Editorial: Kenyan varsities must embrace technology for quality upgrade

For those who still doubt how important information technology has become in the world today, the latest ranking of universities offers fresh, important insights.

A Spanish research firm, Webometrics, has published a new ranking of the world’s institutions of higher learning with shocking results for Africa.

United States and European institutions dominated the top 1,000 positions.

And the magic is simply that these universities are way ahead of the rest in their possession of a critical learning tool in the contemporary world -- technology.

With technology these universities have built unparalleled foundations for learning.

Making the internet available to their teaching staff and students has broadened their scope of knowledge gathering to all corners of the globe.

Access to the internet has promoted on-line research, enabled the university community to buy books from far flung bookshops and broken down lecture room walls to make it possible for one to attend real time lectures in far flung places without having to travel.

More important is the fact that technology has greatly improved the research function in these universities, a key parameter in the grading of institutions of higher learning.

This being the case, it was no surprise that African universities ranked poorly among their peers.

Slow pace of technology intake has meant that both students and their lecturers are ill equipped to learn and research at the same level as their peers elsewhere the world.

These challenges have ensured that in the current survey for instance, the top African university, the University of Cape Town only made it to position 405.

Kenya’s performance was even more lacklustre with the top performer Strathmore ranked in position 2795 followed by University of Nairobi at position 4467.

Webometrics says most African universities are ill equipped technologically and are barely performing their research function. That is to understate the problem.

The reality is that in many of these universities, library shelves are only stocked with books that were published in the 1970s and 80s and the science grossly outdated.

These issues do not, however, appear to concern the managers of these institutions who currently appear to be only interested in revving up the student numbers.