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.