By Everlyn Musa

The month of May was busy for the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program eLearning Initiative. It started with the eLearning summit in Saly, Senegal (May 22-23), which hosted 60 partners from the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program eLearning network who gathered to reflect on the progress the Initiative has made so far and the next steps ahead. In the next few months, participating institutions will express their interests for the next phase that seeks to implement and scale lessons learned in the last 2 years. These proposals will transition institutions from emergency remote learning that was necessitated by COVID-19, to quality online programs. USIU-Africa was represented by Eannes Ongus (Advancement Office), Everlyn Musa (eLearning Initiative), Dr. Phillip Machoka (USIU-A Online), Gabriel Okello, (MERL), Wanjira Kinuthia (Instructional Designer – Lead Trainer) and Onesimus Otieno (Online Pedagogy – Lead Trainer).

The eLearning Summit was immediately followed by the eLearning Africa conference in Dakar, Senegal (May 24-26). Those that attended the eLearning Summit were joined by 4 (four) additional Faculty Advisors – Drs. Tutaleni Asino, Rebecca Bayeck, Joselyn Chenane Nkogo, Safary Wa-Mbaleka. The USIU Africa team presented two papers;

• Innovative eLearning Solutions in Low-Resource Settings
• Building Capacity for In-House e-Learning Design’

Additionally, Yaping Gao (VP, Member Services & Global Partnerships at Quality Matters (QM), and Dr. Phillip Machoka (USIU Africa Online) conducted half-day pre-conference workshop at the eLearning conference entitled “From Remote Instruction to Quality Online: Establish Social, Cognitive and Teaching Presence to Help All Students Succeed”. This gave participants hands-on tools for developing and maintaining quality online programs that will stand the rigors of national accreditation bodies around the world. The workshop was a highlight even in a partnership between Quality Matters (QM) and the Mastercard Foundation to train faculty in applying the QM rubric for quality assurance in programs across the continent.