Creating eLearning content at the Ethiopian Civil Service College ECSC

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Creating eLearning content at the Ethiopian Civil
Service College ECSC

• Monica Goestl, Guenter Ozdyk

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Introduction

• The Ethiopian Civil Service College (ECSC)
• Was founded in February 1996 as an autonomous
  higher education institution
• Plays a major role in building the capacity of
  the Civil Service of both the federal and the
  regional government levels
• Is serving as one of the main pillars to carry
  out the ambitious Civil Service Reform Programme
  (CSRP)
• Students today
• 1.560 residential
• 150 200 short-term
• 940 enlisted for evening courses
• 3.000 enrolled for distance-learning courses
• 5.200 civil servants have attended and graduated
  from mainly tailor-made courses at ECSC
• Demand is much higher
• Chances to meet this demand

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Introduction

• Monica Goestl, German Development Service (ded)
• Technical Advisor at ECSC
• Advice in the development of eLearning courses
  and implementing an environment for ICT assisted
  distance learning
• Capacity Building of ECSCs staff, Training of
  Trainers (ToT)
• Guenter Ozdyk, German Development Service (ded)
• Technical Advisor to the Ethiopian ICT
  Development Agency and its ICT Assisted
  Development project. ICTAD is managing several
  ICT Projects, one of them is the eLearning
  Project at ECSC.

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Topics of this Presentation

• Starting Conditions at ECSC
• Project preparations made at ECSC
• Current task (transform content for 4 courses)
• Specification
• Planning
• What really happened
• Where are we now?
• Real life is diversity
• What this means
• Future prospects

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Starting Conditions at ECSC

• Infrastructure
• Bandwidth of LAN and WAN
• WLAC access in the building
• Other hardware
• eLearning Experience
• Institution
• For the Management, Administration, Procurement
  and Recruitment this was the first time to work
  in an eLearning course development project
• Project staff
• Most members of the team have never had eLearning
  experience before and none of them has ever
  worked in an eLearning project.
• How does this relate to us
• Management has to consider the reality on the
  ground (Expectations)

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Project preparations made at ECSC

• Agreement of Support by the Ethiopian Government,
  the World Bank and the ded
• Recruitment of an international Advisor for
  capacity building at the ECSC
• Workshops about eLearning Basics and about
  Implications for the college (organization and
  form of trainings, skills needed, )
• Decision about the LMS
• What was not considered
• Some team members dont have easy internet access
• Some team members were trained but later had to
  work on other tasks
• Team members are also assigned to other tasks
  which results to a heavy workload for them
• It was difficult to decide about which hardware /
  software to use. Too many providers, too many
  products, not the time to test them, not the
  experience or means of finance

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Project preparations made at ECSC

• How does this relate to us
• It is crucial to understand the situation of the
  team members
• Realistic expectation management and team
  orientation is important
• Training is an ongoing need because of the
  fluctuation rate of team members
• Something not to forget
• Our Project is intercultural staffed. This is a
  challenge and a chance (see publication of
  Hofstede, Hoffmann, Schoper, Fitzimons, Adler,
  Peters and many more)

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Current task, specification

• Content creation for 4 eLearning courses
• Procurement
• Leadership
• Human resource management
• Computer literacy
• Start March 2006
• Time frame 3 month

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Current task, planning

• Team's were setup for each subject
• Subject matter experts
• Instructional Designer (trained Subject matter
  experts)
• Web designer
• The TA was ready to give hands-on training
• The plan was to offer training for the teams at
  the time when they need it to do the job (i.e.
  training of how to build the story board,
  training of the LMS Moodle just before rollout,
  ..)
• A project plan was drawn for each subject

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Current task, what really happened

• The original planning very soon had nothing to do
  with the reality
• Sometimes team members could not attend the
  training because of other assignments
• Trainings had to be repeated sometimes for very
  small number of participants
• The planning did not sufficiently bear in mind
  the time available for each team member
• The planning did not sufficiently consider the
  knowledge of the team
• The planning did not allow for delays in
  recruitment of staff
• The original planning did not consider the time
  necessary, to change the existing pedagogical
  approach from the teacher centered class to
  student centered eLearning courses
• There was more unplanned time needed for
  discussions about different pedagogical issues
• Except for computer literacy the teams decided
  not to procure content and adapt it but to
  convert existing content of the college into
  eLearning format

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Current task, what really happened

• Some of the positive experiences
• Members of the teams were very open to
  suggestions
• Members of the team are proud to implement this
  new eLearning approach at the ECSC
• In spite of all the challenges the teams have
  transformed the content
• The teams took a very pragmatic approach to meet
  the goals

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Current task, where are we now?

• We started at zero
• Now the teams understand the complexity of
  converting existing content into eLearning
  courses
• Now the teams know many of the roadblocks and are
  better prepared for the next projects
• Now we understand better the skills and training
  we need for the eLearning projects at ECSC
• Result
• Next time we will be able to make a more
  realistic planning and reduce the immense
  workload for some team members
• The teams have the knowledge to change/update
  their course content
• Question
• Would it be better to have a service team to
  create/transform content?

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Real life is diversity

• If you have already run eLearning Project you
  might have made similar experiences or quite
  different ones. It is good to share the
  experiences to be able to mitigate the risks here
  and there.
• For those of us who work in multicultural
  projectsRather than there being one best way
  of organizing there are several ways, some very
  much more culturally appropriate and effective
  than others, but all of them are giving
  international managers additional strings to
  their bow if they are willing and able to clarify
  the reactions of foreign cultures. (Hofstede)

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What this means

• At ECSC the teams had a lot of stress but they
  have learned some lessons
• Important to remember
• Like in all other projects, eLearning team
  members need to have the time and the training to
  do their job
• There is a mind change needed to change from
  traditional learning to eLearning. This requires
  sufficient involvement of experts with a didactic
  and pedagogical background
• The rest is budget, Project Management, training
  of technicians, service teams, the right tools
  and the strong will to succeed

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Future prospects

• If you plan to introduce eLearning, take back
  some lessons from this conference, check your
  readiness (infrastructure, team, ) and go do it.
  Nobody can relive you 100 from learning your
  own (sometimes painful) lessons
• ECSC will
• assess the current task
• plan the enrollment of students
• set up the support structures
• set up the ME procedures
• train the eTutors
• test the content in practical operation/set up
  pilot projects
• extent the curriculums to include eLearning
• create more content

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Danke für Ihre Aufmerksamkeit
Thank you for your attention
Ameseginallehoo!