Evaluating ICT for Education in Africa - Royal Holloway, University of ...

I was invited by InWEnt to participate in a one-week eAlumni workshop inZschortau, Germany in February 2008. The event gathered 40 course alumni,trainers and „eLearning champions‟ from 15 countries across the developingworld. In exchange for access to the workshop and conducting research withparticipants I wrote a report for InWEnt regarding the place of monitoring,evaluation and impact assessment within eLearning programmes (Hollow2008).MethodFrequencyParticipant observation5 days - throughout workshopInterview 11Focus group 1Research diaryDaily (total of 4000 words)Figure 3.5: Methods used in InWEnt workshop3.3.5 ICWEICWE GmbH (http://www.icwe.net accessed 08/08/08) is a German-basedcompany that specialises in conference organisation for the education,training and ICT sectors. They are hosts of the eLearning Africa conference,an annual event to develop eLearning capacities across the continent(http://www.elearning-africa.com accessed 08/08/08).The position of ICWE as one of the major actors within the African ICT foreducation sector made them an ideal partner for gaining access to a widerange of perspectives from across the continent. As the organisers ofeLearning Africa, the company maintain a database of 2000 members,mainly African, which enables them to conduct research regarding how theycan best improve the service they are providing. I designed an onlinequestionnaire in collaboration with ICWE in order to gather data from thesemembers (Appendix A). The primary agenda for ICWE was to obtaininformation pertinent for gaining increased donor funding, and for myresearch it was to ask questions regarding monitoring, evaluation and impactassessment. I received 147 responses from a total of 2000 people contacted85