Alex Little

Now back at work in Mekelle after spending a few days in Addis catching up. It doesn’t feel as if I’ve been away very long, even though I spent 3 months back in the UK. I arrived in Addis at about 3am last Thursday morning and immediately knew I’d arrived back when I had to help jump start the taxi out of the airport car park. At the hotel they’d forgotten about my reservation, but they found another room for me at the back of the hotel. I suspect it was actually one of the rooms used for staff. Woke the next morning to find the power off and didn’t come back on until the evening. Apparently the daytime power is still rationed to alternate days – though there is plenty of rain so the hydro electric dams should get working properly again soon. What I call power rationing is officially termed ‘power-sharing’ – in the same way that the loan given to students here to help them through University is called ‘cost-sharing’.

Had a couple of days at home getting everything unpacked, restocking the food cupboards and catching up with a few people, then back to work. The first day at work was strange, meeting everyone again. My office had been broken into whilst I was away, but fortunately nothig had been taken of mine. Wondwossen, who I share the office with, said two students had broken into our office and another to steal exam papers, but they were caught. Both have been now thrown out of the university, but also put in prison for couple of months.

Wondwossen, plus about 20 of the other computer science lecturers are all leavng this year as they have got scholarships to do masters courses, in Addis, US & Europe. That is out of a total staff of less than 30, so almost all the staff teaching next semester will be new. Apparently 5 or 6 new staff are coming from India and the rest will be made up from last years graduate students.

Afer spending some time in Madrid the other week working out a training programme and to get the labs up and running, assuming the new semester will start in mid to late October as it did last year, I’ve now found out that the next semester actually starts mid September, with staff training for a few weeks before. This means the elearning training we were hoping to start at beginning of September probably can’t now start until October. So we may already need to rethink our training schedule, as we were hoping that we’d have time to train tutors and for them to prepare activities for their students before the semester starts.

The reason for the change of semester date is due to the Ministry of Education wanting all universities and colleges to have the same semester dates across the whole country and to finish the second semester before the elections in May next year.

So guess things are all back to their normal uncertainty, but at least I have plenty of work to be getting on with.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve been getting involved in a new elearning project at Mekelle Uni. We’ve got funding to build 2 new computer labs for the Health Science and Engineering faculties. I will be returning to Mekelle at the beginning of August, to assist with setting up the labs.

The pilot project, involving 10 tutors (5 from each of Health Sciences and Engineering faculties) and 200 students, will run for the coming academic year. In the next few months we’ll be setting up the labs and providing general elearning training to the tutors. In addition we’d like to offer mentoring to the tutors, giving them a broader range of experiences and advice as they develop their skills in using electronic resources in their teaching.

So… we’re looking to recruit some volunteer mentors, especially those with experience in teaching any aspect of health science or engineering. Given the low tutor numbers, we’re only looking for a time commitment of a few hours per month. So if you, or you know of someone, who would be interested then please get in touch with me.

We’d be very grateful for any assistance, if you would like more information about the project or what the mentoring involves, then just drop me a line.

Have had quite a busy last couple of weeks, hence the lack of postings, so time for bit of a catch up…

Firstly a weekend up in London and heading over to the Kingsnorth protest for the day on the Saturday, though all very peaceful & sedate compared to some of the other protests there. (photos).

Then one of my friends who I met in Ethiopia managed to get herself onto the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square last Thursday lunchtime to protest against female genital mutilation. She’d only got on at short notice, so a few of use who’d been in Ethiopia together helped out painting t shirts and buying essential equipment (fake blood, string etc). I got plenty of photos, but Julia also managed to get a mention in the slightly more widely read publications of the Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday.

Finally, I’ve also had several meetings so start off a new elearning project at Mekelle University. The Spanish government (with University of Alcala, Madrid and Lund University, Sweden) are funding a pilot project building 2 new computer labs for the health science and engineering departments. I’ve been asked to manage some of the technical aspects of the project. Rather than building 2 new labs with Windows PCs, servers etc, we’ll be testing out using Sun Ray terminals instead. This should allow the IT dept to make better use of their existing servers, ad reduce the amount of time spent rebuilding and fixing virus-ridden Windows machines. But, there’s a lot to be done and organise if we’re to be ready for the start of the next semester in October.

Still no firm return date for me going back to Mekelle, but fingers crossed it will be soon!

Our Moodle server is now up and running, well, it’s available to users on campus (which is a good start) at http://e-learning.mu.edu.et – won’t be available generally on the internet until the domain has been registered on the Ethiopian Telecoms (ETC) servers in Addis. Hopefully this will be fixed up soon.

For those interested, the network problems we were having before were due to an IP address conflict – two servers (including our Moodle one) had been given the same IP address, creating all sorts of odd problems!

I’ve not posted up many photos recently, so here are a few I took last week of my office…

We’ve actually now tidied the office up a little bit, and I have another chair – one which has a back to it! I’ve mentioned before that it’s dusty here, well this is the state of the server that’s on the floor in my office:

I had to blow the dust/dirt out from the USB ports to get them to work, I’ve not actually looked inside the machine yet, but judging by these pictures, it’s probably not in a great state. It’s a relatively new machine too, and if we don’t get it cleaned up and moved I guess it’s not going to last too much longer. The server room downstairs is still in the process of being built – so the floor is thick with brick and plaster dust (whilst still in use as a server room), so I’m reluctant to move the machine until that room is completed.

Finally the view from my office window:

This is the scaffolding on one of the new office/residential they’re building at the Uni. Just on our campus there must be 5 or 6 new buildings going up. All the scaffolding in Ethiopia is just bits of wood nailed together – this photo was taken about 3 floors up and often you can see it all swaying around even in a light breeze.

Yesterday morning I met my new boss (Samson) for the first time and also got to see the university campus and my new desk. The campus is only a short (10 min) walk from my house, so really convenient and think it’s the first time I’ve ever lived within walking distance of work!

I’ll be working in the Computing Faculty, which has about 25 staff, although 12 of these left over summer, so they’re trying to recruit at the moment. An extremely high turnover of staff is another common problem in Ethiopia, staff move on to get degrees & masters to increase their earnings. The staff who are in place then tend to be quite young and inexperienced (though not in all cases).

Samson took me to the staff lounge for some tea and described the how the project has been going and where I’m expected to fit in. The project started in 2005 with funding from the World Bank to develop an elearning system within the university, with study centres in towns around Tigray, which students could visit to access the materials. The university already has a distance learning programme (and department), with students coming to the university only for 2 weeks (2 x 1 week) each semester for tutorials and face to face tuition.

A Moodle server is in place for the courses to be loaded into – they’re currently converting the word documents (from the lecturers) into SCORM packages, then loading these into Moodle, concentrating on the business and accounting courses. The lecturers for these courses have received some training in Moodle, but the system isn’t yet released out to students.

Basically my job will be to get the system launched and support the lecturers and students in using Moodle and promoting the system. It will be the first elearning system available in Ethiopia and they’re hoping to use this as a selling point to entice new students – especially those in Addis who have better internet access. Other parts of my job will be to help get the study centres set up – all the computers have been purchased, quite new ones by the look of it, all flat panel monitors – and also, if I’m interested, to do some teaching, most likely in website development, HTML, PHP etc.

My first impressions are really good, the university sounds much more up together than some of the stories I was hearing from the other IT volunteers last week – though also sounds like I’ll never be short of work!