Enhancing an „eLearning Africa“ Workshop through eLearning

This eLA pre-conference workshop combines a two-day, face-to-face session at the GSTIT with a preparatory and two-week follow-up eLearning phase on the Internet.

The GSTIT - http://www.gstit.edu.et - is funded by the “Ethiopian Telecommunication Corporation - ETC“, the telecom operator in Ethiopia, and offers postgraduate programmes such as Telecom Engineering, Information Technology, and Telecom Management. It also conducts further training for the staff of ETC, who are distributed all over the country. The content and schedule of the eLearning Africa workshop had already been discussed and agreed upon with the management of GSTIT in early 2006. It responds to the GSTIT mission to embark on eLearning in order to serve the ETC staff better in further training and education. Therefore, all twenty participants of this eLearning Africa pre-conference workshop are members of the teaching staff of the GSTIT.

Since April 2006, Sebastian Hoffmann, the workshop leader, has been busy with further preparatory work. He has set up a dedicated eLearning space for the workshop with all the relevant resources and has been communicating with his counterpart at the College regarding the assignments to be worked on by the participants before the workshop starts and on the technical requirements for the face-to-face event.

The aim of the workshop is to guide participants to design an eLearning course module, to produce it on their networked PCs in the GSTIT computer lab, and to publish it on the fly with “Rapid eLearning Tools” on the Internet.

Participants will

• get hands-on experience with basic planning activities when designing instruction, especially for eLearning / blended learning scenarios;
• apply teaching methods;
• use asynchronous communication tools for eLearning purposes;
• edit content on a ZOPE/ZMS-based content management platform on the Internet;
• and work on several assignments guided by a Standard Operation Procedure (SOP) and facilitated by a set of templates.

Each participant will have a computer work place, and all results will be published online on the eLearning platform. The results will be presented at an eLA session on 25 May, when Sebastian will talk about “An Open Content/Open Source Change Management Approach for eLearning Service Development in Traditional Educational Institutions“ within the conference strand “Open Source, Open Content and eLearning “.

With the help of the local facilitator and the instructions on the already established workshop website, the twenty participants have started to prepare themselves for the training session. They are preparing digital images and multimedia resources for their personal website and course module. In the process, they specify

• their eLearning service product
• their market and target group
• the scope and budget of their work

along the lines of their subject matter expertise and the tasks they will have to perform when the College embarks on the provision of eLearning services in Ethiopia.

All participants will become the owners of a dedicated, personal website on the eLearning platform where they will produce and publish their own eLearning module during the workshop. During the two-week follow-up phase, Sebastian will coach the GSTIT staff toward a further enhancement of their eLearning service product.

You will find further details and resources on this eLA ”blended learning workshop” at

http://www.elearning-associates.com/e117/e161/index_eng.html

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