A thriving eLearning experience (eLA 2007)

The story of TOFRRAACE (Toute l’Offre de Formation pour les Radios Africaines Associatives, Communautaires et Educatives) began in 2005 when Mediafrica.Net considered launching a virtual campus that would offer courses and further information on communication and media training in Africa. Today TOFRRAACE is a place for up-grading and learning with colleagues without having to leave the workplace. The initiators decided to organize collective courses in “virtual classes” with ten to sixteen participants under the guidance of a trainer or coach and lasting at least ten to fifteen weeks.

http://tofrraace.mediafrica.net/

By Nina Wittrock, eLA news portal team

Radio has huge potential to have a positive impact on conflict, especially in Africa where it is by far the most effective method of communication. With its current fifteen-week eLearning course "Radio for Peacebuilding” the TOFRRAACE initiative wants to help participants to develop radio broadcasting techniques and content for solution-oriented, non-adversarial programming. Sixteen broadcasters from Burundi, the Central African Republic, DR Congo, and Rwanda enrolled for the e-driven course.

Michel Philippart, Project Consultant: “The aim of the project is to etablish comprehensive and sustainable learning surroundings. In fact we experience that participants taking part in our long-term courses really start to analyse and to reflect on their professional approach. A profound change is taking place on the individual as well as on the structural level.” As an important side effect, TOFRRAACE encourages course members to make effective use of the Internet, which is not very common among radio staff members.

Besides the “Radio for peacebuilding” course, TOFRRAACE addresses other topics of shared interest to reinforce the professional capacities of community broadcasters and media practitioners in Africa. At present, courses for professional skills like interviewing, animating programs, radio standards, and audio editing software are in preparation. Also under construction are thematic courses, including cultural journalism, reporting on economy and health, strategic planning, etc.

TOFRRAACE´s proposals are designed for all media practitioners at work in the community and associative media as well as in the mushrooming private media in Africa – giving priority to broadcasters. Each course is arranged in a similar way, and an important feature is that participants can gain access at any time. During the duration of the courses, they are required to contribute to forums and to discover additional resources in relation to the subject of the week. There are also frequent class meetings at the website, which all participants are requested to join. All these tools are integrated into the open source eLearning software Dokeos.

Thus, participants do not have to install additional software on their computers; they can do the courses via the Internet. Since TOFRRAACE is a real “campus”, there is no direct access to training materials and courses. The participants have to apply and enrol before entering website training spaces. Groups of learning participants are organised under the guidance of trainers and coaches. The initiative does not provide its own training materials, but rather seeks to network and link people and resources.

For further information and resources, one can also visit the annotated website www.mediafrica.net, which contains more than 3,500 resources, including a directory of all radio stations on air in Africa (about 1,700) and a “virtual library” of about 200 entries, including training material for broadcasters and journalists.

Mediafrica.Net and TOFRRAACE are an initiative of three African media organisations: CEMECA (Centre des Médias Communautaires Africains, Burkina Faso), New People Media Centre (Kenya) and APM-Benin (Association pour la promotion des médias, Benin).

Other media organisations and training institutions that actively offer support to community, associative, and private media in Africa have already shown interest in collaboration, e.g. allowing their materials to be adapted for use on TOFRRAACE or making their training expertise available for the benefit of the project. These include Search for Common Ground, AMARC-Africa (African branch of the World Association of Community Broadcasters), CFPJ (Centre de Formation et de Perfectionnement des Journalistes, France), GRET (Groupe de recherche et d’échange technologique, France), InfoSud Belgique, RFI Planète Radio (France), ReR Guinée (Guinean network of rural radios), Congolese Network of Journalists Trainers, etc.

Newsportal: Corporate eLearning