eLearning in the School System

At Bogodogo College in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, Christophe Hien gives computer advice to fellow teachers, fixes broken printers and livens up his classes with digital input. Through the use of a school blog, he helped set up a partnership with a French school. Backed by IICD-supported training, he is now his school’s ICT expert.
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Open Educational Resources (OERs), unveiled at UNESCO’s 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries and funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation are educational materials and resources offered free and open to anyone and usually free to be re-mixed, improved or redistributed. They can be found on the Internet, but how good are they? How efficient and effective are the teachers who employ the OER? Moses Mwale, National Chairperson of SchoolNet Zambia, reports on research findings to evaluate OER. High school teachers from Zambia evaluated OER using the Internet.
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Africa must find its path from teaching technology to teaching with technology: This is what Canadian researcher and eLearning and development expert Thierry Karsenti contends based upon the findings of a recent study he conducted in 120 schools on the Continent. In the following, he considers some of the action points uncovered by the PanAfrican Research Agenda on the Pedagogical Integration of ICT.
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Oracle and the Oracle Education Foundation (OEF) support over 1.2 million students in 91 countries each year through the Oracle Academy and ThinkQuest programmes. Partnerships with governments and institutions around the world help students to develop 21st-century skills and meet the growing demand for a skilled workforce. Learn more about what Christopher Binns, Oracle Education Foundation, thought of this year’s eLearning Africa conference and watch an Oracle Foundation video describing the programme’s successes in Ghana.
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Imaginez un ordinateur muni d’une webcam devant lequel une personne s’exprime en langue des signes. A des kilomètres de là, ces signes sont interprétés et traduits en mots pour un professeur qui peut ainsi répondre à cette personne ou lui donner un cours qui sera traduit en sens inverse. Imaginez un cours, dicté par un professeur et tapé sur un clavier braille par les étudiants et ensuite également imprimé en braille …Avec ce type de solution, les TICE sont par exemple mises à la disposition des personnes sourdes ou aveugles.
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Montagu Drive Primary School opened its doors in the sprawling Mitchell's Plain area of Cape Town in 1983. Its 1050 pupils are drawn from six suburbs in this economically disadvantaged area. The school strives to give pupils a holistic education and caters to children from the earliest education phase until Grade 8, during which time they will have been exposed to technology for some years. However, the devices were rather worn-out: They had 10 outdated Pentium 1 computers and managed their administrative system with four Pentium 4 computers. In 2005, donor funding was secured to enhance new PC furnishings. Today, Montagu Drive Primary not only boasts top-level computer facilities, they now also have two additional classrooms that have been converted to house two SMART Board interactive whiteboards.
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To equip all African schools with ICT tools and to ensure that African youths graduate with the skills necessary to fully participate in the information society and knowledge economy is the objective of Nepad's e-Schools Initiative. A large-scale roll-out addressing 600,000 schools across Africa is now about to begin. Here Dr Henry Chasia, Executive Deputy Chairperson of the e-Africa Commission and keynote speaker in the Opening Plenary, depicts how a decisive e-Schools business plan will help the ambitious 10-year project become a success.
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Les situations les plus critiques génèrent des énergies insoupçonnées. Dans certaines régions en Côte d’Ivoire, une chaîne de solidarité s’est mise en place, pendant ou après les conflits, pour permettre aux enfants de continuer tant bien que mal à être scolarisés et pour que la formation soit maintenue sous différentes formes. C’est par exemple le cas de la région de Dakabala, dont nous parle Fatoumata Kone. Aujourd’hui, cette dernière se bat pour que les efforts conjugués des populations et des ONG ne soient pas vains. Pour que la prochaine étape soit l’accès aux TICE pour tous. Une gageure pour un pays qui pendant plusieurs années de crise a vu ses infrastructures dévastées et été privé d’un système scolaire digne de ce nom. Mais Fatoumata Kone ne manque ni d’énergie ni d’idées.
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EFK, Fondation à but non lucratif ayant pour but de fournir des cours en ligne gratuit pour les enfants de 5 à 12 ans, annonce aujourd’hui le lancement de 72 nouveaux modules à destination de débutants, en 3 langues : espagnol, français et portugais. Davantage de modules seront prochainement proposés. En 2008, EFK a atteint le million d’enfants inscrits !
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A recent European Training Foundation (ETF) initiative shows that effective public-private partnerships in North Africa and the Middle East can be key in fostering new technology-based learning solutions that address skills needs in the global market in general and the fast-expanding ICT industry in particular. In close cooperation with the European Learning Industry Group (ELIG), the ETF gathered valuable information on current ICT learning activities and approaches in the region based on interviews with private companies and school representatives.
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Frans Kalp est venu d’Ermelo dans le Mpumalanga à près de 250km de Pretoria pour participer à un atelier pour l’innovation en matière de TICE organisé par Microsoft et Schoolnet Afrique du Sud. C’est là que nous l’avons rencontré. Il est à l’origine d’un projet qui permet à des écoles rurales défavorisées de recevoir des cours via la téléconférence sans fil. Une histoire de partages des connaissances dans un pays où les disparités entre les écoles sont spectaculaires. Ce professeur de technologie, reconverti pour l’occasion en directeur de projet, a bien l’intention de participer au concours des Enseignants Innovants qui distinguera ceux qui parmi eux auront apporté l’innovation la plus significative dans le domaine des TICE pour l’Afrique du Sud.
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The push to integrate the computer as a teaching tool is set to become a reality soon in Kenya as Intel Corporation – the world’s leading computer chip maker – launches a technology-based programme that will significantly improve teaching in schools.
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The start of the first school term in Zambia this year began with a directive from the Ministry of Education that all schools in cholera-affected areas, scheduled to re-open on January 12th, should not open until the Cholera outbreak that had affected Southern Zambia was fully under control. As a result, many schools in the towns of Lusaka and Mazabuka remained closed and the government found itself unprepared to provide alternative means of education to school children. As this was not the first time Zambia had a cholera outbreak, Brenda Zulu asks whether eLearning could provide a solution to the large-scale closure of schools.
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Many students regard chemistry as being a dry and difficult subject: This is especially true in developing countries, where most teachers lack resources to make it stimulating and relevant, for example via laboratories, equipment, chemicals as well as “hands-on” experiments. To provide an alternative to teaching overburdened with theory, Jared C. Ogunde initiated the project “Chemistry Aid Initiative”, which is aimed at encouraging chemistry education in Kenyan institutions of learning, and includes online resources accessed via broadband wireless Internet connection, CD-ROM and VHS.
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Le Rwanda a rejoint le programme One Laptop per Child (Un Ordinateur Portable par Enfant - OLPC) en Janvier 2007. Richard Niyonkuru a été nommé par le Ministère de l’Education pour coordonner le déploiement du programme. Nous l’avons joint pour lui demander où en est le projet, comment les enfants et les enseignants accueillent l’arrivée des ordinateurs. Richard Nyonkuru nous a parlé des défis qui restent à relever pour faire un succès de ce programme mais aussi de l’engouement des élèves et de l’engagement des enseignants.
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This year’s eLearning Africa Gold Sponsor Microsoft decided to hold its first Pan-African Innovative Teachers Forum, which ran parallel to the conference. Ronald Ddungu of Gayaza High School in Uganda was among the Forum award winners with his project on Education for Sustainability. The dedicated Mathematics and Physics teacher organised a region-wide mathematics contest in Uganda. The idea is for his students to collaborate with peers from Uganda and abroad on working out challenging tasks.
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The year 2008 marked Eduvision’s third year of participation in the eLearning Africa conference. The company designs customised education solutions for developing countries, an audience that Eduvision can directly approach at the event. “eLearning Africa is of great importance to Eduvision”, says the company’s new CEO, Dr. Kuno Jung. “The role as the platinum sponsor gave us the opportunity to present and explain a holistic view of overcoming educational challenges in these countries.”
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Extraterrestrial life, feeding and digestion in mammals, angles and light energy - these are only some of the scientific topics discussed on www.skoool.com.gh, a platform run jointly by eLearning Africa’s Gold Sponsor Intel and the government of Ghana. The educational tool, aligned to Ghana’s new education curriculum, was officially launched in the course of the recent eLearning Africa conference in Accra. With skoool.com.gh, students should be “equipped with information and technology knowledge that is essential to prepare them for the future job markets”, said Dr Benjamin Aggrey Ntim, Ghana’s Minister for Communication.
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As the leaders in e-learning technology meet in Ghana, discussions are focused on global cooperation and extending educational networks. 'A Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) or a Learning Platform such as Fronter has the ability to meet many of the capacity building needs of the current educational context. At Fronter we are excited about the possibilities and working together with our African partners, says Roger Larsen, Founder and CEO of Fronter.
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The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) is a vision and strategic framework that aims to promote sustainable development in Africa, support the empowerment of women and accelerate Africa’s integration into the global economy. Cisco is one of five companies leading a NEPAD consortium, which is focussed on developing an ICT-enabled solution that will improve the quality of education throughout Africa. At eLearning Africa 2008, we will learn more about their activities.
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Focusing attentively on durable green-white machines with thick antennas, several Ghanaian school kids are currently taking the first steps in the One Laptop per Child project (OLPC). In spring 2008, the OLPC started its initiative in West Africa. Experts say that Ghana is in many ways exactly the country for which OLPC was developed. At eLearning Africa 2008, Kwesi Smith from the Kofi Annan Centre/the Ghanaian OLPC Implementation Team will share his early findings and thoughts in the session “Introducing eLearning into the School System” on Friday, May 30th. eLA asked him to give an appetizer.
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The Ulwazi E-Learning Partnership, created in 2003, is a partnership among five Tshwane-based high schools – four of which are in Mamelodi, a historically disadvantaged township. These schools have an interest in promoting dynamic real-time interactive learning and the electronic sharing of knowledge and cultural experiences. The Partnership embarked on a pilot project to deploy a broadband network and to use wireless broadband communication technologies and other state-of the art hardware and software tools and learning methods to explore, in practical terms, the learning opportunities that these offer. The purpose was to create a living experimental laboratory for eLearning. It was envisaged that the pilot could lead to the development of new methods of learning, and the hope was that such methods could eventually also be of use for education in South Africa at large, a country where there is a great backlog in education. SMART Technologies, who supplied the project with interactive whiteboards from its inception, is now about to expand on this innovative programme.
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Since its launch, Eduvision’s eLearning technology for developing countries has been a resounding success. In the course of eLearning Africa 2008, Eduvision - the event’s main sponsor this year - will hold a hands-on workshop in a school in Ghana’s capital, Accra, to demonstrate the latest eLearning tools. The necessary preparations are running full blast, involving regional as well as international partners. At eLearning Africa 2008, Karim Toledano, Manager Eduvision, will also present findings of Eduvision’s latest large-scale Ethopian pilot project.
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Teachers need more information about what a software product does and how it could work in the classroom, says Anne Sparrowhawk, Director of TEEM, a teacher-led evaluation tool for digital learning resources. In a presentation at eLearning Africa, she will focus on how teacher-to-teacher communication can spread the understanding of the value of Information Communication Technology in education and can provide some clear models for use that supports teachers as they learn to use the new resources.
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It was rather late when Theresa and Julius headed to the last room on that Friday evening. They had been cleaning the Congress Centre for a few hours after that crazy crowd finally disappeared, even quicker than they had arrived. A surreal atmosphere was filling the centre’s halls, the way the ground breathes after a pouring rain: empty stands barely standing, random leaflets scattered on the floor… The show is over, folks, see you next year! - was the silent echo Theresa had in her head… By Paolo Brunello.
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South Africa faces many challenges in incorporating information and communication technology (ICT) in its education system, including limited access to technology, a lack of teacher computer literacy, and a need for methodologies to help students use technology. However, with the Intel Teach Programme, South African teachers are learning to effectively integrate technology in the classroom and bring 21st century skills such as digital literacy, problem solving, critical thinking, and collaboration to students. At eLearning Africa Dr. Martina Roth, Director of the Intel Education Group for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), will provide an overview of the company's programmes to help prepare students for today's global opportunities. Intel is gold sponsor of eLearning Africa 2007.
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