E-Learning and Open Distance Education (ODL) in IPRC Kigali during COVID-19 Pandemic Spread: Opportunities and Challenges Available

This study entitled “E-Learning and Open Distance education (ODL) in IPRC Kigali during COVID-19 Pandemic spread: Opportunities and Challenges available” was conducted to examine the opportunities available for IPRC Kigali students who were learning via Rwanda Polytechnic E-Learning platform, established to maintain the learning process and contain COVID-19 pandemic spread. It also examined the challenges they encountered during this period. More than 60% of the student-respondents supported the statement saying that their E-learning platform is able to provide opportunities for relations between learners by the use of the discussion forum. The respondents agreed that E-learning offers opportunities for learning for a maximum number of trainees with no need for many building. Therefore more than 67% of them found this as an opportunity. More than 63% also agreed that a small number of teaching staff may deliver courses to a big number of students at the same time. The majority of them did not accept that the students’ mindsets prevent them from accessing the E-learning platform (48.1%). They didn’t also agree on the statement that lecturers/instructors have a little experience in delivering courses through Distance Learning mode (65.4%). This shows that they are proud of their teaching staff. It was recommended that to address the issue of impossibility to control malpractice; the use of appropriate software used in other universities would be adopted; the government should speed up the distribution of laptops to students who have not received them yet; there should be sensitization to change the students’ mindsets and join E-Learning platform; trainers should design appropriate online learning resources and provide timely feedback to students, and emerging technologies like zoom, Microsoft teams, WebEx, Google meet … videoconferencing, social media, and other virtual classrooms should be considered. Keywords: E-Learning, ODL, opportunities, challenges, ICT DOI: 10.7176/JEP/11-27-04 Publication date:September 30th 202

Socializing One Health: an innovative strategy to investigate social and behavioral risks of emerging viral threats

In an effort to strengthen global capacity to prevent, detect, and control infectious diseases in animals and people, the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) PREDICT project funded development of regional, national, and local One Health capacities for early disease detection, rapid response, disease control, and risk reduction. From the outset, the EPT approach was inclusive of social science research methods designed to understand the contexts and behaviors of communities living and working at human-animal-environment interfaces considered high-risk for virus emergence. Using qualitative and quantitative approaches, PREDICT behavioral research aimed to identify and assess a range of socio-cultural behaviors that could be influential in zoonotic disease emergence, amplification, and transmission. This broad approach to behavioral risk characterization enabled us to identify and characterize human activities that could be linked to the transmission dynamics of new and emerging viruses. This paper provides a discussion of implementation of a social science approach within a zoonotic surveillance framework. We conducted in-depth ethnographic interviews and focus groups to better understand the individual- and community-level knowledge, attitudes, and practices that potentially put participants at risk for zoonotic disease transmission from the animals they live and work with, across 6 interface domains. When we asked highly-exposed individuals (ie. bushmeat hunters, wildlife or guano farmers) about the risk they perceived in their occupational activities, most did not perceive it to be risky, whether because it was normalized by years (or generations) of doing such an activity, or due to lack of information about potential risks. Integrating the social sciences allows investigations of the specific human activities that are hypothesized to drive disease emergence, amplification, and transmission, in order to better substantiate behavioral disease drivers, along with the social dimensions of infection and transmission dynamics. Understanding these dynamics is critical to achieving health security--the protection from threats to health-- which requires investments in both collective and individual health security. Involving behavioral sciences into zoonotic disease surveillance allowed us to push toward fuller community integration and engagement and toward dialogue and implementation of recommendations for disease prevention and improved health security