The pandemic changed the way people live and work nearly overnight, with many of us confined to our homes and making the shift to working remotely. It also changed the way people learn, and educators and educational programme facilitators had to adapt quickly to ensure that teaching and learning could still happen.
“Financial education programmes and Consumer Financial Education (CFE) initiatives, in particular, had to adjust to the evolving landscape and this meant making the shift from face-to-face interaction and learning to online learning through digital platforms,” says Charlene Lackay, Group CSI Manager at Momentum Metropolitan Holdings.
This included migrating the Momentum Metropolitan Foundation’s Consumer Financial Education Programme to an online space so learners could still have access to financial literacy courses.
Making the move to digital learning revealed an interesting dichotomy. It proved to be an effective way of engaging and facilitating continuous learning – but it also exposed the limitations and structural issues of online education, including access to and cost of data in South Africa.
Also emerging as a trend was the evolving nature of how learning happens and the debate about the difference between delivering knowledge and facilitating learning.
Focusing on the evolving nature of learning
Momentum Metropolitan Holdings has been on this journey with an academic research partner with one of its digital CFE projects: they are in the second year of the project to build an effective online learning platform, and have taken on board some key learnings about overcoming the complexities of implementing digital CFE programmes.
“Online learning is not just about placing content on a digital platform,” says Lackay. “It needs to take into consideration how learning methodologies have evolved and become more complex, with experience-based learning proving to be the most effective. We need to understand how learners will access content, from which type of device, because that will tell us how content should be presented to be most effective. We also need to structure assessments to get optimal engagement and learning..”
The main learnings that emerged in migrating this year’s face-to-face programmes online, were around participant’s available time to complete the course, digital literacy – and digital financial literacy, in particular. In a country where internet penetration sits at 62 percent – and 94 percent of those users own a smartphone, or 76 percent own a laptop or desktop computer – digital financial literacy and education proved to be a challenge from both an access and digital skills point of view.
That meant combining digital, education and financial literacy principles. “We are continuing on this journey to ensure that learning happens and outcomes can be achieved,” says Lackay.
Other key learnings have come from the organisation’s work with financial literacy chatbot, Fineazy, which uses a combination of local stories and gamification, personalised learning and simple trusted content to make financial literacy more accessible to South Africans.
The chatbot is able to create an easy-to-understand financial dialogue of bite-sized pieces of information, which is easily accessible to large numbers of South Africans. During Covid our lives moved online. Trying to introduce digital financial education in this environment meant being cognisant of all the competing “online” interests. The kind of microlearning Fineazy provides, has proven especially effective in this context.
“There is a growing recognition of digital as a valuable platform for learning – and as CFE programmes continue to adapt to the changes wrought by the pandemic, we are collectively going to need to develop guidelines around the digital literacy of financial education programmes to make sure that effective, experience-based learning can take place,” says Lackay.
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