The eLearning Centre of Kemi-Tornio University of Applied Sciences has provided support for on-line and remote learning since 1999. For the last ten years, the mainstay of the eLearning effort at KTUAS and the affiliated schools in the Lappia municipal education consortium has been the open-source virtual learning environment Moodle. Moodle as mentioned before is the most widely used virtual learning environment in the world. This fact creates opportunities for our school when we seek to offer services to foreign schools and education authorities.
For years the eLearning Centre has had ties with institutes abroad, such as the Interdisciplinary Institute of Training and Information, MIPKI, in Saint Petersburg. This year, for the first time, we have set foot outside of Europe by sending a Moodle expert to train support staff at the Rwandan Education Board (REB) in Kigali, Rwanda.
The government of Rwanda in Central Africa has embarked on an ambitious drive to roll out Internet education to all its schools, so as to improve access to education for pupils and students. The Rwandan ministry of Education decided on Moodle as its platform of choice in this bid to extend education across the country via electronic networks. In concept this plan appears quite feasible. Rwanda is a small, relatively densely populated country with good conditions for wireless networks. However, it is not small matter to start eLearning for a whole country from scratch.
The Rwandan Education Board enlisted the support of the NGO MKFC of Stockholm, Sweden, to start training their teacher trainers in on-line education. MKFC, which itself employs Moodle in its training efforts, subsequently enlisted the help of Dr. Seija Jäminki and the eLearning Centre of KTUAS to help enable REB to host the training materials in their own locally set up Moodle environment. They needed a Moodle expert to help their assigned support staff install, upgrade and modify a Moodle/Mahara site and to teach them about technical (and pedagogical) support for starting e-teachers.
Yours truly was too embroiled in the upheavals of the start of the school year to contemplate traveling to Africa. However, my assistant Jussi Vehvilainen, who has been working at the eLearning Centre on and off for many years, could be prevailed upon to do the job.
Thus, the week of the autumn break in which the Kemi-Tornio region changed from a wet autumn look to a white winter look, found Jussi in tropical Kigali at the REB headquarters providing intensive hands-on training to a group of REB staff, while I provided back up and two iLinc lectures from my desk in arctic Tornio.
Now, Jussi has returned to the cold North with a very positive experience to look back upon and we at the eLearning Centre reflect on possibilities for further cooperation with REB. He is writing about his time in Rwanda in a little blog set up for that purpose (in Finnish).
One reply on “What the eLearning Centre did next…”
Thanks Paul and Jussi for the work, eLearning Centre is always willing to help and support in eLearning issues. That is how we teachers may focus on our own work. However, we do need to learn how to take care of the learning process and how to support the students, that can´t be ignored.
About this kind of collaboration. I think it is a WinWin-situation; all the actors benefit from the shared context. And we live in a global learning setting so we need to have insight into a wider context. I hope we may work together even in the future. Seija