Alex Little

Elearning participants

This afternoon Jaime and I finished delivering our updated Certificate in Online Education to over 25 elearning team staff from 7 universities across Ethiopia, who had all gathered at the new ICT and Technology innovation hub (ICE Addis) at the Ethiopian Institute for Architecture, Building Construction and City Development (EiABC).

We’d been invited by the on.e elearning team (part of ECBP), who have been setting up eCompetence Centres at many Ethiopian Universities. So was a really good chance for us to work with staff from other elearning teams.

We were really pleased how well the training went, all the participants seemed to enjoy the course. We arrived in Addis last weekend, but have been quite flat out with the training and meetings, so haven’t had much chance to blog. Heading up to Mekelle tomorrow afternoon, so for now will just post up a photo of all the participants – will post some more details in the coming days.

We’re still in the process of planning out our training programme for our next visit to Ethiopia in a few weeks time. At only 3 weeks it’s going to be my shortest visit to Ethiopia, so sure it will be a very busy time, given what we’re hoping to get done in the time there. For a week in Addis, we’ll be starting our basic certification course for elearning teams from some of the other universities in Ethiopia, we’re just waiting to get confirmation of how many are going to attend. Then we’ll have 2 weeks in Mekelle, for the final face to face workshops for the certification we started in October plus starting a new cohort for the advanced training.

There’s still some way to go before Mekelle University is ready to start delivering the course by themselves. Although they’re keen on expanding the training to include other colleges, it’s not sustainable for Jaime and I to continue to deliver the training over and over.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve had lots of good news from the Technology Institute. Florida, one of the lecturers from the Computer Science department, has taken over as head of ICT and elearning. They’ve managed to take on another team member for the elearning team, plus lab attendants are due to start work this week for maintaining the computer labs. They’re in the process of getting a new computer lab (of almost 70 refurbished PCs network booting from the OpenSolaris server) up and running, so will be great to see this up and running, although we have a few concerns as to whether the server will have the power/capacity to deliver sessions to this many extra terminals.

Health Sciences College have also been busy, installing network connected PCs and projectors in almost 20 lecture rooms.

With all these changes, I’m looking forward to getting back to Mekelle, if only for a very short time. At just less than 4 months, this is also the longest break I’ve had away from Mekelle since I started working there back in September 2008.

Has now been a couple of weeks since I arrived in Spain and started to get settled in properly. Although it’s been a relatively short time, I’ve met up with people I knew from both the Open University and from Mekelle. In both cases it’s just been coincidence they’ve been here. I’ve also had chance to visit a few places, to see Guernica at the Reine Sofia museum and to spend a weekend in Salamanca. Strangely most of the people I’ve been mixing with so far have been either Ethiopian (we now have 5 students from Mekelle in Alcala) or Romanian masters students studying Spanish to Romanian translation.

in Salamanca

In sorting out a new bank account I was surprised to find that my signature was required even more times than when I open an account in Ethiopia, quite impressive given that the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia needed my signature more than 12 times.

Much of what I’ve been working on over the past couple of weeks has been about how we can offer out Basic Certificate in Online in Education to more universities and organisations in Ethiopia. We’re currently planning to give the training and certification to members of the eCompetence Centre teams, hopefully we’ll be starting the initial face to face sessions in February or March next year – but dates and location aren’t yet fixed.

I’ve been working with a team of student developers in the Engineering Faculty in Alcala, who are starting to develop a virtual keyboard to enable the input of Ge’ez characters into Android. We’re also looking at how to translate some of the core applications and interface elements of Android into Tigrinyan and Amharic. Enabling the input in local languages and scripts should help once we start to develop applications and training to be used by the Health Extension Workers (HEWs).

Although I’ve found out that Ministry of Education has stipulated that all post-secondary education and training must be given and tested in English, there will be some way to go before the HEWs have the level of English necessary for this. Although I can understand the reasons for using a single language (rather than trying to give training in all the possible local languages), it would appear to me that by first needing to raise the English levels would delay the effects of any advances that can be made in improving the healthcare delivery.

A friend in Mekelle sent me this video of Hoye Hoye by Gizachew Solomon, you may recognise one of two of the people who appear just after 1”50′:

I’ve not yet managed to find the full interview that we did for ETC that this clip has been taken from – but I’m still looking

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.

I recently became the owner of an unlocked HTC Dream smartphone (running Android 1.6). Smart phones are still quite a rarity in Mekelle (and I’d guess in much of the rest of Ethiopia), so despite this not being the most recent model, everyone who sees me using it asks me to have a look & play around. I have seen a few people with Nokia E71 phones, but when you look closer they’re actually Nokla E71′s (yes, that’s Nokia with an L instead of an i).

In a couple of days I will be heading out to some rural areas with a colleague doing his doctorate in public health. He’s testing different smartphones and applications for data collection whilst he’s interviewing Health Extension Workers (HEWs). I’m joining him to see what some of the issues are with using these types of phones and applications in this context, with a view to spending some time over the coming months seeing how these devices may be used to deliver training.

I’ve only really been using the phone for the past week or so and there are a couple of areas where I can already see we may run into problems.

Firstly, the battery life. With my usage, not particularly heavy, the battery usually only lasts just over a day. Given that we’ll be using these devices for data collection, then they’re likely to be having heavy use in areas with little or no mains power. We are testing out some small solar power chargers.

Secondly, the GPRS coverage. GPRS is not used widely here and coverage in extremely patchy (even in large city like Mekelle) and it’s not yet been rolled out to other more rural areas (or even large towns). Sim cards need to be specifically enabled to use GPRS – it’s not turned on by default. The applications we’re testing out (EpiSurveyor and Sana) will both allow data to stored until an area with coverage is reached, but unless the user visits Mekelle on a regular basis then the data will never get uploaded.

I’m sure that improvements in the phones and the phone network infrastructure will eventually make both of my concerns invalid – it’s just a question of when they will be addressed.

The other questions and areas I’d like to look at include:

1) How easy is inputting the data on such a small screen? Might a tablet or netbook PC be more appropriate? Perhaps they’ll work well for short, relatively simple surveys, but not for others?
2) Do any of the HEW’s already have java enabled phones? If so, this would enable them to use the EpiSurveyor application without any new phones.
3) Do any of the phones support input using ge’ez (the alphabet used for Amharic and Tigrinian)? I can’t see how to input these characters on my phone (if anyone knows how I’d be pleased to hear from you), but I can display the characters.
4) How long do the phones take to get a GPS signal? For each record input we can automatically attach the location coordinates – but I’ve noticed that sometimes the phones can take a long time getting a GPS fix. With the power issues it’s unlikely they’d want to leave the GPS on all the time.
5) Would they really be used? Getting reliable data in these areas (even just for the number of births/deaths) is extremely difficult – reporting processes are often unreliable or just not used. Using these phones could help with gathering this info – but obviously only if they are used.
5) What are the other uses for the phones? E.g. providing remote diagnostic support, clinical support, training content/activities or reference, or perhaps for fun/social activities.

Plus I’m sure many other questions and possibilities will arise over the coming days.

Abba Yohanni rock church (just visible halfway up the rock face)

This weekend, Martin, Jaime, Stefan (French engineer from the wind farm project) and I went over to stay at the new lodge in Abi Adi, the Maylomin Botanical Garden Lodge. It’s still in the process of opening – they only have 9 beds so far in 5 separate lodges, built in a traditional south Ethiopian style. They’ve got big plans for the rest of the lodge, new lodge buildings in other Ethiopian building styles, plus plans for a swimming pool and even an airport – but I suspect this is a little way off yet.

Maylomin Botanical Garden Lodge

On Saturday early evening, Welday, the lodge manager, took us for a walk though the mountains to see the sunset, then arrive at the Maylomin cafe (other side of town where Andy and Crissy had a barbecue and party for the college staff back in November 2008).

Sunset over Abi Adi

On Sunday morning, with the two new VSO volunteers at the teacher training college, we took a trip out to visit Abba Yohanni rock church. Set midway up a rock face, it’s just about accessible by a step climb on the western side, followed by walk through tunnels carved into the rock, ending with a tiptoe along a narrow ledge with a steep drop, to access the church.

Drinking tilla

End of tunnel and ledge to access church

Despite 2 flat tyres and camel trains blocking the road on the way back, it was great to get out and about for the weekend – especially to visit some places I’ve either not been before or haven’t been for a long time.

Camel traffic jam

A couple of nights ago there was an electrical storm just on the other side of the city. Well, we assumed it was an electrical storm, it went on for over an hour with flashes of light every 10-15 seconds, but it also happened to be behind the university, right above the Northern Command military headquarters and airstrip.

Over the last week, as well as preparing for next weeks delivery of our Basic Certificate in Online Education to nearly 50 new staff, I’ve also been looking at ways in which we can extend the project. Possibilities we’re investigating include offering the certification to staff at other Ethiopian universities, testing the thin client infrastructure at another organisation and taking thin clients attached to a data projectors/whiteboards into the classroom.

Getting the network into the classroom would allow us to help close the gap between the classroom teaching and the online activities – currently they are very separate, but if students can see the Moodle content/activities in the classroom, they’re more likely to realise they can access this content and more in the computer labs. It also gives us the possibility to test out whiteboards and other technologies.

The labs we installed last November are still working well, only a few of the terminals aren’t working and these are almost all due to poor network or power connection, rather than the terminals themselves. We still have a few issues regarding getting the labs open outside normal working hours. The Health Sciences lab is well used as it’s always open during the normal working day, but we still have to work on extending these hours and also make sure we can get the Technology Institute lab open.

Mike and Elfu in the new lab

In the Technology Institute, as well as ordering several hundred new PCs (not yet all purchased/distributed) they are building a new thin client lab on a similar model to our existing lab. This lab is reusing old PCs as thin clients – with the new PCs arriving there should be plenty of old PCs available for use. It’s a huge room, space for 60 terminals. All the furniture is being produced by the university’s workshop and I was pleased to see that they are using my design for the hexagonal tables which we have in the other labs.

[Our labs need some better names - any suggestions welcome ]

Metalwork for new tables

We begin delivery of the elearning training again on Monday and we have had a lot of interest from staff. Our plan was to deliver to 15-20 staff, but we had over 50 staff asking to join. Only a few who have told us they are leaving for masters soon we’ve had to turn down. I expect that, similar to last year, we’ll have a fairly high drop out rate, but even if half complete we’ll have more than 20 new courses online for student access.

In personal news, I was very pleased to get my first shower in over a week on Friday – the water in our area of town had been completely off. The well near our house was restricting the amount of water anyone could take, despite the best rainy season for 10 years only just ending.

Once again I’m back in Mekelle, I arrived on Monday afternoon, good to be back again and although it’s only a couple of months since I was here, it feels much longer. It’s now almost 2 years since I first arrived in Mekelle, shortly before the Meskel festival in Sept 2008. Meskel will be on Sunday night and Monday this year – so looking forward to my third visit to the celebrations (2008 and 2009).

I had a friend text to say that I was on ETV again last night, from when we were filmed at the Meskel celebrations in Adigrat last year, I later found out that not only was it just on TV, but that it’s part of a pop video! It may be up on YouTube, so if I find the link (and am feeling brave enough) I’ll post a link.

At the University some of the work seems to have been progressing well, though plenty that still needs to be followed up. We’re getting ready to start training again next week, with new tutors from Health Sciences and Technology Institute. This year we’ll also enrol all the students from each tutors course – last year we only accepted a small group of students from each course.

Facebook is now blocked on the proxy server between 8:30-12:00 and 2:30 until 5:00. The policy has been put in place as the use of facebook has been affecting staff productivity too much. It’s also then blocked in our computer labs – so next time I see it full of students, perhaps they’ll be doing something slightly more productive!