COVID-19 effects have been felt in the education sector worldwide where schools, colleges, and universities were closed as a way to reduce the spread of the deadly pandemic and loss of lives. The Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education. advocate that no child should be left behind during the COVID-19 era, therefore gave a directive for universities to use other alternative means of teaching and learning to continuously provide teaching and learning to students during the series of lockdown. An efficient eLearning system in universities is very important as an alternative to faceto-face teaching and learning in this COVID-19 era to have continuity in teaching and learning during the induced lockdowns. Success in online learning can be achieved by understanding the level of readiness of online learning environments. The main objective of the study was to evaluate the adoption of online learning by students in Zimbabwean universities. A descriptive online survey employing questionnaires to collect data on the adoption of eLearning by Zimbabwean universities students was used. Results indicated various eLearning platforms have been introduced in Zimbabwean universities though there is a need for eLearning infrastructure to be availed, students to be trained or students to effectively adopt the eLearning.
Zimbabwe has faced severe droughts, resulting in low agricultural outputs. This has threatened food and nutrition security in community sections, especially in areas with low annual rainfall. There is a growing need to maximize water usage, monitor the environment and nutrients, and temperatures by the adaptation of smart agriculture. This research explored the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) for smart agriculture in Zimbabwe to improve food production. The mixed methodology was used to gather data through interviews from 50 purposively sampled A2 farmers in the five agricultural regions of Zimbabwe and was supported by the use of the Internet. The findings reveal that some farmers have adopted IoT in Zimbabwe, others are still to adopt such technology and some are not aware of the technology. IoT’s benefits to Zimbabwean farmers are immense in that it improves food security, water preservation, and farm management. However, for most farmers to benefit from IoT, more awareness campaigns should be carried out and mobile and fixed Internet connectivity improved in some of the areas.
Trust in online environments is based on beliefs in the trustworthiness of a trustee, which is composed of three distinct dimensions - integrity, ability, and benevolence. Zimbabwe has slowly adopted Internet of Things for smart agriculture as a way of improving on food security in the country, though there is hesitancy by most farmers citing trust issues as monitoring of crops, animals and farm equipment’s would be done online through connecting several devices and accessing data. Farmers are facing difficulties in trusting that the said technology has the ability to perform as expected in a specific situation or to complete a required task, i.e. if the technology will work consistently and reliably in monitoring the environment, nutrients, temperatures and equipment status. The integrity of the collected data as it will be used for decision making. There is a growing need to determine how trust in the technology influence the adoption of IoT for smart agriculture in Zimbabwe. The mixed methodology was used to gather data from 50 A2 model farmers randomly sampled in Zimbabwe. The findings revealed that McKnight etal. trust in technology model can be used to influence the adoption of IoT through trusting that the technology will be reliable and will operate as expected.Additional constructs such as security and distrust of technology can be used as reference for future research.
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