Themes
eLearning Africa 2009 continues the tradition of discussion, knowledge exchange, information sharing and networking through a focus on 10 major themes which are outlined below:
1. Learning, eLearning and Pedagogy (PED)
 Learning and eLearning
The continuous introduction and integration of new technologies in our learning and educational systems open up new avenues of how learning happens and what learning means – among children, youth and adults in formal and informal settings, under resource-poor and resource-rich conditions. It also opens up new and different vistas for the way teaching happens and what teaching means.
What do we currently know about the way learning and teaching practice is changing in Africa and the rest of the world, enabled by new technologies?
Web 2.0
There remains the view that technologies in formal educational settings such as the classroom or lecture theatre, have not changed traditional pedagogy and that there remains a gap between the experience of learners in formal settings and outside of the formal educational contexts, especially with the onset of Web 2.0 technologies and especially by youth who have more regular access to these technologies. What is the African experience in this area? To what extent have blogs, vlogs, wikis and social networking been applied in African educational settings?
Edutainment and Gaming
Edutainment and gaming is increasingly gaining foothold in the African educational context. Some have argued that there appears to be enormous value to be gained from gaming in the educational space and that by their nature, games are excellent at creating intrinsic motivation through fantasy, control, challenge, curiosity and competition. How and to what extent are computer games and edutainment being considered and applied in African educational institutions?
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2. Designing eLearning Systems (DES)
eLearning system design raises a host of planning and conceptual considerations especially in the context of resource limitations. What is the value proposition which underlies the design of eLearning and e-Education systems? What are the planning techniques that need to be considered, how does one create an inclusive process, how does one integrate effective budgeting in such design systems, how does one make intelligent choices of technology platforms, content and learning management systems? How does one mobilise the requisite capacity to deliver the system?
National e-Education Systems
At macro level, many African governments are in the process of designing and structuring national e-Education systems. What has been the experience to date and what are the lessons that have emerged?
Institutional eLearning Programme Design
At an institutional level, there have been many attempts at designing eLearning programmes. What is the experience with effective Learning Management Systems in both African and international educational institutions?
Quality Assurance and Quality Standards
How has quality been defined, what standards have been applied and what quality assurance mechanisms have been introduced?
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3. Sector Strategies (SEC)
ICTs have been integrated at various levels in different sectors of the education system – from the formal schools systems to universities, the public, health and corporate sectors.
ICTs in Schools Systems: New Stories, New Innovations
The African formal schools sector has been in the forefront of applying educational technologies for learning and teaching. Much is already known and documented on this experience. What are the new developments in this sector?
What Education Management Information Systems (EMIS) have been put in place in African school systems?
How are local government district officials incentivised to support the widespread uptake of ICTs in African school systems at a macro level?
What is the experience with ICTs for the differently-abled in schools?
What progress has been made in promoting improved learning, teaching and performance in schools that have been enabled with ICTs in Africa?
Harnessing the Potential of Universities
Universities in general form a critical component of a country’s national system of innovation and intellectual backbone. They have a crucial role to play in reducing the knowledge, technological and economic gaps that exist between Africa and the rest of the world. However, the capacity of African universities to lead the process of integration of ICT in education has been considered woefully inadequate. They lack access to infrastructure, affordable and sufficient bandwidth, as well as the human resource capacity to exploit the technology.
What attempts have been made to overcome these challenges?
What ICT policies have African universities developed to enable them to play a leading role in intellectual development?
What eLearning platforms have been adopted, on the basis of which criteria were they selected and how effective have they been?
What content development and delivery strategies are universities adopting? What has been the uptake of Web 2.0 technologies in African universities?
Costs and budgets for the new eLearning services: How are costs and budgets frameworks defined? What kind of financing and business models are established and maintained?
R&D as the engine for achieving excellence in academic institutions: The status and the actors of ICT-supported R&D and knowledge building; new strategies, such as the development of local and sectoral innovation systems and the pooling of regional resources; cooperation among African researchers and ICT-related research programmes in China, Europe, India and the USA; research results on eLearning from all continents; current programmes for supporting African R&D and how eLearning researchers and practitioners can benefit from them.
Bridging the Skills Gap with Technical Vocational Education and Training
Although ICT and eLearning is gaining ground as an effective pedagogical tool in higher education, TVET institutions and polytechnics in Africa are lagging behind. The reason appears to be lack of knowledge and expertise in the use of these new technologies in the area of technical and vocational training, and the absence of institutional and country policies on the integration of ICT and eLearning into TVET.
Status: What is the current status of interventions on integrating ICTs and eLearning in TVET institutions?
Capacity Development: How can the knowledge and expertise be enhanced to support ICTs and eLearning in TVET?
The benefits of eLearning for TVET: Which subjects and branches benefit most from it? What are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in relation to the use of eLearning in TVET?
South-North and South-South cooperation programmes: Results and perspectives. What are the lessons learnt on other continents, and how can those be applied to Africa? What specific recommendations targeted at the African, national and institutional levels can be provided?
eLearning in the Health Sector
The integration of ICTs in the professional development of health care workers and the use of eLearning as a tool to support mass interventions against diseases and pandemics such as HIV and AIDS as well as TB and Malaria, are on the increase throughout Africa. ICTs have not only shown to enable African health care workers to enhance their knowledge and skills, but have also been able to support effective delivery of health care in communities and in health care institutions.
How have ICTs enabled awareness-raising and information-sharing in the fight against the HIV AIDS pandemic?
How have ICTs supported and enhanced access to health care for African communities?
What are the examples of good practice in the use of ICTs in health care professional development and training?
Corporate eLearning
The corporate sector in Africa has gained valuable experience in using eLearning and ICTs to provide training, develop skills and improve workforce performance.
How have companies utilised eLearning and ICTs to promote skills and career development within the workplace?
Impact: In which ways have eLearning and ICTs enabled skill development in the workplace and how has this enhanced company performance?
eLearning for SMEs: How can eLearning support small and micro businesses? Implementation examples of robust eLearning models aimed at meeting the needs of SMEs; best practice in Africa and on other continents.
The African market for learning service providers: What kinds of services are available? Who are the providers? Which business models have proved to be successful? What are their perspectives?
Making the business case for eLearning in companies: Measuring cost and return on investment; case studies from the Continent and abroad.
eLearning in the Public Sector
The use of ICTs and eLearning to promote skills and knowledge development for government employees and politicians can have a significant impact on enhancing government capacity for effective service delivery and governance.
Status: What programmes and initiatives are currently under way in the use of eLearning in developing the capacity of governments and the public service?
Cooperation and Collaboration: What collaborative eLearning programmes exist between African governments to support skills development, effective service delivery, administration and governance in the public sector?
Impact: What have been the effects of eLearning and ICT integration on improving the administration, governance, service delivery by governments in Africa and elsewhere?
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4. Infrastructure and Access Solutions (INF)
Technologies and Technology Development
The search for sustainable, affordable computing devices, software and connectivity to support education access, learning, teaching and education management is an ongoing endeavor.
What is working? Which technologies and end-to-end solutions are proving to work effectively in African education contexts?
Innovation: Have there been any new enabling devices, systems and solutions that are being tried and tested in African education institutions?
What are the experiences with innovative enabling devices, systems and services based on mobile and wireless technologies, mesh networks, power generation, streaming, collaborative and conferencing technologies, virtual environments and systems supporting ambient or contextual learning?
Workable Universal Access Models
The struggle for affordable universal sustainable ICT access in education remains very far from being resolved. Africa has experienced almost two decades of experiments with demonstration projects and pilots to test access models and a few large scale initiatives to boost low cost bandwidth access.
Affordable Bandwidth. What progress? Large scale attempts have been made to promote low cost Internet connectivity in Africa which holds enormous potential for enhancing Africa’s education systems. How far have these initiatives come?
Scalability: The host of end-to-end solutions that have been and are continuing to be tested. How replicable and scalable are these solutions? What progress has been made in this regard?
Power Solutions: A number of power models for education institutions not serviced by grid electricity, have been tried. What progress has been made and how can they be supported on a large scale?
Open Source, Open Access
The status of Open Source for eLearning in Africa: Who are the actors? Which alliances have been established? What are the achievements and perspectives?
New solutions: What new open source solutions have been tried in African education systems?
Progress: Have open source solutions made progress in advancing education access and learning on a mass scale in education? What advances have been made? What are the challenges?
Impact: What are the effects of open access policies adopted by education institutions?
Lessons learnt and best practices: Positioning against and/or with commercial offerings; benchmarking for the best-fit solution; rollout of projects and developing services.
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5. Capacity Development (CAP)
The dearth of capacity in education in Africa is well documented. This theme focuses on frameworks and strategies for expanding the qualified teacher corps; for building effective leadership in Africa, and for building the technical skills base to support and sustain eLearning systems.
Frameworks for Professional Teacher Development
There remain significant gaps in conceptual frameworks and implementation strategies for effective teacher professional development programmes in Africa. Much of this is influenced by the limited shared understanding of the contexts within which African teachers are working and how this is related to an understanding of ICT integration.
ICT Integration Competency Standards: What are the principles of professional development in ICT integration and the ICT integration competencies that are relevant for African teachers? What examples are there of frameworks applied in an African context?
In-Service Teacher Development: What professional development programmes for teachers already in service, are currently under way? What examples are there of accreditation of time spent on teacher development?
Pre-Service Teacher Development: Are there programmes focusing on ICT integration in pre-service teacher development?
Evaluation criteria: What criteria are being used to evaluate professional development programmes? How are course development processes, pedagogical principles, training methodology and delivery, language and tone, assessment, visuals and layout, course structure and organisation being considered?
African Leadership Development
This is arguably one of the biggest challenges in education in Africa. The programmes in Africa on ICT for development and ICT for education are champion-driven by a few leading individuals or ‘change agents’. What is missing are mechanisms to develop and grow the leadership base within the system.
Current programmes: What leadership development strategies can be adopted? Are there current leadership training programmes under way that are using ICTs and eLearning platforms?
Accelerated Technical Skills Development
In cases where there are strong support and maintenance services available, the technology solutions have proven to work more effectively. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to the ubiquitous uptake of open source solutions, certainly in Africa, is the dire lack of support systems for such solutions.
What capacity development initiatives are currently under way to promote technical skill development in Africa?
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6. Content Development and Delivery (CON)
The availability of locally-relevant, high quality, digital content in both the curriculum and extra-curriculum domains, is a shifting terrain.
Systems: What approaches and systems are currently being applied to content development, distribution, aggregations, management and above all use, in the ways in which they foster good learning practices.
Copyright and IPR in Education: The challenges and responses to copyright regulation in education.
Building Africa’s Open Education Resources Base
The status of the “Open Educational Resources” and “Open Access” movements in Africa: Who are the actors? Which alliances have been established? What are the achievements and perspectives?
Progress: How far have we come with developing African learning object repositories? What progress has been made with building the continents open education resource base?
Lessons learnt and best practices: Reducing costs, achieving independence, developing national and regional capacities, security and autonomy; fostering local and contextual knowledge bases and services; addressing the issues of intellectual property rights.
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7. Research, Monitoring and Evaluation (RES)
The research framework and agenda for ICTs in Education in the developing world in particular is considered to be too limited and fraught with conceptual loopholes. There remains a paucity of research in this area.
Status: Who are the key role players and actors involved in researching ICTs in Education? What partnerships and alliances are being developed to promote research?
Research agenda: What should a research agenda on ICTs in Education in Africa entail? How far have we come with defining such a research agenda?
Current Research: What research is currently under way? Where is the evidence-based research?
M&E: Integrating M&E Frameworks in eLearning Programmes. How is Monitoring and Evaluation being integrated in eLearning programmes?
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8. Reaching the Education For All Goals (DEV)
There have been some, albeit limited, attempts at tapping into the potential of ICTs in reaching the Education For All goals in Africa.
Reaching the Excluded
What programmes and projects are currently under way to reach the excluded?
Status: Who are the actors? What is their strategy? What are their landmark projects in the field, the lessons learnt and perspectives?
Empowering Women Through ICT and eLearning
To what extent are ICT policies and e-Education policies integrating gender equity and women’s empowerment considerations?
Is there really equitable access to ICTs in education institutions between girls and boys, women and men? What strategies have been adopted to promote such equitable access and what have been their effects?
eLearning and the empowerment of women: strategies andprogrammes, lessons learnt. How are ICT skills of women improved? What are the strategies, programmes and best practices?
Fostering women knowledge networks: How do ICTs help to nurture the effectiveness of women’s organisations and to connect them with resources, learning opportunities and other networks in Africa and beyond?
Enhancing the technical capabilities of women: What programmes, projects, strategies have been adopted?
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9. Resource Mobilisation and Partnerships (PAR)
The financial sustainability of eLearning programmes in Africa is a crucial goal for many organisations. Effective resource mobilisation strategies and partnership development are important to achieve this goal.
Strategies: What kinds of resource mobilisation strategies have been tried?
Current actors: who are the current role players and actors involved in partnerships on eLearning in Africa?
The new actors in the field: How are China and India positioning their offerings on the development cooperation market place? What has been achieved so far? What are the perspectives?
Role of Development Partners: What are the funding strategies of development partners and what are the processes for obtaining access to funding?
Managing Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships: How are multi-stakeholder partnerships in eLearning being managed in Africa? How are competing interests managed in particular?
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10. Policy and Planning (POL)
eLearning Policy Models: What models of policymaking have been adopted in Africa? What are the gaps in these processes. What are the lessons?
Planning National Policy Implementation: How are implementation strategies for national e-Education systems planned. What strategies are being adopted, with what progress?
Cooperation: How can public-private and international partnerships, brokerage services and social-partner ICT-enabled programmes become efficient catalysts in supporting large scale national eLearning initiatives?
Reality check: What are the causes of breakdown in national planning systems in general and eLearning processes in particular? How can these be addressed?
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