Impact of Vocational Motivation for Teaching ICT Online during COVID-19 Pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa

Internationalization is a competing higher education strategy as compared to transnational education. The purpose of this exploratory pragmatic study was to examine if student learning was effective within information communication technology graduate courses at an accredited sub-Saharan Africa-based university. The central research question examined in this study was if student learning was effective, given that the domestic population likely possessed a much different learning style culture as compared to where the courses were designed. The unit of analysis was the causal factor relationship of demographic and pedagogy factors on student learning in several ICT programming language courses within the unique context of an accredited sub-Saharan university deploying a transnational educational strategy based on an American style college. Descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, correlation, optimal scaling multiple correspondence analyses, linear or nonlinear graphing, and multiple regression techniques were used to test the hypotheses. The results of this study indicated that student learning was effective, but vocational motivation did not significantly impact grade. Learning impact was higher when students disregarded the learning objectives, which the researchers were able to explain theoretically. Conversely, learning impact was higher for many students who avoided tutoring, which the researchers also investigated.