ICTlogy

Plenary: Entrepreneurialism, Capacity Development and the Role of Education in Accelerating Change

Economic growth and technological innovations are beginning to change Africa but how can the transformation be made permanent? How can the pace of change be quickened? How can we ensure that Africa is not just transformed but able to compete in tomorrow’s markets? How can we encourage a new spirit of entrepreneurialism? How can we boost capacity development, to ensure that Africans are ready to seize new opportunities in the future? How can we empower African educators and give them the tools they need to teach new skills? How can we enable students to make the most of a new world of learning? How can we put education and training at the heart of Africa’s transformation? These are just some of the questions which our panel of experts will address.

Chairperson: Hossam El Gamal, Chairman of the Information and Decision Support Centre (IDSC), Egypt

Dr Tarek Shawki, Secretary General of Presidential Specialised Councils, Egypt,
Keynote Address

Education in our lifetime requires great innovation and collaboration. We need to understand what is required from the ecosystem.

What is the relationship between the economy and education? We have to make this issue surface and take over the public debate. And the the social justice that should come with education.

It is likely that the assessment system is quite guilty for this dissociation between education and the economy, between earning a diploma and learning.

People lack autonomy because the system is ruled with a totalitarian approach. This lack of freedom implies that some decisions are left unmade.

A new project by the Egyptian government, the Egyptian knowledge bank, has been buying a massive amount of digital content (scientific, educational, etc.) from major publishers and put it online for free (for Egyptian IPs). But not only that, new textbooks are pointing at these resources, so that the content of the textbooks is enhanced by the one online.

The project is framed within a macro strategy to redesign Egyptian Education as an Education 2.0.

Prof Moses Oketch, Professor of International Education Policy and Development at UCL, UK
Perspectives on ICT, Lifelong Learning and Endogenous Development in Africa

Besides moneraty benefits of human capital, there are non-monetary benefits, like better health, etc. And, in addition to that, there is non-monetary social benefits (vs. individual benefits). It is time to put these concepts in the forefront of the public debate.

And technology has become crucial in the human capital formation. And not only human capital, but endogenous development. And this is crucial for sustainable development, while also reducing diminishing returns of investment.

Last, technology is changing the very concept of lifelong learning: you are actually learning all the time.

Four key connections:

• Identify and support incentives for ICT and lifelong learning.
• Overcome barriers arising from investment externalities.
• Encourage and support endogenous technology/applications that are locally relevant and scale them up.
• Enhance ICT inclusivity in learning and teaching to overcome structural inequalities and skills deficit.

Dr Rania Reda, Founder & CEO of ITQAN for Smart Solutions, Egypt
We Can Dream Bigger Now

To transform education we have to take into account all education stakeholders: students, educators, parents, administrators, etc. And entrepreneurs come and try and fill the gaps that these stakeholders might have to unleash their full potential, to optimize performance. Assessing the stakeholders’ needs is the first step for transforming education.

Augmented reality can certainly help to improve education. By projecting things that do not exist into real life, learning can be much more engaging, a requisite for real learning. Visualization, quite often, helps to understand complex concepts, eases the assimilation of content.

How to use augmented reality in schools: help with homework (e.g. a video is displayed when a page of homework is scanned), book reviews (e.g. the student can annotate a book and anyone can read/hear/see it), parent virtual inspiration (e.g. record parent encouraging their child), yearbooks (e.g. bring photos back to life), word walls, lab safety, deaf and hard of hearing flashcards.

Discussion

Oketch: how do we measure the impact of technology in matters of learning outcomes? We have to begin to measure learning in different ways as we do now. We haven’t figured out yet how to do it, and it will certainly be the next frontier.

Rania Reda: besides infrastructure — which is crucial — mentoring is very important: many times one knows what to do, but does not exactly how. And here is where coaching an entrepreneur can lead to very good results.

In a very near future, learners will be much more learner-centered in their learning. When information is abundant, one begins to learn how to access and manage information, and to use it for learning.

Researching Learner Centred Methods

If you manage to engage and encourage students to take an active role in their learning, you will find that creating education together is possible. Speakers in this session share their experiences in co-creation.

Chairperson: Francisca Oladipo, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Nigeria

Paxton Zozie, Mzuzu University, Malawi, Using Real-time Response Systems to Enhance Participative Learning in Higher Education at Mzuzu University

How to encourage active participation of each and every student, especially in large classes. And even more, how to enhance collaborative learning and active learning.

Cloud-based student response systems will be used to address the issue, based on clicker technology, like Participoll or Socrative.

Polls do make students more engaged in the lecture, and they prompt interactivity between the student and the teacher, as the teacher can see in real time whether students got something right or not, and can ask for questions, doubts, etc. but tailored depending on the return of the poll.

Challenges: need for Internet connectivity. Notwithstanding, some software can be used on a local network, with no need to be connected to the Internet but only to the computer acting as a server.

Another challenge is that sometimes less content is covered, as more time is devoted to participation.

Students would like to have more detailed feedback for student self-assessment.

Abdul-Majid Nkuutu Kibedi, Ministry of Education, Science, Technology and Sports, Uganda, Exploration of the Linkage Between ICT Use and Implementation of Learner-centered Pedagogy

General goal: to contribute to the increase of quality and equity in access to post-primary education and training, by providing an improved teaching and practice-oriented learning environment, supported by strengthened active-teaching methods.

It is a teaching training education project, with a multi-layered approach:

• Infrastructure: laptops, projectors, connectivity, etc.
• Aggregation of digital tools and links to resources for teaching and assessment.
• Teacher for self reflection and better research, conference, training tailored to integration of ICT in the teaching and learning.

Some college staff members received a short video training course on shooting and editing video, with low cost equipment. A secondary goal is to tape one-self and see how one is teaching, in part to fight the isolation from peer support where teaching often occurs.

On the other hand, videos allow the observation of alternative teaching strategies, allowing time for reflection, as one does not have to respond immediately.

Access to offline Wikipedia and digital books was used to increase the available content.

Also research from Internet through mobile phone helped the group to engage in discussions and brainstorming sessions.

With active teaching and learning methods (ATL), learners develop some of the critical 21st century skills such as critical thinking, communication, collaboration or creative thinking.

Teachers who often use ICTs tend to implement ATL methodologies in their teaching and, on the other hand, ICTs easily support adoption of ATL by students.

Discussion

Q: can you assess the students through response systems? Zozie: yes, you can. If you force them to log in with their users before answering, all data is stored including who answered what. Then data can be downloaded and treated for any purpose, such as assessment.

Zozie: the teaching staff needs experience in stating questions, relevant questions. Formulating questions is not easy, especially higher order questions, such as the ones that address concepts and not just the factual.

Reaping the rewards of open

What are the challenges around the development and implementation of high quality open digital resources across Africa? How can we ensure open content is relevant for classrooms? How can we effectively integrate open resources in schools and institutions?

Chairperson: Alice Barlow-Zambodla, e/Merge Africa Network, South Africa

Wilhelmina Louw, Namibian College of Open Learning (NAMCOL), Namibia
A Case for NAMCOL – Notesmaster Namibia: Open Educational Resources

Main focus on secondary education, but also tertiary education.

NAMCOL realized that, beyond open education, NAMCOL could include online Open Educational Resources (OER) as part of their educational package. OER is offered through Notesmaster Namibia platform.

Notesmaster is a free platform, especially designed for secondary level students. It is structured Namibian curriculum. And, unlike Moodle, Notesmaster Global provides support for the platform.

Development of OERs:

• Team approach, usually teachers and programme developers. You can do it on your own, but it won’t be public.
• Use of OERs, by using the millions of videos, images and animations that exist on the web.
• Quality assurance, a note can only be published once it achieves the approval of 5 peers.
• OER policy and licensing, CC BY-SA-NC

Besides content, there is capacity building: building the capacity of teachers is key in achieving effective use of technology in the classroom. Teachers are trained on the practical use of ICTs in the classroom, and how to collaborate online using the Notesmaster LMS.

Challenges:

• Workload of developers
• Internet accessibility and connectivity.
• Shortage of equipment to be used for incorporating both multimedia and online content into tutoring sessions.
• Insufficient skills in the use of technology (computers and software)
• Know-how of instructional design requirements for online course development and storyboarding.
• Buy-in from teachers and learners in the use of technology.
• Insufficient funds for training and acquisition of equipment.

Angelo Raffaele Fazio, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Colombia
Open Online Courses at Universidad Nacional de Colombia by OpenEya

OpenEyA is a lecture recording software use to tape, archive and share lectures — in this case on physics and mathematics. To even decrease more the cost of taping, OpenEyA can be compiled on a Raspberry pi 2 model B, which adds to the zero cost of the software a lowest cost of the hardware.

As the final output is recorded in HTML 5, the videolecture can be comforably watched on a mobile phone.

The video is also uploaded to Didáctica para el desarrollo (DxD, Teaching for development) which provides a platform for sharing also producing analytics on usage.

It is difficult, though, to find colleagues that want to join the project, consisting on (1) taping and (2) sharing it on DxD.

There is not much evidence on the impact of OpenEyA on the performance of students, as measured in their marks on their final exams, but it is true that less students had to go to the office to clarify doubts. On the other hand, the same amount of students attended the classes. Thus, it seems that OpenEyA is good for clearing doubts after attending the lecture, and that’s it — which is not bad. On the other hand, DxD does begin to have a significant amount of users, which at least adds to the common good.

Faraja Kotta Nyalandu, Shule Direct, Tanzania
An Educational Content Repository: The Backbone of ICT for Education

The educational content repository works on a framework that structures the content down to the level of the concept, from the general concept to the year, topic, sub-topic an concept. The digital (Tanzanian) syllabus controls the educational content repository and connects it with course notes in English, learning levels, Englisk-Kiswahili dictionaries, quizzes and games, digital textbooks and audio lessons and videos. The repository becomes then the backend of content and data of the whole Tanzanian syllabus ecosystem. An API is a gateway to content that allows the web portal to browse all content in many ways.

SMS (through Makini), USSD and mobile apps were created so to provide access to content on many platforms. The level of uptake clearly demonstrate that these platforms to fit the needs of the market.

If it is simple, if it is contextual, if it is useful, people will use it and will enjoy using it.

And besides students, also 1,900 digital teachers are already using the content for their own classes, providing new content, etc.

Dina Elkordy, Université d’Alexandrie, Egypt, L’innovation pédagogique en matière d’utilisation des TIC dans l’enseignement et l’apprentissage

New project to put out content in Arabic, English, French and Spanish on several subjets.

Strong focus on teacher training on the use of ICTs and OER.

Main barriers: Internet connectivity, bureaucracy, etc.<(p>

Discussion

Q: why don’t faculty want to join open educational resources projects? Fazio: people are uncomfortable with new technologies; people are also shy at the camera — even if OpenEyA is not very intrusive; they also want to keep what they teach for them and their students, and not to have it open to public scrutiny.

e-Readiness for Teachers: Supporting the Driving Force

Are educators and institutions ready to implement ICTs? or can gaps be assigned to a lack of knowledge, digital skills or attitude? Take part in this discussion based on different research projects to speak about the different challenges teachers face in their profession.

Chairperson: Keith Magee, Camara Education, Ireland

Gladys Bwoch, Uganda Management Institute, Uganda
Dynamics Governing Use of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs): The Case of Uganda Management Institute (UMI) and Makerere University

The UMI offers courses on a blended basis — but structured sequentially: a distance learning part and a face-to-face part, not at the same time. When in distance learning, the students get their digital learning materials to read, plus practice questions, quizzes and references for further reading, most of the time self-contained in the learning materials.

Everything is hosted on a VLE and the facilitators interact with the students also there. The VLE is an emulation of the face-to-face sessions, but virtually instead of physically. Interaction happens among facilitators and participants, and among participants themselves.

Why bother with usage of VLE at UMI:

• Staff in the School of Distance Learning and IT at UMI train facilitators and participants before face to face sessions on the use of VLE for teaching and learning.
• There is an orientation week to notice zeal for use of VLE.
• Consistent usage of VLE by facilitators and participants disappear and does not persist throughout the semester thereafter, as expected.
• Yet most activities of the programme oblige the facilitators and participants to be always working on the VLE.
• Need to identify the dynamics behind continued usage of VLE to work out modalities that ensure continued usage.

Objectives of the study:

• find out frequency of usage of VLE.
• determine factors of usage and qualitative usage.

Findings:

• Students spend little time at the VLE and went there infrequently.
People prefer other forums more than the VLE because of lack of access. Besides, they prefer Facebook or Whatsapp.
• People find matters unanswered at the VLE, but find support elsewhere.

Solutions:

• More training and support for the facilitators.
• Encourage them to spend more time at the VLE and be more conversational.

Tarek Abdel Fattah, Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University Dubai
The new faculty rule in e-Learning

We have to get over traditional roles of teaching and go into smart-leraning.

Faculty should be able to develop course curricula, choose course materials, deliver lectures, etc. but should not be do it alone. The move to online programs necessarily requires a team-based approach (unbundling of the traditional lone-ranger approach).

We need coaches, not teachers.

All lecturers now follow a specific training on e-learning until they get their certificate. They have to be able to encourage substantive interactions; to provide guidelines; to design , develop and maintain course content with an instructional designer; to set up discussion forums, probe for student responses, etc.

Recommended pedagogical approach:

• Read
• Elaborate
• Explore
• Support
• Endorse

The whole process is managed as a factory, with pre-production, production and post-production of courses and its related assets/processes: instructional design, module structure, etc..

Dugje Kadiri, University of Jos, Nigeria
Human Capacity: A Challenge to the Realization of the Benefits of eLearning in Nigeria

eLearning occupies a central position in running the educational programmes of the University of Jos.

The eFellowship course content includes learning how to operate on the University’s Learning Management System (Moodle). The course comes with incentives for the trainees, to sustain the interest on the course.

There are, though, serious challenges, such as inadequate broadband-width, intermittent power supply, lack of interest or phobia to technology, etc. All these for both faculty and students.

A more functional follow-up programme has to be conducted on faculty who have benefited from the scheme so to assess progress and performance of the programme.

Discussion

Keith Magee: what is actually the main barrier and the main approach to get over it? Fattah: training and support is, by far, the most important approach we have found for a better eLearning uptake.

Q: Is there opposition from teachers? Kadiri: yes, there is. But once they get used to it, they find out it is very effective to advance quickly on your content. Fattah: it is advisable to make small steps in subsequent stages, i.e. first e-learning then mobile learning.

Q: Are there many dropouts in teacher training and online learning? Kadiri: there are none, because the selection is very tight and there is a strong follow-up with their progress. Concerning students, they are eager to participate, as they can only access continuous assessment through the online version.

Q: can eLearning be used at high school? With what tools and methodologies? A: yes, they can be used, though some adaptations should be done.

Plenary: Vision, innovation and reality

Chairperson: H.E. Dr. Amr Ezzat Salama, Counselor of the American University in Cairo (AUC), Egypt

To what extend does the future of Africa depend on innovation? How and where should Africa innovate? What role has technology in education innovation?

How to make research a reality in Africa?

Toyosi Akerele-Ogunsiji, Founder & CEO of RISENetworks, Nigeria
Restarting Africa’s Education Through Tech with Innovation and a Digital Revolution

Technology will now substitute teachers, but will enhance their capabilities and potential. But Content is king, and context is queen.

Teachers are usually unequipped. That is why they are often so afraid of technology.

On the other hand, a major barrier is access to formal education. But content can flow beyond these barriers. Open content, mobile content can enable mobile learning, thus providing education for children that have difficult access to schools.

But parents — and society in general — are afraid of giving technologies to their children (e.g. so they are not distracted). But this is shutting down the most important gate to content, to education, to knowledge they might have. We know mobile uptake is high between children and teenagers. Technology is there, skills are there, but textbooks and content in general are not.

We should aim at an African education that is mobile, that children can take wherever they are. And a mobile-technology revolution needs teachers.

People should not be limited to learning because of the place they live in.

And again, technology or mobile learning will not replace teachers as e-health has not and will not replace physicians. It’s an enabler, a multiplier, not a substitute.

Dr Ismail Serageldin, Director of the Library of Alexandria, Egypt
Reaching Out to Africa

The Library of Alexandria heavily relies on connectivity: 170,000 lectures online that can be used for free, online events, etc.

EOL.org, the Encyclopaedia of Life, is an online huge database about natural life.

African Networks are communities of practice on many topics enabled by the Library of Alexandria.

STI capacity is essential for development. It is not a luxury: it is a necessity. And we have to translate rhetoric into action.

Toby Shapshak, Editor, Columnist & Strategist, South Africa
What Africa Can Teach You About Innovation that Formal Education Cannot

Many people think that “Africa is rising”, despite it is the “dark continent” in the sense that it has no electricity. Precisely: it is from difficulties that innovation comes, trying to figure out e.g. how to get what you cannot have without electricity.

First you experience the problem, then you find the solution. To do so, you need perspective, which often does not come with education. Education might be a barrier for “thinking outside of the box”. We need to learn skills, not content.

Then you need perseverance.

Courtesy of EdTech Stanford University School of Medicine

For the nth time, the OCDE, in its Students, Computers and Learning. Making the Connection report, warns us about how technology is not changing academic performance in schools… unless other variables are taken into account — that is for academic performance as it is (quantitatively) measured today: there are, of course, other outcomes, like digital literacy, e-inclusion and social inclusion in general for the student and the family which, to me, are oftentimes successfully met.

Put very shortly, the thing is that there is quite a lot of evidence that what has an impact on academic performance is changes in methodologies. If ICTs (laptops, tablets, smartphones, interative whiteboards, but also blogging, microblogging, social videos, social bookmarking, etc.) have an impact it usually comes indirectly by having an impact in teaching and learning methodologies.

Unluckily, most projects that aim at putting in the classroom (apologies for this imprecise, generic and especially misleading concept) have been focusing almost exclusively in putting hardware and software in the classroom (that is why the name, all in all, may not be misleading at all) and spend little time and budget to everything else around technology.

But, how does one design a project that has an impact on methodologies? Well, the usual answer is training. But training raises several questions and issues:

• Who trains he trainers?
• How does the trainer build upon experience?
• How does the trainer build a reputation?
• How does the trainer build a legitimacy?
• How is this training sustainable?
• How is this training replicable?
• How is this training scalable?

I think what these questions have in common is a community.

Now, summing up, what educational technology projects usually have done is: they devote all the funds they have to buy technology or digital services, while their main asset, the community, usually remains unattended. Sooner or later, the project runs out of money and thus cannot go on. On the other hand, the asset upon which the project could rely is not put in motion and thus does not trigger the springs and levers that could create the necessary changes for the project to be laid on strong foundations. Yes, this is a cruel simplification, but it is not very far from a general truth: we lose our minds on technology and forget humans.

So, what could be one? It seems that just the opposite direction could be a good starter.

1. Identify a community of interest, that is, find who the motivated people are and see how they are connected.
2. Work to shift the community of interest into a community of practice, by making their members share what they do. This will require resources to make sharing easy, comfortable, worth it. Most resources, though, will not be aimed at technology (e.g. a social networking site or platform) but to engage people and build on trust and reputation. It’s called facilitating. And it mostly relies on humans too.
3. Help the sharing of practices turn into knowledge sharing, so that the community becomes a community of learning: learning by doing, learning by sharing, learning by engaging, learning by dialoguing.
4. Contribute to raise the tough questions: learning is more about asking rather than answering. With luck, a diagnosis will emerge: where are we, where do we want to go, what do we have, what do we have not.
5. Some of the things we have not will be knowledge: bring some structured training in.
6. Some of the things we have not will be technology: bring the technology in.
7. And back to #1.

In my opinion, it is important to stress that points #5 and #6 are not exactly the same training and technology as in traditional educational technology projects. Firstly, because the decision of which training and which technology comes not from a top-down perspective, but from a bottom-up one. It’s the community who produced the diagnosis and, thus, it’s the community who proposed the solutions (either in training or in technology). Secondly, because the diagnosis did not only identified the gaps or shortages, but also the assets. It may well be, for instance, that the collective found out that most students already have laptops or tablets, and thus the funds can be addressed only to buy devices for those who do not have them and only for them. Or, maybe, that there are other community resources that can be put in motion to fill that gap in, such as libraries or telecentres. Or that some people know some things and willing to share them with others in some formal way (course, training session). Many other examples can be found related to technology or — and most relevantly — to training.

Another matter to be highlighted is that the concept of community (of interest, practice, learning) goes way beyond a sectoral understanding of the concept. When thought of from a top-down approach, the community is educators, teachers. When thought from a bottom-up approach, the definition of community is much wider. The good think about a wider sense of a community is that it will take into consideration all the assets available (inside and outside schools) and it will build a much more strong consensus while it is reached. And both — assets and consensus — are the cornerstones of sustainability, in whatever sense (economic, social…) one may take it.