This week from 8 to 12 March, a week of training with the tutors of the project was organized.

From the sessions in November 2009 and with the help of the weekly workshops planned, each tutor must submit their course structured with activities and content. During this week the tutors presented the progress of their courses, and instructors expressed recommendations and tips to improve both the structure and content.

There were also workshops on specific software tools such as image editing, video editing, animations and file management. These workshops were organized around the practical work and personal attention to support the needs of each tutor, to support good development of their courses. The next step is the integration of a small number of students in each course to expand students online access to the course materials and learning activities.

Key Success Indicators

The number of tutors trained, number of courses and the number of participating students will be an important indicator of project progress and provide practical experience that allow to test the infrastructure, the technology and the computer labs.

With the experience from the workshop in November 2009, we started a reflection that result in some changes in the courses development that are congruent with our objectives.

In order to better accommodate with the different study styles and workload, two courses have been designed. Each ourse certificate is associated with different course requirements. The basic course certificate deals with course structure design  and moodle functions like quizzes, forums and assignments. The advanced course certificate deals with the basic requirements plus activities created with rapid e-learning tools like Mind Maps, pdf-convertion, picture editing  and manipulation.

Our main goal is still to engage and support the teachers to achieve a basic course structure in Moodle so they will be able to show an embedded online course with some content and activities for the second semester.

What’s next?

With the intention to collect each tutors progress and to deliver support and guidelines to upload their materials, a series of Workshop for tutors has been scheduled, as weekly training sessions.

At the same time, the second the Face-To-Face week is been organizing in March month, containing such as these topics:

• Course progress presentation: each tutor presents their course status and participates in the evaluation of the other courses progress.
• Some advanced Moodle functions like advanced quizzes and directory upload.
• Standard course format, to reach a coherent course appearance.
• Use of Open Educational Resources (educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone), to include as course content.
• Use of some rapid e-learning tools.

This morning, representatives from the Ethiopian Ministry of Education visited the new Digital-Campus elearning computer labs. Although it was only a very brief visit, all went very well, despite a power outage which meant we couldn’t show the terminals in use. They were very interested in how elearning can be used to compliment other resources, such as eLibrary and also in how the technology and skills can be transferred to other organisations, especially the new Ethiopian universities, one of the visitors is vice president at the new university in Debre Birhan.

The morning before their visit, we had a very successful tutor training workshop. Good progress is being made in getting courses uploaded ready for the second semester, which starts at the end of February, with tutors beginning to develop online quizzes and other activities for their students, as well as video introductions to their courses.

These two 100 terminals student computer pilot e-learning labs implements open-source solutions (Linux, Moodle, MySQL) in a distributed, server-centric, thin client environment which uses both new desktop hardware, and recycled PC’s, thus reducing or eliminating obsolescence and complexity on the desktop, while providing a unique digital identity to every student and staff member who participate. Each individual is given a smartcard for system access.The goal of this integrated project is to offer a complete, hyperscalable, Digital Campus Infrastructure design, implementation, training and supporting elements solutions to Mekelle University.

A MU elearning server, using Moodle (http://www.mu.edu.et/elearning/) is currently available off campus extending the possibilities of online and blended learning to more professors and students at MU. Moodle, one of the most popular open source virtual learning environments (VLE), is used by thousands of schools, colleges and universities around the world. The current Moodle server has bee running for the last months, hosting courses for the Computer Science department. The Digital Campus project is widen this out to be used by the Engineering and Health Sciences Colleges.

The operating system for the Moodle server has already been changed from Windows to Ubuntu and the physical seer has been moved to the main University data centre where the power supply is more regular and a backup generator is available during power shortages.

By showing the current students that open source software is just as usable and functional as their proprietary counterparts, if not more so, the Digital Campus team hopes these future teachers will use open source tools when they come to develop online activities for their own courses

An on-going research programme is being developed under the collaboration between Univerisdad Alcalá,  Mekelle University and the Tigray Regional Health Bureau. Preliminary results were presented at the  annual WONCA meeting in Geneva (Switzerland) in September by Dr.Ignaci Lopez.

Since the end of the last century, the infection by intestinal parasites (IP) among children has been identified as one of the possible factors involved in the malnutrition of children in developing countries. At the same time, it is controversial whether the administration of antiparasitic drugs in this population are systematically improving the nutritional status of children in that context

Our objective has been to check the feasibility of a trial on the prevalence of infestation by intestinal parasites in children in an urban area of Tigray region in Ethiopia and its relationship to the nutritional status of that population as a first step to improve a existing programme of prevention of IP in this population.

A Phase I cross-sectional study in collaboration with the regional office of health Wukro was run  to determine prevalence of intestinal infestation in a sample of children attending one primary health centers at Wukro.

MU has recently approved its Institutional e-learning strategy under the digital-campus program deployment. The new UM e-learning strategy aims to embed e-Learning as a key element of the teaching and learning culture of the Mekelle University, enhance the student learning experience and to provide a richly interactive and stimulating environment to students, teachers and university staff.

The following objectives will be pursued:

• Implementing a Learning Platform  for all departments: this provides a single point of access for both staff and students to a wide range of on-line tools and applications
• Enabling academic staff to take the lead in embedding e-learning in the teaching, learning and assessment.
• Putting in place appropriate and sustainable infrastructure and support both centrally and within faculties and departments.
• Providing high quality, appropriate e-Learning tools and resources.
• Ensuring e-learning is accessible to all students whatever their individual situation is.
• Facilitating flexible and distributed learning.
• Supporting generic research with e-tools as well as developing research into e-learning.
• Encouraging national and international co-operation in e-learning.
• Assuring the quality of e-learning provision and its impact on students’ teaching, learning and assessment experience.

The Spanish Ambassador to Ethiopia, D. Antonio Sánchez-Benedito, opened the new Digital Campus training labs at Mekelle University Health Science and Engineering Campus on the 24th November.  He arrived on the morning to cut the ribbon and to hand out certificates to those tutors who participated in  the online education workshop training last week.

The Spanish Agency for International Cooperation and Development  (AECID) has awarded three scholarships to Mekelle University professors for the academic year 2009-10.These scholars will be enrolled in phD programmes at the University of Alcalá (Madrid, Spain).

Goitom Fitsum (MS Engineering) is a lecturer in the Department of Electrical Engineering  at MU. Goitom is involved in different research and development projects related to network architecture applications.

Araya Abrha (MS Public Health) is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Public Health. Currently Araya is giving lecturers on public health courses to Public Health, Medical and Pharmacy students at Mekelle University. In addition Araya is involved in different research and development projects related to public health.

Mahmud Abdulkader (MS Biology) is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Microbiology at Mekelle University. Mahmud is involved in different projects related to relevant public health/infectious diseases issues.

Wednesday saw the introductory workshop for the Health Sciences and Engineering College staff taking part in the Digital Campus elearning training programme. Over 20 lecturers are taking part in the pilot programme to be trained in developing online activities for their students. The introductory workshop gave the participants an overview of the training programme, what they can expect to learn, the aims, objectives and expectations of the project, as well as organising a schedule for the 20 of training workshops the lecturers will be attending. The training is now scheduled to begin on 16th November with a full week of training, with the remaining training days spread over the rest of the first semester.