Blended learning
New approaches to animal welfare training after the pandemic
The universities and colleges with which WTS cooperates in the VETS UNITED programme have been severely restricted in their work since 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. To counter this, our partners developed many innovative approaches that enabled them to continue teaching their students. The switch to online learning worked very well in some cases, with teachers and students coming together in new formats. Nevertheless, there were many limitations, e.g. due to a lack of technical requirements. Practical teaching, a special feature of the programme, was also often not possible. The question arose as to how to reorganize teaching in the future under these or other challenges. A team from Maasai Mara University in Kenya has been researching this since February 2022.
Animal welfare has become an important topic in East Africa and Kenya in particular in recent years. Numerous stakeholders, from industry and politics to education and communities, have achieved many positive things. NGOs in particular have supported the government and local authorities in embedding animal welfare services more firmly at local level. But there are still gaps, for example in the professional competence of extension and intervention service providers. The introduction of animal welfare training at universities was an important step towards closing these gaps.
The WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak a public health emergency of international concern and then a pandemic in March 2020 (WHO, 2020). The subsequent measures to contain the pandemic led, among other things, to the nationwide closure of schools and universities in Kenya and other African countries. To enable education to continue, universities immediately offered so-called e-learning, i.e. learning with the help of technology. Over time, this approach has evolved into blended learning - a combination of traditional and e-learning. This approach is particularly suitable for practical courses in veterinary medicine and animal health training compared to purely digital learning. To date, there have been no studies on the extent to which this approach is pursued, how well it is methodically structured and how it affects the quality of animal welfare training.
The research approach
The planned study will examine current practices in animal welfare training using the online/blended learning approach at relevant universities in Kenya and selected institutions in Africa and in comparison with leading international universities.
The study will follow different methodological approaches. In addition to desk research and review of curricula and guidelines of selected African universities offering training in agriculture and animal health, online questionnaires and interviews will be used for quantitative and qualitative data collection. Students, teachers and administrators will be asked about their experiences with new teaching methods and these will be compared with the research results.
The study will document the positive developments, but also the gaps in the implementation of new teaching approaches in animal welfare training and make recommendations that will lead to better training for students in the long term.