Abstract:

While developed countries made considerable progress in implementing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and succeeded in adapting a fitting legislative framework to the integrated use of technology into Higher Education, underdeveloped countries practices were more arbitrary, ad hoc, and disjointed (Karamti, 2016). To respond to the pandemic higher education institutions relied heavily on teaching online, this was - as Schlesselman (2020) pointed out - emergency remote teaching and not goal-driven online learning. El Firdoussi et al., (2020) defines emergency remote education (ERE) as a temporary shift in the delivery of education due to crisis circumstances with the main objective to provide temporary access to teaching and teaching aids in a quicker way, that is, to set up and make them readily available, reliably in an emergency or crisis. Neither emergency remote teaching, nor online learning are the best answer in underdeveloped countries due to the digital dive which evolved over time from a dominance related to divide of access to differences in how people use digital tools to participate in society (Starkey et al., 2017). Mozambique is sub-Saharan country with the Human Capital Index (HCI) of 0.36 which is lower than the average for Sub-Saharan Africa region but slightly lower than the average for low-income countries. Nevertheless, the government adopted similar measures as the rest of the world and Universities did continue functioning remotely. At Universidade Eduardo Mondlane (UEM), a flagship university (Bailey et al., 2011) that sees itself as equally dedicated to teaching whilst pursuing research, a research project under the framework of teaching-research nexus was developed. The project began with a study exploring students’ experiences with research integration in teaching-intensive universities (Adriano Uaciquete, 2017). The results of this study were useful in putting forward an instructional design agenda to move towards Research-Based Education (RBE) in the context of teaching-research nexus (TRN). The next phase of the project was an implementation of two alternative interventions following a 12-week cross-over design to increase undergraduate students’ research competences (Uaciquete & Valcke, 2018). In line with the previous studies, for the present study an intervention was implemented based on design guidelines principles (step-by-step approach, individual accountability, provision of structure and enactive mastery) and followed the four approach of Botma et al., 2015: activation of knowledge, engagement with new information, demonstration of competence and application in real world. In total, 309 undergraduate students from social sciences (231 in second semester of 2020 and 78 in first semester of 2021) were involved. Emergency remote teaching was adopted and the intervention-implementation was done trough the learning management system (LSM) (https://vula.uem.mz/). Features in a Moodle course were activated to allow students to interact with other students and/or the teacher for dissemination of knowledge and skills, i.e., teaching or discovery, interpretation and understanding of new knowledge, i.e. research. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected online. This study provides empirical data of an attempt to help students develop competences and contributes to shed light on how to strengthen the nexus between teaching and research functioning remotely.

Keywords:

Teaching-research nexus, undergraduate students, research competence, emergency remote teaching, higher education, Mozambique.