Empirical Study of Exporting a University Curriculum

Amidst unethical behavior scandals surrounding admissions and profit strategies of Western universities, stakeholders must wonder if exporting an American curriculum into developing nations will result in effective domestic student learning. The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic interjected an additional unexpected constraint for higher education stakeholders, particularly for practitioners who were forced to move complex lab-based information system (IS) programming courses online for students in developing nations. The research question examined in this study was, would learning be effective in an American-African university partnership involving IS bachelor degree courses taught online to undergraduate African students during the pandemic? Hypotheses were developed from the peer-reviewed scholarly literature and tested using inferential statistics. Three pedagogy factors—design content, active engagement, and vocational motivation—along with demographic and experimental control factors were regressed on student learning using parametric statistical techniques.