We’re also beginning to design a more integrated platform for the different components – reusing existing open source toolkits/components and standards wherever possible. It’s going to take a while to refine our ideas and then to actually build and test the system, but I’m going to start off by looking at how to create a mobile app for assessing the skills/knowledge of the HEWs.

i-call (http://common-sense.at/i-call): Using a dial up voice service, where callers can select their way through a story (interactive decision maze) to teach them about the consequences of their actions. Designed to identify pregnant women at risk. Also using SMS to remind women about their medical appointments. At the specialist level, using Moodle mobile extensions to provide case studies, self testing and forums.

Botswana-UPenn Partnership (http://www.upenn.edu/botswana/): Testing myTouch 3g Android smartphones with doctors and their students. The phones were preloaded with a range of (free and paid for) medical and drug applications. The applications most used were Dynamed, 5 min clinical consult and Epocrates RX. Found that people preferred using phones with slide out keyboards rather than on-screen virtual keyboards.

Mobile learning for applied distance learning, presentation by Niall Winters from London Knowledge Lab: Participatory design methodology (using pen & paper) to iterate the design of mobile applications for health workers before the applications are finally written. Running a workshop “Designing Mobile Learning Activities” on 4th July in London (https://store.ioe.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?modid=5&prodid=39&deptid=111). Also LDIC report “Distance Learning for Health: What works” (see: http://www.lidc.org.uk/news_detail.php?news_id=117).

Digital Opportunity Trust (DOT): Mike and I met with some of the DOT staff at the ICE hub in Addis a few days before the conference. At the conference they presented one of the research projects “Web2.0: Mapping Practices and Perceptions” (see: http://www.dotrust.org/research/publications)

Health Sciences Online (http://hso.info): Repository of freely available health sciences knowledge

OpenECBCheck (http://www.qualityfoundation.org/openecbcheck/): Peer reviewed quality and accreditation for elearning programmes

Next week I return to Ethiopia for a few days and will then go to present at the eLearning Africa conference in Tanzania.

iceAddis is based at the EiABC campus and is where Jaime and I held the elearning training in February earlier this year:

iceAddis

We have been investigating the various options for this and our plans now revolve around Digital Campus supporting (through a partnership agreement) an ICT company based in Ethiopia to provide quality ICT services. Digital Campus in Europe would stay not-for-profit, but we would like to steer clear of being seen as a charity or donor organisation. Although we’re able to source and provide hardware very close to being free, we would only want this equipment to be used in environments where there is a clear support structure in place. I know far too many donated computer labs either permanently locked up or hardware reduced to doorstops because it simply hasn’t been properly maintained.

Digital Campus Ethiopia (for want of a better name) would initially provide the first line of support, being directly based in the client organisation and Digital Campus Europe would initially provide the second/third line support, but also giving training, work experience and internships, with a view to the Ethiopian based company subsequently taking over this role, building into a viable self-sustaining business. This should help offer a higher level of service quality as well as being able to offer better paid career options to local staff.

The challenges are very high, especially in finding a suitable team of staff (or an existing company) to partner with, as these people will be critical to the success (or otherwise) of the venture. But everyone I’ve spoken to recently seems to see it as the ‘right way’ to go.

I’d be interested to hear thoughts and opinions on this approach.

Please contact me for further information and I can explain more and send you contact details.

As probably many people reading this already know, I worked at the Open University (UK) for over 7 years. After this amount of time I decided that I needed a change. Not that I particularly wanted to leave the OU, rather, I needed a new challenge and to look at what other options might be out there for me. I’d often considered applying to VSO (Voluntary Services Overseas), but either didn’t think I had the skills/experience needed or was too busy doing other things. I certainly didn’t apply with the explicit intention of then working full time in international development. My first piece of luck was that VSO had a placement available for a project directly in the area I had most experience in (elearning, as I’d been working on at the OU), I’d expected to be offered a placement doing general ICT infrastructure development and skills training.

Whilst working in Mekelle (Ethiopia) I had my second piece of luck, which was to become involved with a project from Alcalá University (near Madrid) which was also trying to develop the elearning capacity and facilities at Mekelle Uni. I extended my VSO placement specifically to continue working on this project and now, here I am almost a year after finishing my VSO placement, working as project manager at Alcalá Uni on the same project in Mekelle and preparing to go back to Ethiopia in a few weeks time. Admittedly my personal circumstances have helped me hugely, I’ve been able to be very flexible as to where I live and be able to travel anywhere anytime. Many other VSO volunteers I knew in Ethiopia returned to their home countries and similar jobs.

So… back to why I don’t consider myself to be an international development worker… I prefer to consider myself to be working on an elearning and ICT project which happens to be in Ethiopia. Most people would probably describe that as international development, although I could work on a similar project anywhere (Russia, Japan, Argentina etc), yes, the circumstances (working culture, state of infrastructure etc) would be different, but aren’t they different in every country, even every organisation, anyway?

For the work I’m now involved in and how we’d like to move forward, keeping ourselves distanced from being seen as an NGO/charity is probably our best way forward. My feeling is that being seen as an NGO/charity may perpetuates the impression that we’re there simply to donate equipment, which then ends up being installed but inoperable and unsupported after only a few months. There is certainly still a place for charities/NGOs etc, especially working in relief work, healthcare & education for the extremely poor, but not so much for ICT development.

Probably the only advice I could give to anyone wanting to get into a similar field (which is much the same as you’ll find in any other article about careers in international development) which is that you must to spend some time abroad (probably volunteering) to really gain an appreciation of the issues and challenges faced. Just having a Masters or some other qualification won’t be enough. Apart from the few days in pre-departure training with VSO, I have no formal training or qualifications in international development.

Perhaps I’ve just been very lucky or perhaps I made my own luck, I’ll leave it to you to decide which!

I spent my final week in Mekelle helping to run student induction sessions for the Health Sciences college. We now have around 600 students registered on elearning courses (from both Technology Institute and Health Sciences College), with over a third of these having completed our initial student survey – so we should be able to get some good information about their expectations and previous computing experiences.

As always, my last few days in Mekelle were very hectic – my workload seems to increase as I get nearer to my departure date! But we have now got over 20 classrooms in the Health Sciences College connected up to the network, with projectors and computers, so teachers no longer have to carry their laptops to be able to give a presentation, plus they have access to the internet within the classroom. Currently these computers are running on Windows, but we’ll change this so they boot across the network and act as thin client machines.

I was also helping to advise the Technology institute on how they can massively increase their computing infrastructure using the thin client model. They have many 100′s of old monitors to make use of. There is a long way to go to get this set up, especially as the institute needs to staff and train an ICT team/department.

We still have some issue regarding the fact that the labs we have aren’t able to cope with the number of students wanting to use them. I’m getting a lot of requests to allocate specific times for classes, but I’m being quite firm that the labs should remain open access, rather than becoming a substitute for the lack of maintenance in the departmental computer labs.

Am now trying to have a bit of time off in the UK (without getting bogged down in emails about the labs, training etc!), before heading to Spain to work at Alcala Uni for a few months.

Teaching the English alphabet at Sherafo Primary School

This week has been extremely varied and busy. On Monday I started off by helping with the student induction sessions for the Technology Institute students. Mesi and Berihu (the elearning team in the institute) are now able to run the inductions themselves, so I don’t need to get involved with these any more. So in less than 3 weeks, we have gone from training the teachers in how to get their courses online to having students enrolled on the online courses they have created.

Student inductions

Then on Tuesday I gave a couple of presentations about the Digital Campus project and Open Educational Resources to the languages department. Andrew and Elinor from Clarity were back in Ethiopia to run some training for their English language improvement software, so my presentations were to help inform the languages department about how they may want to use elearning in their teaching.

I spent Wednesday morning helping to interview 13 people for 3 lab attendants posts to look after one of our computer labs and to work in shifts so the lab can be open 24 hours a day. The interviews were extremely short – only 5-10 mins each and the candidates had the choice of whether to speak in Amharic or English, so in the end there was only one candidate I could give an opinions on as they had answered the whole interview in English. Although I couldn’t understand every word, I could tell that the level of training at some of the private colleges was a little suspect (many had their IT diplomas from private colleges in Mekelle). For example, in response to my question about what they would do if a student had a problem with their password, over half replied that they’d use password cracker software (or at least I heard the words ‘password cracker software’ in their Amharic response).

Later in the afternoon I travelled up to Wukro again to accompany Mahmud (another of the phd students at Alcala) on some of his research field work. He’s looking for particular types of parasites in children, so is going out to rural schools and doing blood, urine and stool tests on a subset of the students.

On Thursday we headed out to Sherafo school (about 30 mins drive off the main road from Agula) to complete the testing he’d started there the day before. Our lab was set up in the model classroom at the school and whilst Mahmud was interviewing the children and their parents, I was helping the rest of the team weigh and measure the children – improving my Tigriyan numbers at the same time. I’m not sure how much a disruption my presence at the school was, most of the children spent a long time staring at me.

I was also looking at whether the cameras on the smart phones were going to be good enough to take photos of the microscope slides, so they could be attached to other questionnaire/interview data being recorded on the phone application. The unfortunately predictable answer was no – the only way we could get even halfway recognisable photos was to use a proper digital camera with macro setting.

On Friday morning I caught the bus back to Mekelle and was up at the Arid campus by just after 9am. I went to look at the refurbished PC lab that’s still being built. The furniture was just being installed, but there’s no sign yet of the network or electrical work that we’ve been waiting quite some time for. Although the tables use a similar design to those I had made for the other lab, I wonder how long the new tables will actually last. The sliding keyboard shelves feel like they’ll break quite easily.

In more positive news, over at Ayder campus in the afternoon, I arrived to find that all 22 classrooms were now networked. The college dean had asked for this to be done only about 2 weeks ago. Each classroom also has a projector and an old desktop computer. So next week all we need to do is get the computer configured to boot from our server and all the classrooms can have internet and other computing facilities.

I’m now going to have a relaxing weekend

I have spent the past 4 days visiting rural Health Posts with my colleague Araya. His phd is looking at the gaps of the Health Extension Workers (HEWs), specifically related to maternal health. Once the gaps are known, the next stage will be to design a programme to fill the hole in knowledge/skills, possibly using technology to help deliver the training.

Altogether he’ll interview 150 HEWs at over 100 Health Posts in 3 districts in Tigray. Over the 4 days I’ve been out with him, he managed to interview 18 HEWs at 14 health posts. Each day has been long – leaving Wukro around 7 am and not returning until after 7pm, so 12 hours to conduct about 5 interviews, each interview lasting about an hour or more.

I’ve been helping with the technology support and will be helping look at what could be appropriate to use in this context. Not all the concerns I mentioned in my earlier post have been realised.

The GPRS coverage has been far better than I’d expected, out of the 13 posts we visited, only one had no mobile or GPRS coverage. A couple had patchy coverage – but it was working for some of the time during our approx 2 hour visits. This is really positive from the point of view of the technology we might like to use in the future.

However, none of the posts had an electricity supply. A couple had electricity poles running very close to the building, but they weren’t connected up. In most cases there wasn’t any electricity supply to the village at all.

My phone battery got to be a real problem for me, despite having wireless and bluetooth turned off, I found that battery was only lasting for about 8-9 hours. I was using the GPS quite a lot, but even on the first couple of days when I was only briefly turning the GPS on (to get the coordinates for the posts), this only gave me a couple of extra hours battery life.

All except one of the HEWs we met had a mobile phone. The reason for the one exception was that she worked at the post with no mobile coverage, so she’d given her phone to a relative. Which for me than raised the question of how they charge the phones given there’s limited power supply. The answer to this was that they must travel to the town to charge their phones (this could be a 2-3 hour walk), or they send the phones with someone else going to town.

The HEWs have very limited English (although much better than my Tigrinya), so delivery of any training materials must be in either Amharic or Tigrinya to have any chance of being effective. One of Araya’s questions is about their use of text messaging, many don’t use text messaging simply because they don’t know the latin alphabet well enough.

What I’ve seen over the past few days is only a small proportion of all the posts that Araya will eventually be covering, but it’s likely that the further interviews will reinforce what we’ve already found out – rather than raising any new issues or significantly altering the results to date.

Over the coming months (after some more of the interview have been conducted), we’d like to get the results from the technology aspects written up into a paper.