Alex Little

In the elearning project here, I still have a lot of questions in my mind as to the best course of action to take for some aspects. I’m sure anyone who has tried to implement an elearning system in their institution will have asked themselves very similar questions!

Take, for example, the uploading of the course manuals into Moodle. Some considerable time has been spent copying and pasting the course manuals (from Word or pdf format) into the eXe eLearning XHTML editor (http://exelearning.org), exporting this as a SCORM package then uploading into Moodle. Due to the time already spent in doing this, I’m very reluctant to not then make use of the packages that have been created. However, I have doubts in my mind as to whether this is a valuable and sustainable approach to continue to take.

This is similar in approach to that taken by OU to get their materials into Moodle for OpenLearn – having the course manuals converted into OUXML format, then uploaded into Moodle.

I feel a better approach to take in this project would be to concentrate on getting teachers to create online activities in Moodle and not to spend so much time in converting the raw course content into another format. The students will be given the course manuals in paper format regardless of whether they’re online too – none of the students here would have reliable enough internet or computer access to rely on online access only.

The online activities can then just be created for the corresponding week in their study schedule, avoiding the huge time expenditure in the cut’n'paste approach which, in my mind, won’t be of any real benefit to the students. It also avoids all the reformatting that’s needed when cut’n'pasting.

Maybe just a Freudian slip, but I’ve been told we’re having a ‘brainwashing session’ about the next steps of the project later this morning. Hopefully this will be after I get some breakfast, up at the staff lounge earlier, I was told I couldn’t have any food because they didn’t have any plates…

Unfortunately the faculty trip, due for this weekend, up to the Tekeze dam and Axum was canceled – something to do with the cost and lack of numbers. So instead a few interesting nights out in Mekelle.

Whilst we were out in Allegro bar having a few games of pool, several people behind us (7 or 8 of the new Uni students) started shouting about black power. After a few minutes of this one of them came over to say that it wasn’t because there were white people around, just that they were excited about the prospect of Obama getting in as president! Not having any TV, or a radio which can receive BBC world service, I feel quite out of touch with what’s going on outside of Mekelle, so I’d not realised the election was coming up so soon. Not even sure I know much about what’s going on in Mekelle for that matter, apart from the odd report of people being eaten by hyaenas.

On Saturday we went up to Wukro, a local town about a hours bus-ride away, to have a look at the agricultural college there. Reinhard (a German guy) has been working there for nearly 5 years and took us on a little tour. They must have some of the best cared for cows up there, which look like they actually have bit of meat on them. All the cows we see in and around Mekelle are extremely thin, which explains why most the meat here is very tough. The college make cheese to sell on, and we ended up buying about 4 kilos – this was between 6 of us and should last a while in the fridge.

Although the bus ride is only an hour, a couple of locals were travel sick – the bus doesn’t actually stop, the conductor just hands round plastic bags which are then thrown out of the window (presuming most of it isn’t already on the floor of the bus!). This seems to be quite common and is probably because many people here aren’t used to traveling long distances by bus – the roads aren’t exactly smooth (though the road to Wukro is tarmac all the way) and the buses could do with new suspension fitting.

Word now seems to be getting out that I’m an IT volunteer so have had several requests to help fix computers/laptops – I sorted out 3 last week and over the weekend and am due to help reinstall Windows XP on someones laptop later today. Think I’ll need to get my pricing structure sorted out!