In emerging countries, teachers are often saddled with old – and often irrelevant – materials. The question we address is how can the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement remove barriers to accessibility of world-class knowledge at the higher-education level?.

Open courseware is an example of disruptive technology. Open Educational Resources encourage critical thinking, the use of multiple sources to check accuracy, and problem solving. Several studies have shown that students learn a full semester’s worth of material in half the time when the online coursework is added and more students stick with the class, too.

Thousands of pieces of free educational material — videos and podcasts of lectures, syllabuses, entire textbooks — have been posted in the name of the open courseware movement. But how to make sense of it all? . We think O.E.R. can be the most cost-effective way to improve education in emerging countries and we’d like to see continued growth and expansion. We are aware that now we have the technology that enables us to go back for a personalized educational experience with interactive engagement.

At Digital Campus, we are preparing  projects that will track and analyze how open education may enhance learning, and examine how it is changing the future of education in Ethiopia.

This week saw the final face to face training week for our first batch of tutors on the Basic Certificate in Online Education. On Friday evening we held a celebratory dinner at the Axum hotel. Ato Tadesse (Head of the Institute of Pedagogical Sciences) and Dr Beruket (vice-director of the Tigray Institute of Technology) presented certificates to the following tutors:

Atsede Fantahun, Tsegay Girmay, Selamawit Mengesha, Mahmud Abdulkader, Goitom Fitsum, Araya Abrha, Hana Mengistu, Segen Yainshet, Kirubel Anteab, Abera Hadgu, Derbew Fikadu, Kalayou Kidanu, Hayelom Kebede, Seyoum Eshetu, Fasil Kiros.

The next step is planning for the advanced certificate and also running the basic course again for a new batch of staff. The Institute of Technology (previously the Engineering College) has employed three new staff as elearning specialists (Fre, Berihu and Meseret), so I will begin their training over the next few weeks to prepare them to support the tutors and students.

This week I attended the 5th Elearning Africa Conference in Lusaka, Zambia, seeing all the great progress that is being made across the continent in developing elearning. I had the opportunity to present the Digital Campus project in the eLearning in Higher Education strand. Although the time available was short, I had a great response to my presentation and made many new contacts, which will open up some new possibilities and directions in which we can take the project in the coming few months/year.

Many projects in the rest of the conference discussed the use of mobile technologies and these all seemed to demonstrate just how much further behind Ethiopia is in comparison to other African countries. Many projects were able to proceed due to almost 100% mobile phone ownership by students, not only basic models either, but students owning relatively high spec media and smart phones. In Mekelle, it appears to me that students have only recently been able to access these types of devices so ownership levels are stll very low. All this shows that even within Africa a big digital divide remains.

In the exhibition area, many companies presented shared computing solutions, but none of these seemed to me to be as cost effective and as scalable as the solution we are building at Mekelle Uni. The final conference debate revolved around the question as to whether a target of 1:1 computing (every student owning a laptop/computer) was necessary and achievable given the financial resources available. The debate was quite heated, with very strong opinions on each side.

There were several great sessions around the use of open source software and how quality research can be encourages within African universities. All of which fits in really well with the aims and ethos of the Digital Campus project.

In the next weeks, we will have the opportunity to show our first program results at the eLearning Africa 2010 meeting to be held in Lusaka (Zambia). Our conference entitled “The Digital-Campus project: an integrated model to support e-Learning in higher educational institutions in Africa” will cover the main goals and challenges we have addressed in our project at MU.

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

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.