her students had been thrown into.

As Prof. Mbogho explains, “…we were learning on the job and we discovered that you could record your lectures … I took advantage of that.” She took her existing PowerPoint slides, and used drawings and graphics to illustrate her points better. For her programming courses she included a demonstration. “I was able to record my lectures, obviously improving as I went along discovering what you can do” she says.

As she started to record her lectures, she and her colleagues quickly discovered that the university’s learning management system didn’t have the capacity to store the amount of data that they were generating. Instead she began to upload her lectures to a YouTube channel.

Having a repository of her classes on YouTube also proved useful given the difficulties students found keeping up with “live” online learning. “I’ve also noticed that students find that very useful,” she says, “especially if they miss lectures or sometimes their computers break down.”

While she hasn’t yet undertaken a detailed assessment, “I have anecdotal evidence that it’s having an impact,” Prof. Mbogho explains. “Even the students opening up and being interactive” is significant, she says. “Students are very quiet… but now… there’s better interaction with the students.” She also believes that it is helping students to understand the concepts better, because there’s an opportunity to review the content after the lecture.

The recordings also include elements of the class discussion. “The other thing that is captured, which I think is great, is students asking questions.” Because her answers are also recorded, students watching the videos later have a better sense of the discussions that happen in class, and can follow the questions asked by their peers.

For Prof. Mbogho, innovation must always be understood in context — what someone is able to do with the resources and knowledge available to them.

“Innovation depends on where you are,” she says, “something can be commonplace in one place, where they use that all the time, and it’s nothing new. But I think for us, here in Kenya, it is an innovation to be putting your lectures on YouTube, to be putting your learning materials where you know, they can be accessible to students, wherever they may be... We haven’t been doing that we haven’t really been taking advantage of the existing platforms.”

Prof. Mbogho feels that the greatest obstacle has been lack of knowledge. If people don’t know what’s already available, or have an idea of what is possible, then it is difficult to encourage new approaches. “There’s a tendency to just draw boundaries around institutions… we tend to do things in silos, instead of sharing… I think if we were to share more in this country, and on the continent we would be more successful in the creation of quality content.”

Time to explore new tools and develop the content can be a barrier too but, she says, “if we share experiences we learn”.

Examples of Prof. Mbogho’s lectures can be viewed here and here.

Interview conducted by Dr Augustine Mwangi, University of Nairobi