The Power of Involving Project Participants as Co-Researchers: The Case of an e-Learning Initiative Project in Eight African Institutions

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Reimagining Monitoring and Evaluation in Dynamic Educational Settings

Proposal

Purpose
Decolonizing research means centering issues and perspectives of non-western individuals aimed at respectfully knowing and understanding theory and research from other perspectives (Thambinathan & Kinsella, 2021; Smith, 2012). The path of decolonizing research requires humility, respect, and responsibility to ensure we are not minimizing other researchers’ struggles or contextualizing their research for our worldviews (Thambinathan & Kinsella, 2021). With much of the research rooted in dominant Western scientific perspectives, how might we decolonize research, especially under conditions of coloniality between the Global South and North regarding educational partnerships?
Since researchers are not always part of the community where they are conducting research, they may not always know the right questions and the best way to ask them. Therefore, participatory research approaches are a possible response to these challenges. Participatory methodologies ensure that research is responsive to the community’s needs and give participants a voice and space to shape the research while enhancing the credibility of the findings (Tremblay et al., 2021; Conder et al., 2011). Decolonizing research in this context requires doing away with existing power dynamics and top-down research frameworks that limit the participation of community members and rely exclusively on dominant Western knowledge systems to validate research methods, findings, and learnings (Dighe, 2023; Hopson et al., 2012).
Decolonizing research and intentionally letting researchers of the community in context enables them to highlight their priorities and narratives in their worldview. Without decolonizing research, dominant perspectives can trivialize and ignore local knowledge systems and concerns (Dighe, 2023; Smith, 2012). This requires having the intentionality for restructuring power relations – both the material and epistemic perspectives (Dighe, 2023).
In this paper, we share how an e-Learning Initiative involved project participants from eight African institutions in conducting context-specific research to inform the project, the common themes on the opportunities and challenges university stakeholders should address to scale and sustain online learning, and how experiences with the research grants have helped the research team rethink the project evaluation process as we seek better ways to decolonize evaluation research.

The Project Description, Methods, and Data Sources
As COVID-19 continued to impact teaching and learning worldwide, academic institutions grappled with providing online courses with limited resources to meet the needs of students. In response to these challenges, an institution in the United States and another in Kenya, with funding from and in partnership with a large foundation, co-designed and co-implemented an e-Learning Initiative with ten partner institutions in Africa, the Middle East, and Central America to support the institutions develop capabilities and resilience to deliver online learning and related support to meet students’ learning needs.
As part of Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, and Learning (MERL) activities, the Initiative provided (on a competitive basis) Small Research Grants to all participating institutions. The Small Research Grants aimed to support research, evaluation, and learning efforts at each participating institution and contribute to the program's improvement. The objective of research projects was to achieve a depth and breadth of understanding of the impact of online learning on the lives of the faculty, staff, students, communities, and the wider society, as well as its contribution to expanding access and increasing the quality of learning.
However, only the African institutions responded to the call for proposals (November 2021), and 17 projects were selected as final recipients of the grants (14 individual institutions and 3 cross-institutional submissions). The research period was between March and December 2022. However, the grant recipients were required to obtain an IRB/research permit from their institutions before receiving the research funds and share the research project reports with the Initiative. The MERL team reviewed the reports, provided feedback, and analyzed the major themes (reading the reports and identifying major thematic categories and patterns).

Preliminary Results
The Small Research Grants provided opportunities for decolonizing evaluation research and capacity building, engagement, collaboration, and networking among the researchers. Involving participating institutions in the research activities ensured focus on specific needs, interests, and priorities at their institutions. More data and research were also available for the Initiative within a short period, offering a more holistic view of the e-Learning Initiative. The research projects provide faculty, staff, and students’ voices on the opportunities and challenges the university stakeholders should address to scale and sustain online learning.
The research focused on several aspects crucial to online learning, such as online content development, online assessment, digital pedagogy, policy frameworks, infrastructure, and faculty and students’ perspectives on online learning. Faculty members had little experience with online content development, delivery, and online assessment, and therefore there is a need for proper faculty development toward best practices in online education. Some projects underlined the need for a blended approach to learning and drafting related policies and frameworks to guide online learning. Institutions are facing several challenges that affect online learning delivery, such as unreliable internet connectivity, power outages, unstable Learning Management Systems, inadequate learning resources (laptops, smartphones, or tablets) for students, limited support for students, faculty, and staff with special needs, and lack of e-infrastructure/digital tools. However, as one research project put it, “successful online education will take the collaboration of many stakeholders, such as telecommunication companies, governments, learning institutions, and non-governmental stakeholders, where each will play a crucial part in creating an enabling environment for best practices.”

Significance
This work is significant in several ways. First, it provides evidence of success within a large grant-funded project highlighting the importance of involving project participants in a project’s research activities as co-researchers. Second, many national and international projects globally aim to improve learning within education settings; therefore, this work provides a case study for researchers doing similar work. Third, in line with the 2024 conference theme, it provides faculty, staff, and students voices on the opportunities and challenges university stakeholders should address to scale and sustain online learning. Additionally, it calls on researchers to explore ways to decolonize evaluation research.

Authors

• Prince K. Kwarase, Arizona State University

• Pauline Mbesa Wambua, Arizona State University

• Clifford Daniel Olemo, United States International University Africa

• Kevin Otieno Akumu, United States International University - Africa