Technological Infrastructure and Use of ICT in Education in ... - ADEA

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Technological Infrastructure and Use of ICT in Education in Africa: an overview 99 Box 9: The African Virtual University (AVU) The AVU was started in 1997 as a pilot project of the Africa Department of the World Bank. AVU is a technology-based distance education network, involving 12 African, European and North American universities. It is now an independent, non-profit organization headquartered in Nairobi. The goal of the AVU initiative was to use ICT in sub-Saharan Africa to enhance access to quality higher education in subject areas of importance for economic development. The World Bank (2002) describes the AVU as a ‘university without walls’ that uses modern ICT to enhance access to science and engineering through direct access to high quality faculty, curricula and learning resources from across the world. Thirty learning centres, in 17 tertiary institutions across Africa, have been established. Thus, although the courses provided are based on distance methods, the learning still takes place at a tertiary institution, and courses are often also done by students registered for contact courses. By 2002, about 3,500 hours of instructional programmes had been provided and over 24,000 students had registered in semester-long courses. The teaching and learning model was composed of a mix of videotapes and live lectures delivered via oneway video, two-way audio, digital satellite broadcast, and email interaction. No formal evaluations have yet been done, but it is estimated that dropout rates are approximately 15%, which is low for a distance education programme. Levey (2002) notes that the project has received criticism because all the courses provided have been developed in the Northern hemisphere. Murphy et al. (2002) note that, during recent strategic reviews, it was decided that AVU will not aspire to be a university in its own right, but will rather help to expand access to higher education by delivery of courses from other universities through distance programmes. In addition, AVU resource centres will provide technological support for partner institutions. The digital library, which is a core component of the initiative, offers access to full text journals and a catalogue of subject-related web links. Sources: Murphy et al. (2002), World Bank (2002), Levey (2002) 10. ICT and Tertiary Education
100 Working Group on Distance Education and Open Learning 10. ICT and Tertiary Education Box 10: Global Graduate Seminar A professor at the University of Michigan runs this seminar with participants from two other American universities and three South African universities, namely, the University of the Witwatersrand, University of Fort Hare and the University of Pretoria. This seminar is an initiative of the Collaboratory of Technology Enhanced Learning Communities (Cotelco) with support from the Alliance for Community Technology (ACT). Each of the universities involved offers the seminar as a credit course for one of their masters or PhD programmes. At each university, learners are located in a computer laboratory, but learning takes place in a globally distributed collaborative learning environment of cross-national learning teams. Webbased collaborative tools, both synchronous and asynchronous, are used to create this globally distributed learning network. Both a distance component and a face-to-face component are included. The professor leading the seminar spends an equal amount of time at each participating university to provide face-to-face contact with the students. For the rest of the time, students work using only the online collaborative tools. Each student takes part in two group projects, one face-to-face with students at the same university, and one globally distributed group. The project has a strong research component exploring on-line collaborative learning. Findings thus far have shown that students feel that they learn better when working in face-toface teams than distributed ones. However, almost half of the participants found no difference in the seminar whether the professor was physically present or not. This provides tentative evidence that online distance methods are a suitable substitute for contact teaching (Cogburn, 2002, Cogburn et al. 2002). This is especially important in the context of sub-Saharan Africa where skills educators, especially in the tertiary sector, are in short supply. Source: Cogburn (2002); Cogburn et al. (2002)
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