A Successful Continuation

Signing of cooperation contract between ICDL
and the eLearning Center Kenya

“We had a great start at eLearning Africa 2008, especially in the pre-conference seminar on Mainstreaming eLearning for Environment organised by UNEP,” says Dr Til Schönherr. The seminar participants were able to enhance the draft presented by UNEP during the pre-conference. The delegates agreed that institutions involved in capacity building for environmental education should improve their methodology related to eLearning didactics and enhance their networking activities. During its keynote presentation and the panel discussion, InWEnt made several suggestions for ways to improve this process. The revised UNEP draft, which has now been approved as Decision 6, went on to the African Ministerial Conference for Environment (AMCEN) in Johannesburg, South Africa, which took place a few days after eLearning Africa.

In general, Dr Schönherr’s department views its task as triggering the process of networking and bringing together technology and partners committed to e-Capacity Building to complement local activities in African countries and other developing areas.

InWEnt recommends a “multi-stakeholder approach”, as it is sometimes difficult for local eLearning providers to offer the whole range of skills and manpower needed to run an eLearning centre for a single institution. This includes server maintenance, further development of learning management systems and user support and also eLearning skills training, which for Dr Til Schönherr is one of the most important requirements for successful elearning deployment. At eLearning Africa 2008, InWEnt’s successful eCapacity Building approach was presented by members of the Kenyan eLearning Center (KeLC) and the Namibian Open Learning Network Trust (NolNet) who attended InWEnt’s eLearning skills training courses before becoming eLearning managers themselves.

Another project, which InWEnt initiated with the European Foundation of Quality in eLearning (EFQEL) two months before the conference took place, was the Open ECBCheck, which aims to harmonise quality standards for ICT-supported capacity building providers internationally. To solicit information on this, InWEnt and EFQEL carried out the first "Advisory Board" meeting immediately prior to eLA in Accra. The event attracted staff members from the World Bank Institute/GDLN, SPIDER, Commonwealth of Learning, FAO, NolNet, KeLC, IICD, GeSCI and others, all of them appreciating the new initiative.

InWEnt now plans to hold a second board meeting this coming December at ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN, the international conference on technology-supported learning and training.

Questions raised at the initial event pondered both the kind of information needed to inform potential users about the quality of a particular eLearning provider as well as how providers can prove that their distance-learning courses and tutorial support meet certain normative quality standards. One suggestion is that an internationally recognised quality label would help clarify both issues. Dr Til Schönherr: “Today, nobody can be certain of what he’s getting, why the programme is so expensive, etc. We want to define standards concerning implementation processes, which will help our local partners to maintain quality when we pass existing projects on to them and will guide them on how to improve quality in eLearning”.

Finally, eLearning Africa 2008 offered InWEnt the opportunity to continue the discussion of specific research results, e.g. concerning "unintended impacts" of eLearning. One might emphasize positive effects like the impact on effective, involving learning and teaching methods, women’s empowerment and the increase of intercultural tolerance, but should not neglect the negative impacts like environmental problems due to IT waste, the energy consumption of ICT infrastructures, etc., for developing countries in particular. In Accra, the latter were discussed intensely during a workshop entitled `Effective evaluation of ICT for education in Africa´ hosted by David Hollow of the Royal Holloway University of London.

Link
http://gc21.inwent.org
InWEnt - Capacity Building International, Germany

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