Second (or third?) thoughts
I keep changing my mind as to how appropriate it is to be trying to run an elearning project here in Ethiopia.
On the one hand, I’m running training sessions for staff in how to set up their courses in Moodle, but then very few of the students have access to computers so staff are understandably reluctant to spend time setting up a course that almost no-one can access. To give you some idea of the limited availability I’m talking about, on the Business Campus we have around 3000 students and 6 computing labs. 2 of these labs are open for postgraduate students only (comprising approx 100 students) and 3 of the labs are only for Computer Science students (approx 300 students). This leaves the final ‘DIF’ lab – this is the lab funded by the elearning project I’m working on – and has approx 20 networked PCs, but due to lack of maintenance and supervisory staff it’s not open to students. This leaves a handful of PCs in the library to be used by 2600 students, approx 1 open access PC per 500 students. Even if I manage to get our DIF lab openly available to students, this only increases availability to approx 1 PC per 100 students. Not an ideal situation to be in when trying to promote the creation of online quizzes & discussion forums!
On the other hand, even small steps forward may be useful. Just getting teachers and students used to the idea of online and blended learning and how they may create or participate in online collaborative activities is a good thing in itself. They may currently only have limited computer access, but this situation is bound to improve, or at least I hope it’s bound to improve! Receiving training and having some experience of participating in and creating online courses now may help prepare teachers and students for the future.
At the moment, I’m on the pessimistic whats-the-point side of the fence, but I am writing this on a Friday afternoon and may well have changed my mind again by Monday morning! Also by Monday morning we may have received the timetable for the new semester. The new semester starts on Monday, it’s now Friday just after lunch and no-one (teachers or students) have any idea of their lesson timetable!
Hi Alex – for what it’s worth, if I think back to my early days at the Open University, we were trying to teach computer programming to Psychology students who
a) were not really interested
b) were (sometimes) quite technophobic
c) had no computers at all – anywhere
Students had to travel, usually dozens of miles but sometimes hundreds, to a study centre where they could access a time-shared ‘terminal’ – a 300 characters-per-second teletype machine. There were a grand total of about 200 of these terminals distributed around the UK, and we had thousands of students on the course (and there were hundreds of courses, many of them also competing for these resources). So everyone had to book their time carefully.
So, shared limited resources in daunting conditions: but in the end the students absolutely loved the opportunity. I know times have moved on, but if you’re wondering whether it’s worthwhile in such daunting conditions, I can only assume that the answer is a resounding YES!
Keep up the great work…
Cheers
-Marc