WhatsApp and Educational Continuity in Africa in the Era of COVID-19: From Its Misuse to “WhatsApp Education”

Introduction

During the crucial era of COVID-19, many African educators and students have switched from using traditional learning management systems (LMS) like Google Classroom, Forma LMS, and Canvas to using WhatsApp, to keep schools running. However, regarding their instructional value, the two types of tools do not have the same design or script; more specifically, they do not have the same relationship with school. Moodle, Canvas, and others are digital educational environments that have been acknowledged as such (Brunel et al., 2015), and their deployment at the initiative of academic leaders that have embraced them, particularly during COVID-19, gives them an official and formal character (Bullich, 2018). Conversely, WhatsApp is an application primarily designed for instant messaging in daily life but widely used during COVID-19, in informal and unofficial logic, usually on teachers' and students' initiative. From our perspective, transitioning from a teaching platform with an institutional endorsement to a social application raises intriguing concerns. Failure to consider these concerns is perhaps at the heart of the challenges and difficulties of appropriating traditional LMS within African institutions, notably during COVID-19. From the sociology of innovation perspective, in particular, the model based on the social dimension of information and communication technologies (ICT) and users as innovation actors, our article aims to offer the sociological and pedagogical possibility of developing an educational version of WhatsApp (Akrich, 1998). Based on its social acceptability and technological socialization, we strive to identify a path toward developing a tool called WhatsApp Ed., the application of which will significantly improve access to quality education in Africa.

Through analyzing learners' practices within these two types of digital communication spaces, LMS and WhatsApp, our research seeks to clarify how the social integration of a training device influences students' opportunities to receive a quality education. The question we ask is as follows: How can WhatsApp's social integration be utilized to develop a training device whose socialized usage help address the challenges and issues of access to education in Africa? Answering this question can help us stress that a training device's sophistication and formalization are no guarantee of its accessibility, even in the realm of education and pedagogy. Furthermore, sometimes its elaborateness and standardization even prove to be roadblocks. In contrast, designing a training device based on a socialized and socially integrated technology provides a digital learning environment consistent with people's established social interaction and communication patterns. The ways in which Moodle, Canvas, and Google Classroom, on the one hand, and WhatsApp, on the other hand, were used to ensure pedagogical continuity during COVID-19 in Africa shows that the level of technological sophistication and institutional prescriptions alone are not sufficient to guarantee the effectiveness of their use in education.

Thus, we hypothesize that developing a digital training device based on WhatsApp, Africa's most socially integrated technology, whose use has contributed mainly to educational continuity in Africa during COVID-19, is a meaningful strategy to broaden access to excellent education on this continent. However, in actuality, the design of technological training devices prioritizes their technical sophistication, or what Mallein and Toussaint (1994) refer to as “the rationality of technicist performance,” more than the representations of use that users project onto these devices (Béché, 2017; Peraya & Bonfils, 2014). Adoption occurs when end-users effectively employ most of the device's features and behave according to the device's built-in typology and modeling of uses (Paquelin, 2004). Conversely, it becomes a problem when users do not master the fundamental functions of these devices or do not comply with their usage prescriptions (Béché, 2017). Therefore, the users' “culpable” actions are easily identified as the root of the problem rather than an insufficiency in the technique's design or its prescribed implementation (Millerand, 1999).