The complete eLearning Africa 2007 programme has now been posted on the conference website. With more than 250 speakers, 49 sessions in seven parallel conference strands, fourteen workshops and a number of exciting new features, the event will again be a landmark in Pan-African capacity building for ICT-enhanced education and training.
This year, the hosting country, Kenya, will particularly benefit from eLearning Africa. The Ministry of Education and the Kenyan national Advisory Committee have not only been engaged in the programme preparation, but also in the mobilisation of the Kenyan educational community to participate actively at the event through country-wide awareness building and the establishment of new mechanisms for outreach and capacity building.
Corporations and donors, both from Kenya and abroad, are supporting the attendance from educational stakeholders, especially those who come from the Kenyan regions. Two break-out workshops will bring more than twenty experts from the main conference to Mombasa and Maseno/Kisumu, addressing the two regional educational communities in the eastern and western parts of Kenya. A series of up-country lectures on eLearning capacity building already took place in February and March 2007.
The Kenyan Minister of Education, the Hon. Prof. George Saitoti, will host the first African High-Level Policy Maker and Industry Leader Round Table and Retreat, entitled “Accelerating the Building of ICT Infrastructures and Capacities for African Educational Systems”.
UNEVOC-UNESCO, together with the Commonwealth of Learning and UNESCO BREDA, will launch the first African “Technical and Vocational Education and Training – TVET” Summit, with the title “Access to and Inclusion in TVET in Africa Through New ICT-Based Solutions”.
eLearning Africa 2007 is enjoying a fantastic response from the African and international educational communities. The registration of participants by late March 2007 was almost four times higher than it had been in March 2006 for the event in Addis Ababa.
The venue of the event is the Safari Park Hotel. Settled in a huge, beautiful tropical park with many superb catering and hospitality facilities, the hotel offers a great environment for learning, networking and recreation, all at the same time.
The patron the Hon. Prof. George Saitoti, Minister of Education and all members of the conference committees welcome you to join us in Nairobi in May 2007.
Karibu Kenya!
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Conference Highlights of eLearning Africa 2007
Workshop 1Leaders
European-African R&D projects for bridging the digital divide
Leopold Reif, Hoffmann & Reif Consultants, Berlin
Workshop 2
Leaders
Quality for E-learning: Successful strategies for e-learning in Africa
Dr. Ulf-Daniel Ehlers, UNESCO, the European Foundation for Quality in E-Learning and the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Workshop 3
Leaders
Establishing My Web Presence with a Blog
Tony Carr and Glenda Cox, Centre for Educational Technology, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Workshop 4
Leaders
Mobile Learning: What's Happening, Has It Worked, What's Possible?
John Traxler, Director, Applied Innovative Digital Technologies Research Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK
Workshop 5
Leaders
Designing Learning for the Future
Professor Alan Amory
This second eLearning Africa Conference, taking place in Nairobi from May 28 – 30, will feature:
A plenary roundtable discussion on Building Partnerships for Education in Africa that will address the somewhat controversial topic of Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships for Education (MSPEs) and will bring together panellists from Cisco, Microsoft, Intel and Nokia to discuss successful partnerships.
African Showcases, highlighting examples of how to enhance learning with the support of technology, presented by African organisations and institutions such as AfriHUB, Nigeria, ISPU Quelimane, Mozambique, Prior Learning Centre, South Africa, the African Languages Technology Initiative, Nigeria and the College of Technical and Vocational Education (CTVE), Botswana.
China’s experience in the use of eLearning for development in both the formal education sector and in the area of training/capacity building for civil servants and government officials, led by the World Bank, Japan.
Conference sessions highlighting how African universities are adopting ICT, with input from the University of Botswana, University of Swaziland, University of Johannesburg, Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology, University of Lagos, Mekelle University, Tshwane University of Technology and many others.
Successful strategies for Implementing ICT in Schools, presented by the Kigali Institute of Education, Rwanda, WITAR, Burundi, the University of Namibia, SIVECO Romania and the Multimedia University, Malaysia.
Creative and successful learner-oriented design strategies, shared by the University of Colombo School of Computing, Sri Lanka, the University of Santo Tomas, Philippines, the University of the Free State, South Africa, and many more.
Examples of highly innovative ICT initiatives in African schools supported by companies like HP, Smart Technologies, Eduvision and others, highlighting the way in which companies can make a significant difference through imaginative collaborative strategies.
Approaches to quality assurance in eLearning programmes, presented by the DelPHE network of excellence for ICT4D in African Higher Education Institutions, the University of Nairobi, Kenya and Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan.
A special workshop session led by Bellanet and UNESCO on applying Open Space, an innovative and participative technique. This workshop session will focus on experiences in training trainers.
A lively debate about the challenges and alternatives of building ICT infrastructures to provide access and connectivity in Africa, with the participation of SRI International, USA, the African Virtual University, LinkNet Zambia, Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie and the Université de Kinshasa.
A pre-conference workshop on the subject of Harnessing the Wealth of Free Global Digital Learning Resource Repositories, led by Moustapha Diack of the International MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching) initiative.
A practical, hands-on workshop aimed at teaching participants how to Produce and Publish Media for Online Learning will take place on May 28 - 30, organised by the BBC, Kenya Institute of Education and ATiT, Belgium.
A session focusing on cutting-edge technology developments for Africa, especially on the advantages and applications of Web 2.0 Technologies, with valuable benchmarks from the University of Potsdam, Germany, the University of Leicester, UK, the City University of Hong Kong and the Royal Veterinary College London, UK.
Examples of how eLearning is being used to enhance the training of civil servants, based on the experiences of UConnect, Uganda, the Canada School of Public Service, the University of Ibadan, Nigeria and the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation (IBFD).
Examples from schools of how ICT is being used on a daily basis, including the winners of the recent GET Showcase competition organised by the Gauteng Department of Education, South Africa from the Rosettenville Central Primary School and the Roshnee Primary School, South Africa.
Innovative solutions from libraries as access providers to digital resources and distributed expertise by CEDESURK, Congo University Network, the Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden, the National University of Rwanda, the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, the Environmental Protection Agency, Ghana, the Indira Gandhi National Open University, India and many others.
Experiences and debates on eLearning in medical education and the fight against HIV and AIDS, presented by CompuTainer Pty Ltd., South Africa, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India, the University of the Western Cape, South Africa and CINECA, Italy.
Demos on applications, courses, technologies and diverse tools that help to enhance and expand eLearning initiatives.
Formal and informal networking opportunities during the discussion sessions, coffee breaks and social events
