Alex Little

This morning we had another visit from the Ministry of Education, coming to find out about our Digital Campus elearning project. They’ve had quite a punishing schedule over the past few days – not helped by a mix up which left them with 1 day to complete a 2 day car journey. Nonetheless, they seemed very enthusiastic and keen to learn about our project, looking at how similar programmes and technologies could be introduced at other Ethiopian Universities.

Unexpectedly (for me), our visitors were accompanied by a reporter and journalist from ETV, so I had to provide an impromptu presentation to camera about our project, which I’m expecting to be broadcast nationwide sometime over the next few days. I hope I gave a better performance than England did last night against Algeria! I think the appearance of the TV team surprised the students working in the lab, but a couple of them were happy to be interviewed, so really pleased they’ve been able to get feedback and opinions from the students too.

Finally has been great to see the new computer labs in full use. On Tuesday I went over to the lab at Ayder, to find it not only open, but full of students (all 45 terminals in use), so this was very pleasing to see. The only downside was that students were almost exclusively using Facebook (except for the girl looking at the wikipedia page on Enrique Iglesias) rather than anything to do with the courses our tutor have produced.

I suspect that this is only to be expected, students rarely get to use a computer so the first thing they want to do is check their emails and facebook status. I still can’t really figure out exactly what the appeal is of spending so much time on facebook – but maybe that’s just me. There is talk at the university of blocking facebook and some of the other social networking sites simply because of the bandwidth they consume, but then last year there was also talk of doing the same with some webmail services (specifically Yahoo).

The use of the labs in this way isn’t really too concerning for the project – as least it demonstrates the demand is there and better than the labs being empty or locked. Surely students can’t spend 24/7 on facebook (or can they?) and eventually perhaps they’ll move onto something more constructive? Or do we need to get the course content and learning activities into facebook?

We have noticed that many students are sharing accounts/passwords – giving them to their friends. Seems there’s little we can do about this apart from trying to educate students that their documents and work are at risk of being deleted/copied etc if they give out their account details. Or we introduce fingerprint or iris scanning!

Over the past couple of days I’ve been started the training programme for the three new elearning staff, all going well so far. They’ll receive some training from ECBP (Engineering Capacity Building Programme, Ethiopia, funded by GTZ) so we’re looking at ways in which we can coordinate the Digital Campus training programme with theirs.

Our internet connection has been quite poor since I returned – off for 2 days last week then another 2 full days this week. There is an incredible difference in the number of students in the labs between when the internet is on and when it’s off.

Am now trying to decide where the best place will be to watch the England match on Saturday, choice is basically between either the Axum hotel (free entry but expensive drinks), or a DSTV house (very cheap entry and better atmosphere, but no drinks!)

Last week we had our second full weeks training course with our elearning tutors. Jaime came over from Alcala University to deliver most of the training and I was there to help out with more of the technical aspects and generally lend a hand.

It was a completely different week to the previous training week we had back in November. Then it was the start of the training so it was much more hectic and we had more participants – who seemed to flit between attending or not – so it was difficult to manage with everyone working at different paces. In November we gave people plenty of time for practical work as well as giving presentations – but at the end of the week, some people thought there was too much time to work on their own. I suspect that many of these were the people who were more interested in getting the certificate to say they’ve done the training than actually implementing anything.

This week we had a core group of about 12 tutors who attended the whole week, which was almost entirely practical sessions – just a few presentations. Jaime had much of the previous week meeting with the tutors for individual tutorials and catch up, which worked out to be time well spent. The outcome was a very productive week and we now have many courses (around 15) almost fully uploaded on our Moodle server (see: http://www.mu.edu.et/elearning) – many of the courses allow guest access if you would like to take a look. Next challenge is to make sure the student accounts have been created and that they have received some form of induction to the lab.

Unfortunately we still have some unresolved technical issues in the labs which has been making things a little tricky to manage. None of the issues by themselves are show-stoppers, but all the little issues add up and we’ve already experienced the fact that we’re not always told when there are issues – instead people just don’t use the lab. So we need to make sure there are plenty of ways in which staff and students can communicate when they are having difficulties.

At the end of the week we had a nice meal out with all the tutors at the Axum hotel. Even though it was a Friday night, most places are very quiet – it’s still fasting time in the run up to Easter and many people won’t go out to restaurants/bars if they’re not able to eat meat!

Today I held the first student induction session for Seyoum’s ‘Marketing Management for Industrial Engineers’ course. All seemed to go very well, we had far fewer problems with the students logging in than I was expecting – I think this was mainly due to Seyoum being able to explain in Amharic what they needed to do.

I feel I’ve been a little quiet on here recently, but that’s not because been being lazy. Quite the opposite in fact. The closer I get to my leaving date, the longer my to do list seems to grow. It’s highly unlikely that I’ll get chance to finish everything I’d like.

It’s only in the last week that I realised I’ve not left Mekelle now since the middle of December, when I had a very brief trip down to Addis for the VSO leavers workshop. But, I do now have a trip down to Adama University lined up for next week, a couple of hours drive south of Addis, so will be good to get away for a few days for a change of scenery, even though it’s still work related. The new intake of volunteers arrive this weekend, so whilst I’m in Addis, I’ll get chance to meet them all.

Progress with the Digital Campus project had been a little slow over the last few weeks, but things are now getting back on track. The next full week of training has been arranged for the second week of March, so just before I return to the UK. We’re also now getting many of the technical issues resolved with the servers, such as implementing an LDAP server to ease the user creation process. Later this week I’m running a Moodle admin training course for people in Computer Science and ICT, so at least staff will have an idea of how to maintain the server properly.

This week, I’ve started the Moodle Course Creator Certificate (MCCC), so I’ll be working on that over the next couple of months. Despite having used Moodle a lot in this job and whilst at the OU, most of this has been from a developer point of view, rather than a teacher. So will be good to learn more about how the various activity modules, which I’ve rarely used, really work. Just need to make sure that I can set aside enough time to devote to this.

The last week or so has seen lots of ups and downs, though overall the balance is more up than down! On both of the last Saturday mornings I ran training sessions for tutors. I was expecting these to be a bit of a nightmare, I’d already had trouble getting all the user accounts working correctly, plus I wasn’t really sure how many people would turn up. In the end around 10 tutors attended each week so was very pleased with this outcome – it could very easily have been that no-one or only one or two attend. Not knowing who was coming beforehand or what level they’d got to made things a little tricky for planning the sessions, but went well in the tutorial-style we used. Some are already creating quizzes and other activities for their students, whereas with some other tutors, they hadn’t attended the training week in November, so we were starting at the beginning.

Last Sunday morning (just over a week ago) we had some visitors from the Ministry of Education, so I explained our elearning projects and showed them the labs – unfortunately (as always seems to be the case) a power outage, in one of the buildings holding the switches connecting the terminals to the data centre, prevented me from showing the terminals in use.

The downsides this week have been the fact that it was uncertain for a while as to whether we’d be able to run the second full week of training for the tutors, as the visitors from Alcala may not have had time to prepare. If they weren’t coming this would have made extra work for me, as I still would have needed to run some extra training to ensure the tutors were set up and ready for delivering courses int the second semester. With all the other tasks I have to do (in the now 8 weeks remaining – not that I’m counting) this would have been too much and I’d have been very disappointed if they had canceled, or delayed until June.

Also a laptop went missing from our office over the previous weekend. A student had left it with one of my office colleagues to fix, but without going into all the detail here (and I’m not totally sure about exactly what happened), he ended up being locked up at the police station for 2 days and has to pay 12,000 birr (over 1000 USD) until the laptop is found. Previously our office was used a lot by other staff to get internet access and to get their laptops fixed, but now all this will stop and the locks are being replaced.

This week we finally made progress on fixing up many of the user accounts that weren’t working, plus getting the server at Ayder campus working again. There were lots of different odd problems with the users accounts, but most re fixed now (just a few odd problems to resolve still). But getting the server fixed was great news (especially at the end of a Friday afternoon). this means we can now get the lab open again and into use. Though now the students are having exams, then they’ll have a 2 week break, so they may not be around much for anther 3-4 weeks. The lab at Ayder now has curtains up, and new carpet is ready to be put in. The curtains seem to match the rest of the room, but I suspect this is more by accident than design.

Anyway it was a good end to a very fraught week, so hoping I don’t have any more weeks like this one.

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…

Today we had a visit from the Spanish Ambassador to Ethiopia, D. Antonio Sánchez-Benedito, to open our new Digital Campus training labs. He arrived this morning to cut the ribbon and to hand out certificates to those tutors who participated in the training last week. Last weeks training went very well, certainly exceeding our expectations, so have been very pleased with the response so far. Very short posting today as have much to catch up on from the past week, so hope to post a more in the coming days.

Last Wednesday, Roman, Jaime and Mike all arrived from various parts of the world to run the first training week for the Digital Campus project and to get the servers and labs labs set up.

Everything for the rest of the week was rather stressful as we were chasing up where equipment was and arranging to get it moved into the right place. The bureaucracy of getting all the items logged into the store, plus the lack of communication or any sense of urgency has been quite astounding. To get the items into the labs, they first must be moved into the main store, I then write a letter confirming that the items match the specification, then they are registered with the main university store manager, only then can the equipment be signed out and transferred to the college, which then has the responsibility of moving the items from the main store into the lab. With many different items, arriving at different times, to different university sites, then being distributed to two different labs, for different colleges creates rather a huge scope for mistakes, inaction and buck passing.

One reason we were given that the monitors hadn’t been moved into the labs was that the terminals hadn’t been moved and there was no point moving the monitors until the terminals were in place. Sure, the monitors are quite useless without terminals, but vice versa is also true, leading to a ridiculous catch-22 situation.

On Saturday, we went up to Wukro for a bit of what should have been relaxation. The tables for the labs are being built by the agricultural and we’ve been waiting a little while for these to be completed and delivered. When we called in the morning to ask about the tables, we were told, rather ominously, ‘you’d better come and see them’. We arrived at about 6pm to be told that the tables had just left on a truck bound for Mekelle Uni. As it was highly unlikely that any of the University store managers would at work at 7pm on Saturday evening, Father Angelo set off in his truck to catch up with them to stop them but they’d had too much of a head start. I’m unsure where the tables spent the night, but I was then called at 7am Sunday morning to say they were at the University, is someone around to receive them? I was still in Wukro and again, unlikely that anyone else would be available at the Uni at that time on a Sunday. after a few phone calls back and forth, the guards at the Uni allowed the tables to let left there for us to collect, check and sign for on Monday. The tables were actually finally located on Wednesday morning.

On top of all this we also had the training course and associated arrangements to finish off ready for the 5 day training course to start tomorrow (Monday). The following Tuesday the Spanish Ambassador is due to visit the project. As the Spanish Cooperation (AECID) organisation is funding the project, it’s important we have something to show in terms of labs/servers etc – so keeping many fingers crossed that next week is less stressful than the last, though I have major doubts about this!

We did manage to fit in a little relaxation by visiting a rock church near Wurko on the Sunday morning. We were accompanied by two researchers who have already written a couple of books about Tigrayan rock churches, who were also allowed to take photos of every page of the churches old prayer book.

On Friday, I finally rebuilt our Moodle server, following the power supply failure of the old server. The site is now running on the same server as the main Mekelle University website and so can be accessed off campus (another big achievement) at:

http://www.mu.edu.et/elearning

Initially, we’ll use this Moodle installation as the place where the Engineering and Health Sciences tutors can upload their courses for the Digital Campus pilot project, but any other college or department is welcome to use this server for hosting their courses.

The building of the labs for the Digital Campus project is all coming together at once, the servers and terminals are on their way up from Addis as I write, the tables are almost completed and will be delivered by the end of the week, plus the other networking and electrical work is almost finished. All of this is on top of organising the training week (16th to 20th November) for tutors, followed by week of training for th ICT staff. This training is being run by the Digital Campus project team, with the others arriving from around the world during this week.

Given how busy I’ll be over the coming 2-3 weeks, I’m unlikely to be checking email much or updating my blog, so be prepared for a long catch up post in a month