On Tuesday, March 17th, 2020, Cameroon announced the temporal closure of schools in response to the corona virus pandemic, as a measure to curb its spread. Everything happened so fast that individuals and academic institutions had no time to set up mechanisms to transition into 100% online teaching/learning to continue the education process for the duration of the shutdown. This survey, conducted one month after the school closure, seeks to assess how academic institutions in Cameroon have been doing with respect to keeping students learning through distance education. The survey draws responses from 7 basic education teachers, 133 secondary school educators (80 Science Teachers, 47 Arts Teachers and 6 in other fields), 10 higher education lecturers, all based in 6 of the 10 regions of Cameroon with a bulk of them in the Centre, Littoral, North West and South West regions. We observed that 47.9% of them work in an urban setting with relatively greater access to technology and the internet, 27.4% work in a semi-urban setting and 24.7% in rural communities, which are by default technologically disadvantaged. Further, 68.9% of the teachers work in public schools, 18.9% in private schools, 6.8% in confessional schools and 5.4% in international schools, which traditionally have more instructional technology in place with frequent usage. Of the educators who responded, 68.9% of them are of the younger generation, with less than 15 years of teaching experience.
Download the survey findings and analysis in the paper below
Akaba James & Nteta Philip