Alex Little

In the past, I’ve worked on quite a number of research projects developing prototype software and web applications, where, due to the nature of the project (pilot/prototype/research) you never quite get the time to invest in making these systems as robust, well structured or documented as you’d like. Yet at the same time, a tension starts when there is a push to get these systems used in the real world, and they become to be treated as production level systems. No, it’s not quite that black and white, research projects need some real world testing to prove their worth and production systems will never be perfect.

With our new thin client labs and OpenSolaris server I feel we have a similar tension. On one side, these labs were a facility for us to try out new ICT policy and infrastructure for the university, for example, disabling flash devices, using university mail accounts, amongst many others. Yet at the same time, our lab is the only functioning lab available in the Engineering College. A review yesterday by the ECBP team, found that there was only one other lab (approx 30 PCs) which was functional and had relatively modern PCs (less than 5 years old) – but this lab isn’t yet networked (it’s in the computer science building – which, almost a year after being occupied by the department, still hasn’t been networked except recently for some of the staff offices). So there are 40 networked terminals available for a student population of over 2000. That’s a ratio of 1 terminal to 50 students in a college teaching engineering, technology and computing.

So we have a question of priorities, do we stick with the research goals and risk the labs not being usable due to the decision we’ve made (but then have something interesting to write up), or do we focus on providing students with a lab they are able to use effortlessly?

For me, it’s an easy decision to make. We must focus on providing a robust and reliable lab (contrary to the other labs) for the students to benefit from and not worry about the fact that they’re sharing passwords, using webmail rather than university mail accounts and the like. This doesn’t contradict some of the bigger research aspects we wanted to look into (e.g. demonstrating we can create a more robust and scalable architecture than the usual PC labs), but does mean that we very quickly needed to make compromises (such as allowing the use of flash drives) we didn’t want to have to make so soon.

Have been hearing a few critical comments from some staff regarding the Certificate in Online Education and it’s content. Apparently some staff feel that learning about some of the techniques that we have been showing them is beneath them, or they already know how to perform these functions (for example use of graphics editing software). In my mind it’s just another excuse not to participate in the training. It also shows that they aren’t coming to the training with an open mind and consider that elearning is simply a technical issue, rather than a way of truly improving the quality of their course content and activities. I’m quite sure that some staff are capable of using some of the software, but in order to give them a certificate they need to prove is to us by actually demonstrating their skills with the courses they deliver to students.

Unfortunately, it still seems far too common here for staff to receive a lot of training, but never follow the training up by implementing what they have learned.

There are a wide variety of other reasons (excuses) I’ve heard as to why staff haven’t participated in the training, but there are few I believe as anything other than excuses.

More positively, except for the England v USA result, I’ve now found a few good places to watch the world cup matches. Apparently some students here have requested alterations to their exam timetables so they are able to watch all the games. I don’t think they received a particularly sympathetic response!

Otherwise, another busy week, spending much of the time with the new Institute of Technology (officially the Tigray Institute of Technology, but this results in an unfortunate acronym!), working on an action plan for the implementation of elearning into the new institute. They certainly seem to have more commitment than we received from the rest of the university over the past year. But hope that the Institute will be able to set a good example of how changes can be made in the rest of the university.

A team of staff (Joern, Selamawit, Haileleul and Oliver) from ECBP on.e arrived yesterday to begin working with the Institute and the new elearning team here. We’re planning how we can integrate our two separate training programmes for staff (elearning team and the tutors) and assisting with planning the technical/ICT infrastructure required.

Brief run down of the sessions I’ve been to today…

Opening plenary
Conference was officially opened by the Vice President of Zambia and other opening speeches, including the Anglican Bishop of Gambia talking about the use of Facebook and Twitter – not something I was expecting.

Implementing and Sharing Open Source Repositories
With all the JISC conferences and meetings I’ve been to over the previous few years, I thought (hoped) I’d heard the last
about learning object repositories and metadata, but apparently not. The main question for me that came out of this session was the fact that much of the talk seems to be about how institutions can push out their OER content, but little about how to encourage people to make use of the available content, or evaluating how much this content is really used.

Research Networks on ICT4D
For me this was the most interesting session of the day – possibly because it broke away from the normal series of powerpoint presentations and was more of a discussion forum. Tim Unwin (Royal Holloway Uni, London) had several interesting points to make:

1. Most ICT4D project fail as they aren’t based on a real demand or need from Africans themselves, rather they are driven by outside (EU/US) organisations
2. Technology providers see Africa as a market to make money from. This is shown by the number of technology vendors present in the exhibition area, looking to sell their solutions
3. The quality of journal papers and research from African universities is very poor and this isn’t a technological or funding issue.

On the last point Jophus Anamuah-Mensah (TESSA project, Ghana) talked about the fact that African researchers seem to have lost a lot of the collaborative culture which previously used to exist.

Improving Mobile Learning Environments
At the conference there are many presentations and sessions about mobile learning. Much talk is made of the fact that so many people in Africa have a mobile phone and that they are cheap. Unfortunately this still isn’t the case in Ethiopia, where mobile ownership appears to be noticeably lower than other African countries. Many of the projects presented make big assumptions about the type of devices that students have access to, for example, owning internet & java enabled mobiles. From my very unscientific assessment, I would put student mobile ownership at Mekelle Uni at less that 30% and these tend to be only basic/entry-level voice/SMS enabled phones (I ought to include this as part of our student surveys/questionnaires once I return to Mekelle next week).

I’ve also heard about a couple of project integrating Moodle and SMS, but both of these seem to rely on either a subscription service, or with good cooperation from the telecoms provider, something we’re unlikely to be able to make use of in Mekelle.

General Comments

• Ethiopia appears to be very under-represented here, so far I’ve only met one other person coming from an Ethiopian organisation. If you are from Ethiopia and you’re here then please get in touch.
• I’ve caught up with many ex-colleagues from the OU (UK) – showing what a small world it is.
• I now have plenty of leads and technologies to follow up on and investigate, plus many ideas for possible projects and/or collaborations.

In a bit of a contradiction, project progress has been fairly slow the last couple of weeks yet I have been as busy as ever. We still have number of issues to resolve for us to be able to move forward. Firstly the course content for the training and workshops. It’s been hard for us to get the time to write the Moodle training course material from scratch, so we’ve now made the decision to buy a license for the MoodleBites for Teachers training course. Purchasing the license means that we can install the materials on our own Moodle server and gives us much more flexibility than paying for individuals to take the course online and in a specified time period.

There are actually far more materials, covering more aspects of Moodle, in more detail, than we really require for giving to our tutors. So we’ll need to spend some time adapting the materials to take out the sections we don’t want or need to cover at the moment. But having all the materials means that those who are interested in learning further have the option to do so. As time is passing very quickly and it won’t be long before I head back to the UK we need to try and make sure that the tutors can follow the training with only remote assistance. I’m a little skeptical that this will work, so am hoping that I can cover as much as possible before I leave.

We’re also still a little disappointed with the amount of materials that have been uploaded by the tutors, to make the project successful we need to demonstrate much more. I’ve been given many reasons as to why people haven’t been able to upload, either they don’t have the materials yet as they’ll write them as they deliver the course next semester, they don’t know what course they’ll be delivering next semester, or simply that they haven’t had time. All of these excuses are a little disappointing as we were very clear when we were giving the introduction and face to face week in October and November that we’d need people to be working on their second semester courses and that they’d need a day per week to commit. The only one that was raised as an issue at then was the time commitment necessary.

Another issue that has been taking up much of my time is getting the user accounts working correctly. Many of the user accounts on the server simply don’t work, and the process of creating new accounts has, in my mind, far too many steps and so is far too error prone. I figured out what the problem was with many accounts, simply the ownership of the home directory was wrong, so these were easy to fix. But there are still a handful of accounts that I just can’t figure out why there is problem. Am hoping that Mike will get chance to look into this in the next few days.

Although we may be having problems with delivering the workshop training materials, if we get the accounts working properly for students then we can start to have an impact. The lab at Arid is now open, Elfu, one of the IT experts in the Engineering College, has moved her desk into the lab, so the lab can be open all during the normal working week and she’s making sure all the terminals are up and running. For the second semester, we’ve had agreement that the students will have responsibility for the key for opening the lab, so they’ll be able to use it as much as they like outside the normal working hours.

Last week, Oliver and Haileleul from the Engineering Capacity Building Program (ECBP) in Addis came to visit our elearning project in Mekelle. They are working for the elearning development program for ECBP, setting up eCompetence Centres at other universities in Ethiopia and are looking to develop a similar program in Mekelle without duplicating the Digital Campus project work.

All seemed to go very well and we’re currently in the process of writing a proposal for the training of more staff to become elearning experts, to be presented to the University management in the very near future.

Their most successful program so far seems to be at Adama University, where the Engineering College has been turned into an independent Institute of Technology. The (German) director and senior management have really focused on improving student computer access, by setting up 600 terminals open 24/7.

The ECBP approach taken to develop elearning course content/materials is slightly different to our approach with Digital Campus. We are training teachers to set up and upload their own courses and teaching materials, with the support from pedagogical department, whereas the eCompetence Centres allow teachers to take their materials to the centre. The centre staff then do much of the content development and uploading for the teacher. There is good reason for this difference, the ECBP approach has a stronger focus on multimedia content, whereas we’re looking at much more basic content uploading and activity creation. Expecting all staff to have the facilities, skills and time to produce multimedia content is simply unrealistic.

There are pros and cons of each approach. Sending your content off to a centre for transformation into online activities can increase the technological complexity of the activities or content developed (e.g. multimedia or flash animations), increase quality (questionably) and consistency between courses. Also it is easier to set deadlines for course production. However I have concerns that staff then have no sense of ownership of the online materials related to their course, for example, that regular updates are made and that staff participate in and monitor forum discussions. It may mean staff then don’t consider it to be part of their jobs to be involved with the online aspect. I have to ad that the ECBP approach does have the teachers working with the elearning team – it’s not a case of the teachers dropping off the materials and walking away from any further involvement.

Training teacher to produce their own online content and activities means that you can have a smaller team supporting the elearning development, providing advice and training but not the ‘doing’ and this woul dhelp to reduce the direct cost to the university. We hope it would also motivate the teachers to encourage their students to use the materials and activities if the teachers have gone to the effort of creating them. The danger is that teachers won’t have the time or skills, or it will be considered to be more work force upon them by management. Maintaining a baseline level of quality and consistency between courses may be difficult.

So, which do you think is the better approach? Or should there be a mixture between the two?

I hope that I’ll get the opportunity to visit Adama university early in the new year, with some staff from Mekelle, as I believe there will be a lot we can learn from their experiences. I think that the success of their program may be mainly due to the efforts put into providing 24/7 open access computer labs to students, something that’s yet to be achieved on anything but a very small scale at Mekelle.

The week before the opening of our labs by the Spanish Ambassador we had run a full week of training with about 25 teachers from the Health Sciences and Engineering Colleges. Simultaneously with the training we were also trying to get the labs complete – so quite difficult to coordinate with everything done right at the very last minute.

The training went far better than we had hoped, with the teachers being very keen, even to the extent where when we suggested a coffee break, it was hard to get people away from the computers. We also had many requests from other staff who would like to join the training. The next two challenges are to get the labs open and available for students and not to lose the momentum we’ve built up with the recent training. We’re continuing with weekly half day workshop/tutorial sessions and will be opening the labs for a very select group of students so they can test out the labs for us and help to identify any possible problems. This also gives the ICT team the opportunity to learn and deal with issues.

So much has happened over the last 2-3 weeks so it’s impossible for me to note (or remember) everything that’s happened, although there were a couple of notable exceptions.

Firstly, the tables that we ordered from the agricultural college in Wukro finally arrived. I mentioned in a recent posting about the delivery over the weekend, well, the other half of the order arrived on Friday morning, only the varnishing hadn’t been finished, so the college sent a technician to complete the tables as they were being unloaded from the truck. Despite the delays, I’m very pleased with the tables and how they look in the labs, I was slightly worried that I’d miscalculated and the tables would be too big for the lab or too small for the computers, but fortunately this wasn’t the case and everyone tells me how good the labs look.

The other event which stuck in my mind was organising the ribbon for the ambassador to cut. At about 5pm the day before his visit, I was given a copy of the schedule, one section read ‘cutting the ribbon’. I then made the mistake of saying that I was going into town after work, only to be asked if I could by some ribbon as they uni didn’t have any. I mistakenly assumed this would be a relatively easy task given that all tailors and fabric shops are down the same street. This was not the case, after visiting too many shops, the only red ribbon I could find was about 1cm wide. we had to settle for a strip of edged red fabric and hoe that it would be wide enough for the door and wouldn’t look too bad. On the day I also took pair of scissors with me, just in case.

As a surprise for us and the trainers, the University had arranged a meal at the Axum hotel on the last evening of the training, so we finally had chance to wind down a little…

With all the recent talk about Google Chrome OS and Microsoft office on the web, putting cloud computing back in the technology headlines, I recently read a less well publicised Microsoft story in the Seattle Times:

As U.S. companies begin exploring cloud computing this year, a school system on the other side of the globe has already leapt into the cloud. Ethiopia is rolling out 250,000 laptops to schoolteachers all over the country, all running on Microsoft’s platform called Azure.

The project, as described in the article, seems to overlook 2 huge issues, as do most of the people who have left comments on the article.

Firstly, the internet infrastructure in Ethiopia is just not robust, widespread or reliable enough for teachers to just connect up their shiny new laptops to some data centre in the US. Take for example Abi Adi, a town of around 20000 people, about 3 hours drive from where I’ve been working in Mekelle. A colleague, working in the teacher training college there, tried to get a couple of new phone lines installed to give extra (dial-up) internet access, but was told that all the lines for the town had already been allocated and no more would be available until new lines were installed, but no immediate plans were in place to increase the number of lines available.

And many Ethiopian towns and villages are far less well connected than Abi Adi.

There are obviously other options to delivering internet access through copper or fibre networks, such as through VSAT or the mobile phone network. But again to get these installed, or made reliable for the proposed project, would be a massive (and costly) undertaking in it’s own right.

Secondly, there’s no mention of the training and support that would be need to be given to teachers. The support infrastructure would need to be huge, who is going to fix the machines when they (almost inevitably) get a virus, or overheat after being choked with dust?

My experience of the One Laptop Per Child project shows that the training and support given to teachers and students is absolutely crucial to the success of the project – in much the same way it will be to this new project.

So, do I think cloud computing could work for Ethiopian teachers? Certainly not currently.

It’s not that I don’t like the idea of what they’re trying to do here, but just very wary that it’s yet another white elephant project which sounds good and gets them in the headlines. The money could be far better spent working with ETC (Ethiopia’s sole telecoms company) to improve the general internet infrastructure, and training teachers to work better with the technology already available to them. Only then might Ethiopia be able to take advantage of the possibilities afforded by cloud computing.

Recently I was sent link to Chisimba, a ‘Web 2.0 enabled, Free Software development framework for creating web and distributed applications’, developed by African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR). From the info on the site it looked an interesting project, although my first impression was that its trying to be all things to everyone, with modules for blogs, wikis, CMS, LMS and more. It appears to have taken elements from Moodle, Joomla, Drupal and Elgg and packaged them all into one application, which may or may not be a good thing.

On downloading and installing on my laptop, I soon found that this was still very much a work in progress, as there appeared to be lots of little bugs/annoyances that would probably have been resolved if it was a little more developed. A very minor example of this was the fact that the next/previous buttons on the installation were the wrong way round (for me anyway), with next being on the left hand side and prevous on the right, rather than the more usual arrangement. The installation itself was a little fiddly, however that was mainly because I had to upgrade my version of PHP, install some PHP libraries and some PEAR libraries too, before it would install.

A lot of effort seems to have gone into creating modules, 100′s of them by the looks of it, so thought I’d take a look at installing the blog module. Unfortunately the automatic ‘download and install’ kept giving me an error, so then tried an offline installation of the module – a 35Mb download of all(?) the modules is available – but I couldn’t find any info on how to install a module in this way. I’ve posted a query on their discussion forums, so hopefully I’ll get a reply to have this resolved soon.

Overall I was a little disappointed that I couldn’t have a proper play with the modules, but will come back to it once I get a resolution as to how to install them. Having said that I can’t see this framework taking off, there are many other established frameworks out there and I don’t think Chisimba offers anything different enough from these.

In the last few years, I’ve got out of the habit of buying computing books, knowing that generally I’ll only make use of small sections and how quickly they become dated, so have tended to rely on using the internet to look up what I need. Even in cases where I’ve needed to learn something from scratch, I’ve again generally relied on online tutorials/examples.

With this in mind, I was recently asked to review a new book from Packt publishing ‘Moodle 1.9 – ELearning Course Development’ (on Amazon). Well, I say recently, but it was actually a little while ago now, and I’ve only just had chance to have a proper read.

Although aimed at “anyone who wants to make the most of Moodle’s features to produce an interactive online learning experience”, it strikes me as more a reference book for Moodle. With an extensive section (around a quarter of the book) devoted just to the installation and initial setup of a Moodle server, including authentication, security, filters, themes etc , I started to think it was aimed mainly at system administrators, but the remainder of the book is devoted to explanations on how to create courses, add resources and activities – the areas most teachers and course creators would want to know.

Extensive coverage is given to how each of the blocks and activity settings can be used, which, whilst very useful as a reference, may come across as a little intimidating, especially for new Moodlers. Explanations are also given on why you might want to use the activity although I found that it lacked real life examples of good and bad practice. I’m sure many teachers would want to know what others have already tried, whether successfully or not.

Given the fast paced change of most software, Moodle is no exception, I would also have liked to have seen some reference (acknowledgment?) of the features coming in Moodle 2. Perhaps this was deliberately left out so as not to confuse readers, or perhaps Moodle 2 wasn’t in a stable enough form at the time of writing, but this book is likely to date quickly, assuming that Moodle 2 is released according to plan in mid 2009.

There are a couple of other books in the same series, ‘Moodle Teaching Techniques’ and ‘Moodle Administration’ and I’d have really like to have read all three alongside each other, to find out where the differences are, any overlaps and if either of these other books plug the gaps I felt were left open by Elearning Course Development.

In summary, an excellent book if you already know what you want to do with Moodle but aren’t sure how to use the settings to achieve your aims. I’m unlikely to be seen reading this book without also having a PC in front of me with Moodle in my browser.

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!