What is the next step?

The next step is the Advanced Certificate in Online Education Course, consisting of online and F2F sessions, that extends from the month of September 2010 till the month of April 2011.

The objectives of this phase are:

• A wider knowledge of Web tools to produce didactic materials.
• Improved quality of online courses.
• Achieve a tighter integration between classroom teaching and online material, including more collaborative activities for students.
• Improved student usage of the computer labs and the learning platform.

To achieve these goals a combination of actions is required:

• F2F workshops,
• Online support for tutors and
• Specific support in improving the materials and teaching methodologies.

The performance indicators and requirements for participants are a critical component for this course.

New Basic Online Education Certificate

Considering the increasing interest of teachers in participating in these courses, a Basic Online Education Certificate Course will start in November 2010 for a new group of tutors.

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.

Two weeks of intensive training and tutorials with Mekelle University  professors have been organized in March. During these sessions the tutors presented their course progress, and instructors expressed recommendations and tips to improve both the  course structure and content.

There were also lectures 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 for the correct development of their courses. The next step will be allowing  students into each course materials and learning activities

The number of tutors trained, courses developed and participating students wil give us a good indicator of the project progress and provide us with practical experience on the computer labs functionality.

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 based on the MoodleBites online training Courses. 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