Organisational development in Ethiopia: a national eLearning Competence Center

Autor: Leopold Reif, Hoffmann & Reif

Without proper organisational frameworks new skills provided for university staff will not be able to have an impact and will even quickly get lost. Individual capacity building needs to be complemented with organisational capacity development. The new skills in "Instructional Design" and "Course Management on Networks" need to become embedded in an organisational structure that provides space, time and resources. Last but not least these organisational infrastructures themselves need resources and sustainability.

The tight linking of the two issues - productisation of knowledge in the networked universities and the appropriate organisational infrastructure - should become an important feature of the Ethiopian ICT - Assisted Development Programme.

It is suggested that with regards to the need of an organisational framework, the Ethiopian Programme should initiate an eLearning competence center in an existing national teacher training college. This eLearning competence center should then become the driving force for the utilisation of the educational network infrastructure in Ethiopia.

It is planned that within three years 150 Ethiopian professionals will be trained as eLearning experts. They will be employed by the eLearning Competence Center and its distributed satellites within the regional universities.

The staff of the eLearning Competence Center should

develop, maintain and manage eLearning courses for the faculty in five selected regional universities;
train distributed professors to become eLearning course authors and course providers;
further develop, maintain and manage a national eLearning Portal through which all training and support is delivered both to professors and students;
further develop, maintain and manage eLearning courses on the national eLearning Portal directed to students using the facilities of the nationwide distributed learning centers of the Schoolnet;
further develop, maintain and manage accreditation, certification, quality control and examinations;
manage distributed eLearning tutors and provide further training to them.

The first courses to be delivered by the eLCC :

Instructional Design and the Management of Blended Learning and
eLearning Content Publishing,
and a number of IT centric TVT courses, as well as courses on
Hotel Management, Construction, Electricity and Business.

The relevance of these two course packages as capacity building blocks is significant:

Instructional Design, eLearning and content publishing are fundamental pillars for the national content development in the educational sector. Content development is a top priority within the Ethiopian ICT strategy as defined in 2002 by the Ministry of Capacity Building[4];
The suggested courses address the urgent need in Ethiopia for improving the quality of existing TVET programmes, supporting the evolving new TVET faculties and providing access to training to the growing technical labour force in the country.

The German contribution to the eLearning Competence Center would be a package that can become the basis for the further development, maintainance, management and distribution of eLearning programmes:

an Open Source based eLearning platform (the eLCC Portal) which consists of a learning-content-management system (LCMS) and allows the production and delivery of SCORM compatible content and learning applications;
an eLearning Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) that defines standards for the production and delivery of instructional content on the Internet;
an accredited e-readiness and eLearning orientation programme as an introduction to eLearning for 2700 TVET teachers;
an accredited six month blended learning comprehensive eLearning programme for the development of eLearning capacities that includes modules such as Instructional Design, the Management of Blended Learning and eLearning Content Publishing.