Paolo Brunello about The Burundi Project: Mending the Digital Divide by Empowering Teachers (eLA 2007)

Paolo Brunello

Paolo Brunello is the WITAR Project Leader in Burundi. He has managed the eLearning programme between the Italian A. Rossi Technical Institute and the Lycée Technique A. Rossi de Ngozi, Burundi, since 2004. In 2005, he completed the post-graduate online course “E-learning and Integrated Training”, which dealt with eLearning management, which was offered by the University of Padova. He also participated in the WSIS in Tunis, where he presented the project at the Italian Pavillion and at the international conference “Past Present and Future of Research in the Information Society”. Paolo holds a Master’s degree in Work and Organization Psychology from the University of Padova.

By Paolo Brunello, WITAR

«With good contacts and a strong will you can do great things» - an African once told me. Well, I think this is what WITAR is trying to do. The World Istituto Tecnico Alessandro Rossi is a small Italian NGO founded by the alumni association of the oldest technical high school in Italy, the ITIS Alessandro Rossi.

Lycée Technique A. Rossi de Ngozi, Burundi, Inauguration

Since 2003, WITAR has raised and invested almost € 500,000 for the support of a twin technical high school – the Lycée Technique Alessandro Rossi – in Ngozi, Burundi. How come? How is it that a handful of volunteers in their sixties find that amount of money and leave their families on a regular basis to go and work in remote Burundi? Well, they are as young in spirit as they were back then - fifty years ago - in high school, but now they know the value of the technical training they received and how crucial it was for their lives and their community. They, therefore, wanted others to be able to enjoy the same benefit, and so they directed their efforts towards a disadvantaged technical school in northern Burundi. They started by reconstructing the buildings and setting up labs and workshops. The school was then equipped them with the proper tools and machinery so that the Burundian students could practice the theory they were studying: electronics, computer maintenance, and electro-mechanics.

A WITAR member who is a former teacher at the ITIS Rossi is now CEO of Eutelsat, the third largest satellite company in the world. He decided to donate a VSAT antenna to WITAR in order to connect the Burundian school to the Internet with a broadband connection. In October 2004, I first arrived in Ngozi with the mission of developing an eLearning program for the Lycée Technique Alessandro Rossi on behalf of WITAR, aiming to exploit the Internet at its best to support education and training. With a few PCs, we started a computer-literacy training programme for the Burundian teachers first, and then, little by little, we improved our infrastructure while developing more advanced eLearning activities. We now have 25 PCs in our LAN, a few laptops, and a wifi antenna covering the entire school area.

This means that every classroom can be online: let the Burundian teacher take the wifi-enabled laptop, the LCD projector and the wall screen, and there you are, integrating the Internet into the lesson. We offered the teachers some courses on web-search training focused on learning objects and educational websites, but we mostly left the computer lab freely accessible to students and teachers, thus enabling peer-to-peer learning, which proved to be crucial.

For example, at the very beginning, I only had to teach a few people how to create an e-mail account on Yahoo, and they then passed it on, teaching others how to do it. Of course, we did put some limits on free net-surfing: we have a PC running Ubuntu Linux that serves as a proxy and firewall so that every connection is logged, monitored, and possibly filtered in case the content being accessed is not compliant with our policy.

Besides this kind of training, we configured a VNC connection so that the Italian teacher's display can be captured and projected on the wall screen while the learners (teachers or students) follow his actions and repeat them on the same file, opened locally on their PCs. The explanation comes through via Skype.

We also set up a Learning Management System using Moodle (www.ltarngozi.org/moodle), where teachers from the Italian school can collaborate with their Burundian colleagues to exchange experience and design learning activities that can be carried out by their respective students, working together at a distance. This has been the hardest thing to do for several reasons. The first is because everything is done on a voluntary basis = for free. The second issue is that English (chosen as the “official” language) is poorly mastered on both sides, while PCs are still “unfamiliar tools” for most of the teachers involved. Third, students are generally better off than their teachers in both, thus obliging the teacher to play a very tricky “power game” where he needs to shift his role from guru to mentor in order to preserve his authority: not easy!

On a broader scale, we are happy that Eutelsat, having found our project quite remarkable, has recently decided to support similar ones by offering its VSAT connection services at a special rate for NGOs, schools, and other non-profit organizations working in sub-Saharan Africa. Not bad, is it?

[Paolo Brunello will be presenting at eLA on Wednesday, May 30 2007 in the session SCH21 “Supporting the Take-Up of ICT in African Schools” at 9:00 hrs. ]

Newsportal: Teacher Training