Following the outbreak of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) as an international pandemic, educational
institutions in Uganda, were closed on March 20, 2020 as a measure to implement social distancing to slow
down the spread of the disease. This was followed by a national lock-down to limit people’s movements and
further prevent community spread of the disease. In Uganda, all public universities were caught unaware
and could not easily switch to online teaching and learning. This meant that teaching and learning for
students in conventional face-to-face programmes was halted until when the COVID-19 threat eases.
According to World Health Organization (WHO), the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to stay with us
throughout the entire 2020.and beyond.
The President of the Republic of Uganda and the Minister of Education and Sports both guided that higher
institutions of learning should adopt ODeL approaches for teaching and learning. Subsequently, National
Council for Higher Education developed guidelines for rolling out an Emergency ODeL system. One of the
key requirements in these guidelines is having staff with the capacity to develop and deliver online courses.
Soroti University constituted a steering committee on behalf of the university to perform benchmarking on ODeL, Five (5) institutions were benchmarked. This were; Makerere University (MUK), Uganda Christian University (UCU) Uganda Management Institute (UMI), ISBAT University (ISBAT), and Victoria University (VU).
One of the outcomes on the benchmarking report was the training of both academic and the technical staff to Install, manage and work with “Moodle” Leaning Management System (LMS)
Kabale University was identified and contacted to do the training for Soroti University which they Okayed and it was conducted from 18th Jan 2021 to 22nd Jan 2021.