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Building University eLearning Capacity

Elearning team officeIn early 2009 Digital Campus started working with Mekelle University to help develop their elearning capacity. At the time, a few teachers from the Business College and Computer Science department had received training in how to create online course content and activities, but few students were really using online activities as a day to day part of their course. Given the rapid expansion of the university, the ability to deliver some course content and activities through blended learning, reducing the dependence on face to face lectures and improving the teaching quality, is a priority for the university.

Developing elearning skills

Key Facts

The Digital Campus team began a project to deliver the Certificate in Online Education to groups of teachers from the Engineering and Health Sciences Colleges, with a key aim being to create a team of elearning experts able to deliver the certification to their colleagues. The project focused on integrating blended learning activities into courses, rather than creating content for distance education, given that students generally have little internet access outside the university. The elearning training was given in parallel with a project to improve student computer access, after all, what use is putting courses online if students have no means to access them.

Initial training

The first group of tutors were trained between November 2009 and June 2010 with 20 tutors completing the first level of the certification. The training consisted of 3 face to face workshops in November, February and May, with tutors studying online between the face to face sessions to develop their courses. Tutors delivered their courses online during the second semester of 2009/10, an important aspect of the certification is that tutors are actively involved in giving online activities and content. In our experience, training is too often given in a theoretical atmosphere, subsequently, skills learned aren’t put into practice.

Elearning training participantsThe tutors on the programme were all willing volunteers, receiving no extra payment or other incentives, apart from the recognition of being awarded the certification. Our experience from the first presentation of the course reinforced our belief that although the training could, in theory, be given wholly online, a blended approach works far better. During the online periods there was a noticeable lower level of activity in the training. Entirely understandable, given the other workloads and priorities of the tutors.

Current Status

The second presentation of the first level began in October 2010 running until March 2011, with face to face workshops in October 2010 and March 2011. Concurrently we began the first presentation of an advanced certification, for those who had completed the first level, with participants expected to be more self supporting (although the course still has face to face workshops and is facilitated for the online parts).

The next step is to continue to work with the elearning support staff, increasing their range of elearning skills and supporting their development of the University’s elearning programme, working towards the goal of the elearning team directly delivering the certification.

Improving Student Computer Access

Students using new computer labOne of the limiting factors in the success of the elearning training is the availability of open access computer labs for students. Most computer labs, although using relatively recent hardware and operating systems, have few PCs fully functional. Many are crippled due to viruses or broken hardware or many aren’t connected to the network. Most labs have restricted opening hours or no open access at all and are only used as teaching labs.

A network-centric model

Key Facts

  • 2 new computer labs
  • over 80 open access terminals
  • further 70 terminals available soon

To help ensure the success of the elearning programme, Digital Campus set about thinking how computer terminal access for students could be vastly improved and how a cost effective, maintainable and hyper scalable computer architecture could be delivered. For us, the most obvious solution was to use thin client technology with open source software, this has a number of distinct advantages over traditional PC labs:

  • Centralised IT management – with little or no software on the client terminals, the computing capacity and management is focussed within shared, robust, redundant servers in the MU data centres, where all the software configuration and data is stored and maintained
  • More efficient and cost effective use of hardware – with horizontal scaling, old servers can be built into the server cluster to increase capacity. PCs past their useful life for running the latest operating systems can be repurposed to become network booting thin client terminals.
  • Identity management – users have one username and password giving access to the same desktop environment, applications and data which ever terminal they use to log into, even if the terminal is on another campus. So no more sharing of PC admin accounts, or moving files around using flash disks, CDs etc. Centralised user data storage also enables reliable backups to be taken.
  • No software license lock-in – using only open source software, avoids licences costs. Open source software is also far less susceptible to viruses.

This network-centric design isn’t without drawbacks, although a smaller IT support team is required, they need a higher skillset to ensure effective server and network management. Whereas in traditional PC lab environments, the availability and maintenance tasks of desktop PCs is distributed (and often times falls into the hands of the end-user), with network-centric architectures, the lab thin-client functionality depends entirely on the network and server availability maintained by the university ICT staff.

Assessing thin client technologies

The Digital Campus pilot, in designing a network-centric architecture for Mekelle University ,explored several varieties of thin client technologies: Sun Ray ultra-thin clients (mostly used, some devices up to 10 years old), PXE bootable PC’s with a linux kernel for remote desktop access, Sun Ray access client software on recycled PC’s, and LTSP linux stations with recycled PCs. We’re still in the process of assessing which is the most appropriate as a long-term solution.
Installing a new networkAlthough some new hardware was required (mainly the servers) and donated by the project, the majority of the budget is devoted staff training and capacity building with tutors and ICT staff, with the expectation being that existing hardware is reused and the university factors in the cost of new/replacement hardware into it’s existing budgets.

In November 2009, we opened two new computer labs, one for the Technology Institute (39 terminals) at the main university campus and another at the Health Sciences colleges campus (42 terminals). These are supported by 2 OpenSolaris servers, one on each campus to provide failover capabilities. our experiences so far show that these labs have far higher availability than any of the traditional PC labs.

Next steps

The Technology Institute is now in the process of creating a new thin client computer lab with 70 terminals reusing old PC hardware, Digital Campus is supporting the implementation of this, providing training, advice and support. We are also continuing to support the research and development of the appropriate server software and configuration needed to create a hyper-scalable network-centric architecture for the university.

Data Collection using Smart Phones

InterviewGathering data from remote locations can be very time consuming, using paper based collection methods may mean it takes a long time for the data to reach those who are going to use or analyse it. Collecting accurate medical and epidemiological data is essential to get a true picture of the health of the inhabitants for resource planning and research. With the growth in availability and decline in cost of smartphones, these seem an ideal technology to help to improve the accuracy of data collected and vastly reduce the time taken for the data to reach those who need it.

Interviewing rural health workers

Key Facts

  • 64 rural health workers interviewed
  • Symbian and Android smartphones tested
  • better than expected GPRS coverage

Digital Campus is testing a variety of technologies for the collection of public health data to help determine which may be most suitable for application in the field. Working with PhD students in maternal health care an initial study to discover the possible challenges and options for using mobile technologies has already been completed. Over 39 health posts in 3 districts of Tigray (northern Ethiopian) were visited to interview the Health Extension Workers (HEWs) based there.

They were interviewed to try to determine their knowledge, training and experience in maternal health with a view to identifying any gaps in their knowledge and designing a programme to help fill these. Additionally, and crucially if a technology based solution is to be implemented, information regarding their technology experience and the infrastructure facilities (such as mobile reception and electricity access) was collected.

Fast and accurate data dissemination

All the data collected during the interviews was recorded on a smartphone using a questionnaire created using the episurveyor web application (a propietary but nice platform so far). Using the client software (installed on the actual phone), responses to the survey are recorded on the phone, as soon as an area with GPRS signal is reached, the data is automatically uploaded to the EpiSurveyor server, making it available to anyone (with the right permissions) around the world. Each record uploaded is automatically time and location (with GPS) stamped, making it possible it pinpoint exactly where and when the interview took place.

Rural health postOne of our initial concerns was that the GPRS coverage would be limited, perhaps only to large towns/cities, but in fact almost all the Health Posts had good GPRS coverage, even those where the villages didn’t have reliable electricity provision. Only a handful of very remote posts had no mobile coverage at all.

We used Symbian and Android based smartphones to collect the data, but in fact the EpiSurveyor client software will run on almost any java enabled phone. We are also currently setting up a more sophisticated platform based on the Sana community-based development MIT project, with the intention of developing it as a more powerful open-source mobile health platform , that will allow us not only to gather epidemiological data, but to use it for electronic clinical records, telediagnostic applications, decision support systems and posgraduate training

We are in the process of writing a detailed technical paper, describing in more detail the survey results and technology used, along with the main challenges and possible solutions to using smartphone technologies in this environment.

Next steps

Over the coming months we will provide a small group of Health Extension Workers with smartphones to determine what (if any) issues and challenges they face in using these and also to gain a clearer picture of how this technology could be used to improve their skills, training, data collection and reporting methods. Once the results from this pre-implementation phase are known, we will be in a position to design a larger scale programme.

Open Educational Resources

What is OER?

As I mentioned in previous posts, OER is defined as digitized educational materials offered freely and openly for use and re-use in teaching, learning and research.

OER challenges

Using OER in education presents some important challenges:

  • Globalization of the knowledge societies, related to the rise of knowledge-intensive societies and the demand for skilled population.
  • Challenges to education systems: extend reach of education, improve quality and flexibility.

Could the technology help?

The developments of new technical solutions, the increasing connectivity, the growing numbers of low-cost devices and the rising of open digital content create the infrastructure to facilitate knowledge sharing in a global context with social, economic and cultural differences.

OER: an academic and cultural challenge

The explosive increase of OER reinforces the tradition of the altruist academic sharing. Initiatives like MIT OpenCourseWare, the UNESCO actions, the OpenCourseWare Consortium movement, and others initiatives opened a wide debate about OER implications, about their advantages and disadvantages in educational systems in different parts of the world.

OER and the cultural context

OER content that is useful in a cultural, academic and economic development is not always applicable in a different context.
When a university is considering the use of open content in the development of their subjects, must carefully consider the relevance and implications of implementing OER and imagine the prospects for participation in the OER movement as institution.
The participation of the universities in this movement implies to go beyond its role like users of open contents to an active role to share the didactic materials developed by its teachers. This step raises important challenges; to develop pedagogical and technical skills between the teachers to develop to interactive contents and methods of quality control.

Interesting views

Catherine Ngugi’s interview, project director of OER Africa, offers interesting views:

  • Some resources created elsewhere, might not be culturally appropriate, or relevant to the other place.
  • Connectivity is one of the practical challenges.
  • An important point is availability of free licences, with permission for free use.
  • The support from university management is crucial.
  • The notion of open learning is an incentive for academics, but they need to know how to do it.
  • The partnership with other universities is a key issue.

For more detail, read the Catherine Ngugi’s interview (http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2010121021305756)

Video Content Management and Streaming with Kaltura and Moodle

Through the elearning training we are trying to encourage teachers to make more use of video and other multimedia content in their courses. This presents us with several issues, mainly because most video streaming sites are blocked by the University (to save bandwidth). This means we either don’t include the videos or we download to run them locally. So far we’ve just been uploading them into the Moodle course, which is fine for relatively low numbers of videos (or for very short videos), but is soon going to become unsustainable. Also, we’d like to suggest video content teacher may wish to use – so it wouldn’t be appropriate to have these filling up the Moodle server.

One solution is to use a multimedia management streaming server, so over the last few days I’ve been testing out Kaltura. It’s an open source video content platform and has plugins for Moodle, WordPress amongst others.

Installation was straightforward enough on my laptop, once I’d got the necessary prerequisite packages installed and settings. Couple of issues I did come across:

1) On my first attempt at installation, it installed on the root of my webserver, so I was unable to access my other web applications. This was because I specified ‘localhost’ as the domain. I tried to figure out how to move to a subdirectory (see: http://www.kaltura.org/moving-installation-new-directory) but haven’t got that one figured out yet. So I just set up a new host (http://kaltura.localhost) and used this instead. So now I can access Kaltura and my original webapps, with out switching configurations and restarting apache.

2) When the prerequisites say that you need a mail server, it really does mean that you need one! After installation, when creating publisher accounts, the login details are emailed only – so there’s no way to set the password except by following the link in the email. I assumed I’d be able to reset the passwords manually and so the mail server integration wouldn’t matter to much. Given that this is just running on my laptop, I haven’t got a mail server running, so then had to set about trying to get one configured. Fortunately I found these instructions on how to configure postfix to relay through a gmail account on Ubuntu (I’m running 10.10). I set up a clean/default postfix installation and used the settings/instructions posted in the comments by Michael M. I used a ‘disposable’ gmail account, so that if something goes wrong, I won’t get blocked from my normal gmail account, but seems to be working well so far. It’s also good now that I can have emails sent for all the webapps on my machine.

So after I had these 2 issues resolved, I was ready to start having a play. All seems to be working well, although I was hoping that people would be able to browse the uploaded content without having first logged in. I guess we’d just need to create a generic account. If anyone knows how to set this up then please let me know – or if there is a generic Kaltura content browser application that I could use?

I tried uploading a few flv and mp4 videos to embed onto a webpage, and seem to work well. A little slow on my machine, but then my netbook probably isn’t designed to be a media processing and streaming server!

My final experiment was to look at the Moodle plugin, unfortunately I had a few more issues with getting this working. When trying to register the module in Moodle, I kept getting the error that ‘Your Kaltura registration failed. Missing KS. Session not established’ when trying to enter the url, username and password for my Kaltura server. After a bit of investigation I found it was a bug with how the partnerId was(n’t) being passed. I found a hack around this, see: http://www.kaltura.org/config-moodle-mod-moodleadmin-page, but it’s not pretty!

Now I have the option to add a video resource in Moodle directly from my Kaltura server, or so I thought I had, currently whatever I seem to search for (tags, video titles, categories which I know exist in the account I have) returns no results. Next step is to try and figure out why I can’t seem to find any of the videos I have uploaded…

Testing alternative thin-client server solutions

The thin client solution we currently have running in Mekelle is based on using OpenSolaris and we have a variety of terminals – a mixture of SunRay 1′s, SunRay 2′s and Nortech clients. Using sun ray session server, the sunray terminals are performing well, but when we have the labs full of students, the Nortech terminals are significantly less responsive. There are a number of possible reasons for this, the protocols used, the network amongst others. There is a huge range of other configurations and technologies we could use to provide a robust and scalable thin client architecture.

I’ve spent a few days this week in Barcelona with Cast-Info investigating their Desktop4All solution, which we’re looking to trial as an alternative to the OpenSolaris setup we currently have. Goitom, one of the phds students from Mekelle will spend the next few weeks based in the Cast-Info offices, learning how to install and set up the server system used for Desktop4All, with a view to installing this when back in Mekelle in a couple of months.

Desktop4All, based on Linux, is a set of integrated open source applications. It’s likely to produce a similar end result to the solution that we already have running with OpenSolaris, but the main advantage for us will be in the support and documentation available as a reference. Testing out Desktop4All will give us the opportunity to collaborate in the development and to investigate whether we get similar types of issues arising as we have had with OpenSolaris.

When we started the Digital Campus project, I think there was some concern over whether the students would need much training in how to use a non-Windows operating system, given that much (all?) of their previous experience of using computers/pcs was with Windows (usually XP). This has turned out not to be the case, given that many students have had limited time to become locked in Windows, we’ve found few issues with students being unable to navigate the interface or use applications. I suspect we don’t always give the students credit for their ability to adapt to new interfaces and systems (especially judging by how quickly they find their way to webmail, youtube and facebook).

Student Inductions

I spent my final week in Mekelle helping to run student induction sessions for the Health Sciences college. We now have around 600 students registered on elearning courses (from both Technology Institute and Health Sciences College), with over a third of these having completed our initial student survey – so we should be able to get some good information about their expectations and previous computing experiences.

As always, my last few days in Mekelle were very hectic – my workload seems to increase as I get nearer to my departure date! But we have now got over 20 classrooms in the Health Sciences College connected up to the network, with projectors and computers, so teachers no longer have to carry their laptops to be able to give a presentation, plus they have access to the internet within the classroom. Currently these computers are running on Windows, but we’ll change this so they boot across the network and act as thin client machines.

I was also helping to advise the Technology institute on how they can massively increase their computing infrastructure using the thin client model. They have many 100′s of old monitors to make use of. There is a long way to go to get this set up, especially as the institute needs to staff and train an ICT team/department.

We still have some issue regarding the fact that the labs we have aren’t able to cope with the number of students wanting to use them. I’m getting a lot of requests to allocate specific times for classes, but I’m being quite firm that the labs should remain open access, rather than becoming a substitute for the lack of maintenance in the departmental computer labs.

Am now trying to have a bit of time off in the UK (without getting bogged down in emails about the labs, training etc!), before heading to Spain to work at Alcala Uni for a few months.

A is for Axe

Teaching the English alphabet at Sherafo Primary School

This week has been extremely varied and busy. On Monday I started off by helping with the student induction sessions for the Technology Institute students. Mesi and Berihu (the elearning team in the institute) are now able to run the inductions themselves, so I don’t need to get involved with these any more. So in less than 3 weeks, we have gone from training the teachers in how to get their courses online to having students enrolled on the online courses they have created.

Student inductions

Then on Tuesday I gave a couple of presentations about the Digital Campus project and Open Educational Resources to the languages department. Andrew and Elinor from Clarity were back in Ethiopia to run some training for their English language improvement software, so my presentations were to help inform the languages department about how they may want to use elearning in their teaching.

I spent Wednesday morning helping to interview 13 people for 3 lab attendants posts to look after one of our computer labs and to work in shifts so the lab can be open 24 hours a day. The interviews were extremely short – only 5-10 mins each and the candidates had the choice of whether to speak in Amharic or English, so in the end there was only one candidate I could give an opinions on as they had answered the whole interview in English. Although I couldn’t understand every word, I could tell that the level of training at some of the private colleges was a little suspect (many had their IT diplomas from private colleges in Mekelle). For example, in response to my question about what they would do if a student had a problem with their password, over half replied that they’d use password cracker software (or at least I heard the words ‘password cracker software’ in their Amharic response).

Later in the afternoon I travelled up to Wukro again to accompany Mahmud (another of the phd students at Alcala) on some of his research field work. He’s looking for particular types of parasites in children, so is going out to rural schools and doing blood, urine and stool tests on a subset of the students.

On Thursday we headed out to Sherafo school (about 30 mins drive off the main road from Agula) to complete the testing he’d started there the day before. Our lab was set up in the model classroom at the school and whilst Mahmud was interviewing the children and their parents, I was helping the rest of the team weigh and measure the children – improving my Tigriyan numbers at the same time. I’m not sure how much a disruption my presence at the school was, most of the children spent a long time staring at me.

I was also looking at whether the cameras on the smart phones were going to be good enough to take photos of the microscope slides, so they could be attached to other questionnaire/interview data being recorded on the phone application. The unfortunately predictable answer was no – the only way we could get even halfway recognisable photos was to use a proper digital camera with macro setting.

On Friday morning I caught the bus back to Mekelle and was up at the Arid campus by just after 9am. I went to look at the refurbished PC lab that’s still being built. The furniture was just being installed, but there’s no sign yet of the network or electrical work that we’ve been waiting quite some time for. Although the tables use a similar design to those I had made for the other lab, I wonder how long the new tables will actually last. The sliding keyboard shelves feel like they’ll break quite easily.

In more positive news, over at Ayder campus in the afternoon, I arrived to find that all 22 classrooms were now networked. The college dean had asked for this to be done only about 2 weeks ago. Each classroom also has a projector and an old desktop computer. So next week all we need to do is get the computer configured to boot from our server and all the classrooms can have internet and other computing facilities.

I’m now going to have a relaxing weekend ;-)

Visiting Rural Health Posts

I have spent the past 4 days visiting rural Health Posts with my colleague Araya. His phd is looking at the gaps of the Health Extension Workers (HEWs), specifically related to maternal health. Once the gaps are known, the next stage will be to design a programme to fill the hole in knowledge/skills, possibly using technology to help deliver the training.

Altogether he’ll interview 150 HEWs at over 100 Health Posts in 3 districts in Tigray. Over the 4 days I’ve been out with him, he managed to interview 18 HEWs at 14 health posts. Each day has been long – leaving Wukro around 7 am and not returning until after 7pm, so 12 hours to conduct about 5 interviews, each interview lasting about an hour or more.

I’ve been helping with the technology support and will be helping look at what could be appropriate to use in this context. Not all the concerns I mentioned in my earlier post have been realised.

The GPRS coverage has been far better than I’d expected, out of the 13 posts we visited, only one had no mobile or GPRS coverage. A couple had patchy coverage – but it was working for some of the time during our approx 2 hour visits. This is really positive from the point of view of the technology we might like to use in the future.

However, none of the posts had an electricity supply. A couple had electricity poles running very close to the building, but they weren’t connected up. In most cases there wasn’t any electricity supply to the village at all.

My phone battery got to be a real problem for me, despite having wireless and bluetooth turned off, I found that battery was only lasting for about 8-9 hours. I was using the GPS quite a lot, but even on the first couple of days when I was only briefly turning the GPS on (to get the coordinates for the posts), this only gave me a couple of extra hours battery life.

All except one of the HEWs we met had a mobile phone. The reason for the one exception was that she worked at the post with no mobile coverage, so she’d given her phone to a relative. Which for me than raised the question of how they charge the phones given there’s limited power supply. The answer to this was that they must travel to the town to charge their phones (this could be a 2-3 hour walk), or they send the phones with someone else going to town.

The HEWs have very limited English (although much better than my Tigrinya), so delivery of any training materials must be in either Amharic or Tigrinya to have any chance of being effective. One of Araya’s questions is about their use of text messaging, many don’t use text messaging simply because they don’t know the latin alphabet well enough.


What I’ve seen over the past few days is only a small proportion of all the posts that Araya will eventually be covering, but it’s likely that the further interviews will reinforce what we’ve already found out – rather than raising any new issues or significantly altering the results to date.

Over the coming months (after some more of the interview have been conducted), we’d like to get the results from the technology aspects written up into a paper.

Using smart phones for health research in rural areas

I recently became the owner of an unlocked HTC Dream smartphone (running Android 1.6). Smart phones are still quite a rarity in Mekelle (and I’d guess in much of the rest of Ethiopia), so despite this not being the most recent model, everyone who sees me using it asks me to have a look & play around. I have seen a few people with Nokia E71 phones, but when you look closer they’re actually Nokla E71′s (yes, that’s Nokia with an L instead of an i).

In a couple of days I will be heading out to some rural areas with a colleague doing his doctorate in public health. He’s testing different smartphones and applications for data collection whilst he’s interviewing Health Extension Workers (HEWs). I’m joining him to see what some of the issues are with using these types of phones and applications in this context, with a view to spending some time over the coming months seeing how these devices may be used to deliver training.

I’ve only really been using the phone for the past week or so and there are a couple of areas where I can already see we may run into problems.

Firstly, the battery life. With my usage, not particularly heavy, the battery usually only lasts just over a day. Given that we’ll be using these devices for data collection, then they’re likely to be having heavy use in areas with little or no mains power. We are testing out some small solar power chargers.

Secondly, the GPRS coverage. GPRS is not used widely here and coverage in extremely patchy (even in large city like Mekelle) and it’s not yet been rolled out to other more rural areas (or even large towns). Sim cards need to be specifically enabled to use GPRS – it’s not turned on by default. The applications we’re testing out (EpiSurveyor and Sana) will both allow data to stored until an area with coverage is reached, but unless the user visits Mekelle on a regular basis then the data will never get uploaded.

I’m sure that improvements in the phones and the phone network infrastructure will eventually make both of my concerns invalid – it’s just a question of when they will be addressed.

The other questions and areas I’d like to look at include:

1) How easy is inputting the data on such a small screen? Might a tablet or netbook PC be more appropriate? Perhaps they’ll work well for short, relatively simple surveys, but not for others?
2) Do any of the HEW’s already have java enabled phones? If so, this would enable them to use the EpiSurveyor application without any new phones.
3) Do any of the phones support input using ge’ez (the alphabet used for Amharic and Tigrinian)? I can’t see how to input these characters on my phone (if anyone knows how I’d be pleased to hear from you), but I can display the characters.
4) How long do the phones take to get a GPS signal? For each record input we can automatically attach the location coordinates – but I’ve noticed that sometimes the phones can take a long time getting a GPS fix. With the power issues it’s unlikely they’d want to leave the GPS on all the time.
5) Would they really be used? Getting reliable data in these areas (even just for the number of births/deaths) is extremely difficult – reporting processes are often unreliable or just not used. Using these phones could help with gathering this info – but obviously only if they are used.
5) What are the other uses for the phones? E.g. providing remote diagnostic support, clinical support, training content/activities or reference, or perhaps for fun/social activities.

Plus I’m sure many other questions and possibilities will arise over the coming days.

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