It’s almost three years since seven public institutions of higher learning were merged to form the University of Rwanda. The momentous decision has since seen several changes in running of the country’s premier institution of higher learning. The New Times’ Solomon Asaba caught up with Prof. Philip Cotton, the university vice chancellor, for an insight into the transformation.

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It’s nearly three months since you assumed office as vice chancellor, what is your observation so far?

I worked with the university for a while before being appointed to this position. I was part of the task force that created the University of Rwanda. However, this position now gives me a very different view of a university from life in the colleges.

Some of the observations are that we are, of course, one university and now a huge organisation with 31,000 students on 14 campuses and about 2,500 staff both academic and non-academic.

After the merger of the seven public higher learning institutions, there came five other institutions, three former schools of nursing, two teacher training colleges Rukara and Kavumu in the first year, then Byumba, Kibungo and Kivumu schools of nursing last year.

Didn’t the merger pose challenges that affected performance under a single institution?

The merger of 12 organisations meant new cultures and that in itself created a lot of challenges. People in the old institutions had dedicated a lot of time to develop the former institutions, giving a lot of their lives in developing the academics and then found themselves part of a much larger institution. That has been an interesting transition phase for a lot of people, but we are one university.

We are collegiate university, the colleges are part of the university structure but we articulate everything as one university. That is how we find most relevance in terms of the way we find solutions to the nation’s problems and how we train young people to contribute to society.

Having been part of the College of Medicine, you surely have a comparison to make before and after the merger.

You have hinted on a few of them but do you think with this merger, the University of Rwanda is achieving far greater progress?

Yes, University of Rwanda has made a lot of progress in a very short time. When you look back to the former institutions, there were some pockets of really good practice, there were some units producing a lot of research, generating a lot of publications, attracting a lot of research funding and there were other pockets of excellence in teaching and learning.

One of the imperatives for the merger was to harness all the positives within higher learning and to share that good and positive experience. However, there was also need to find ways to deal with areas that were less good and to build on our success and we are stronger as one institution in terms of positioning ourselves among the best universities regionally and internationally. Indeed, we are much stronger as a single institution.

Talking about research, most times experts have argued that most research done locally is either not applicable or can’t be translated into practical areas to serve a purpose. Are you, as a university, taking a position to improve the quality of research?

We have to and we are in many ways a research-oriented university. We are nation-centred but our primary role is to teach, to nurture, to encourage, to infuse to develop curious minds as well as to lead some areas of research in the region and internationally.

I agree with everything in your preamble, that the quality of research programmes in undergraduate programmes is generally less good than it should be but many of these problems are not particular to the University of Rwanda.

Many of these problems also exist in undergraduate programmes in universities around the world, so we spend a lot of time and effort while students spend a lot of time and effort writing their books or research projects in the final year of their undergraduate degrees.

Those projects for all sorts of reason are of poor quality than we would expect to see.

For me it is about saying, what is it you want to achieve as a result of a student engaging a research project, you want them to understand literature reviews, you want them to pose a researchable question, you want them to understand the difference in scientific inquiries and research methodologies or you want them to understand basics of statistical analyses and appraisals.

You can do all these things by using other challenges and you can help students achieve those intended learning outcomes in ways other than research projects.

What challenges affect research projects in higher learning institutions?

Research projects require a lot of supervision and I think one of the challenges for universities around the world is plagiarism. But universities around the world force students into a position where they can do nothing than copy and paste because the type of questions set are of low grade in terms of intellectual effort.

They describe and explain the difference between rather than questions that take students to intellectual levels of evaluation, synthesis and analysis for students to own evaluations in particular subject domains.

If you set students challenges and they only have short periods of time they can access the Internet and their assessment relies on Internet. They will copy and paste things without track of where they came from, so we have to look carefully at how we assess students.

It was revealed a year ago that to address issues of plagiarism, you are placing systems in place to filter content, how far has the institution gone in regard to this?

We are but it is not the only answer. We use plagiarism software so that when students submit their work, they have to submit it to the plagiarism portal. After submitting a draft, a similarity score is generated. This provides the similarity between their work and other pieces submitted and, of course, you got a little challenge when you have 300 students writing the same piece of work through the same software.

Similarities are bound to be there some times coming from the bibliography because many of the students are using the same sources to write their work. When you implement plagiarism software, you need to train the students and staff, and agree on an amnesty period so that you can actually help people who think around plagiarism.

We also have to look at our own mode of assessment and long essays in some subject areas particularly in the science and health care, are forms of assessment that lack reliability and validity.

So we have to look at other forms of assessment such as multiple-choice questions that can be marked automatically by computer, we can store questions in electronic format and the software will tell us how the questions were performed when taken by a whole group of students.

There is a lot more than just implementing plagiarism software.

Currently, what steps are you taking?

There is some limited access to this software but we don’t have the licenxe for the entire university, so now is the time when we start training and teaching people about the pitfalls of plagiarism, and you do have to train students and teachers over a long period of time to get to understand what it is all about.

In the long term we have to prove to the rest of the world that the assessment in the University of Rwanda is truthful and accurate.

Last year, the School of law shifted from Huye campus to Kigali to deal with the issues of staff numbers, are operations now stable?

The issue here is that the School of Law was delivering programmes that were professional for professionals. Many of the people who were instructors were based in high levels of the legal structure in Kigali and many of the students who were taking those courses were also in legal practice in and around Kigali.

To study in the evening meant that people couldn’t actually make it to Huye. There is also some other response of using distance learning within professional law degrees because there is quite a lot you can’t do online. You need a courtroom to have people interact with one another. We may have faculty issues but universities are the local drivers of the economy and we don’t have any plans of withdrawing; we have to keep those campuses operating.

However, for some cases like Law, it became imperative that we need to be where most of the learners and lecturers were.

Looking at regional integration, Rwanda pioneered a move to have uniform fees for regional students. Kenya joined in while Uganda and Sudan are poised to take a similar move in public institutions, what do you think about harmonising tuition?

We want to increase students and facilitate staff mobility within the region that is better for our university and it is better for other universities and for the sector. But different countries will be negotiating that at different rates.

Also, we want to be able to harmonise and standardise quality across the region because fees might be important. We want to be able to spend the money; one spends on fees in achieving a high quality degree so we have to also consider the quality of education in the region.

Sponsored students often complain about food and living out allowances, do you think that it is something to be revised or government can only do so much?

The Rwandan government offers our students much more than most governments around the world. Ninety-eight per cent of students get scholarships, you will be surprised to find any other university around the world with such a high percentage.

Interestingly, I received a paper from students a week ago where they said we can’t keep expecting government to give us more and more. We have to find ways to push the success of our own education.

We worked hard on one of the campuses in Kigali to look at student businesses on the campus, so that we should not give profits outside when the students can benefit from them. Whether it is photocopying, small snack shops or barber salon, whatever it is, we want them to generate more income because students perform better when they can eat and sleep well.

We also have an endowment fund for students. We deal with that through the student welfare, staff, international and academic partners.

A step was taken last year by government to fix the menace of defaulters of the student loans. BRD has already started work with a new office, are you hopeful that this is what was needed?

Well, it will be a consistent running process. The challenge that we have had as a university and as a community was being in a transition that involved the university, Rwanda Education Board and BRD that has been setting up infrastructure and establishing ways of working.

Being a trained health professional, how do you relate the quality of medical courses in Rwanda now that the bigger vision is to become a health hub?

When I first came to Rwanda in 2006, my interest was to look at medical courses quality. Things have changed a lot; people agree that there was a dramatic improvement in undergraduate and post graduate programmes.

Students were more able to do diagnosis and treatment. One of the single most important reasons for the success was a collaborative effort between the Ministries of Health and Education to improve the way students learn and implement knowledge in practice.

One other thing is the Ministry of Health recognised the need for other people besides doctors such as nurses.

Now we have eight new nursing masters degree holders, the first of its kind, and in the end we can have these highly trained healthcare team of people.

editorial@newtimes.co.rw