You will participate as chairperson of the session "Capacity Development Supported by eLearning". Could you please give a short introduction to the topic and what the visitors can expect?

Prof. Alain Senteni: The World IT Forum (WITFOR) of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) focuses on the ICT-equity agenda and aims at assisting developing nations to implement sustainable strategies for the application of ICT by initiating projects in different areas. The WITFOR education commission currently has four co-chairs. One comes from IFIP-TC3, which is the IFIP Technical Committee on Education, one comes from the UNESCO Division of Education, and two come from educational institutions in developing countries, in our case Botswana, where WITFOR took place in 2005, and Ethiopia, where WITFOR 2007 will take place.

The overall objectives of the IFIP WITFOR education commission consist of investigating how to maximize the integration and use ICT in education in developing countries in the light of best research and practice and the support of implementation and enhancement of such practices. In this respect, the WITFOR education commission's involvement in eLA must be considered a new step in an ongoing capacity-building process that was initiated in 2004 in Botswana. The team has evolved gradually from the core group of WITFOR 2005 co-chairs to include experts, policy makers and administrators from Botswana, Mauritius, the UK, Finland, and now from Ethiopia, who will continue the work in the context of WITFOR 2007 in Addis Ababa.

The Capacity Development supported by eLearning (CAP 17 & 22) sessions that we organise illustrate the underlying philosophy of the commission. It is based on the creation of a synergy between grass-root level projects and wide frameworks designed by trans-national organisations, such as IFIP and UNESCO to help in networking local projects, providing global consistency, supporting their implementation, and insuring their sustainability. Our two CAP sessions will feature case studies and working examples in Africa, demonstrating how ICT is being integrated in pedagogically meaningful ways either in educational institutions or in less formal communities. It will also outline ongoing and upcoming projects in the same vein.


The session CAP 17 that I am co-chairing with Mariana Patru from the Teacher Education Section of UNESCO and IFIP-TC3 will be an opportunity to present the work done by the commission since 2005 and to outline the commission's agenda for 2007. The rationale for the commission's work, in addition to organising the WITFOR Education Commission's component for the conference programme, is to mobilise avant-garde teachers, teacher educators, and community practitioners to become change agents in improving the professional competence of their communities, the quality of teaching, and the learning environments of their members and themselves through a networked professional development project.

One objective of the project is the setting up of a support network of so-called change laboratories. This CAP 17 session will then allow the investigation of new case studies and working examples in Africa and will also serve as a forum for discussion and reflection on activities and projects to be put on the commission's agenda of for 2007.

The session CAP 22, co-chaired by Mariana Patru and Joseph Ngu from the UNESCO International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa (IICBA), will mainly focus on UNESCO's Teacher Training Initiative for sub-Saharan Africa, a new ten-year project (2006-2015) to dramatically improve teacher training capacities in 46 sub-Saharan countries. The programme is designed to assist countries to synchronize their policies, teacher education, and labour practices with national development priorities to achieve Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) through a series of four-year cycles.

What is the practise of the University of Mauritius in this correlation?

Prof. Alain Senteni: In 1992, the University of Mauritius created its first distance-learning centre, now tCentre for Professional Development & Lifelong Learning (CPDL). This was followed, in 1995, by the creation of a Centre for Information Technology and Systems (CITS) to develop ICT infrastructure, and in April 2001, by the creation of the Virtual Centre for Innovative Learning Technologies (VCILT) to promote flexible and blended approaches to lifelong learning, based on ICT integration in educational processes. Technology-enhanced methods and eLearning have emerged as a natural solutions to answer the needs for expansion of educational institutions in a geographical context, making physical expansion of the university campus quite illusory.


But beyond physical constraints, the creation of these centres lie within a general movement of the Mauritian society, aiming at turning Mauritius into a "cyber-island" and proceeding to the conversion of its traditional economy, mainly based on sugar, textile production and tourism, to an economy of flow and services, using extensively modern technological means. The promotion of information and communication technologies (ICT), along with the creation of several cybercities, lies within the framework of an economic and social re-engineering at the scale of a whole country. This mutation raised many fundamental issues about the means and processes that must be set up to implement it, and also the models that will describe it and turn it into a concrete reality.

In October 2003, the three centres were clustered into a Lifelong Learning Cluster (LLC), an internally flexible organisation that today comprises sixty programmers, web and multimedia developers, instructional designers, and OOL lecturers. Without questioning the autonomy of the centres or adding a useless layer of bureaucracy, the cluster provides the three centres with the capacity to act as a whole, to do research, and to deliver graduate programmes. An International Institutional Quality Audit held in May 2005 commended on the originality and efficiency of the model, as well as on the high quality of the work of the LLC.


In many respects, the LLC has been instrumental by providing the University with a state-of-the-art network infrastructure, an integrated Management Information System (MIS), a Learning Objects Repository (LOR) used as the digital library of several projects, and an in-house virtual campus platform (iLearn). This has permitted the local development of more than forty online or web-enhanced modules that reach more than a thousand students each semester. It has also enabled the University of Mauritius to become involved in international research and development projects, such as a WITFOR Education SADC-wide professional development project for teachers, which has the support of the governments of Botswana and Finland.

We are now getting involved in the setting up of a Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth (VUSSC), currently being launched by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL).

The LLC is also currently delivering a capacity-building M.Sc. in Computer-Mediated Communication & Pedagogies (CMCP) and organising an International Conference in Open and Online Learning (ICOOL) conference for the third time. In December 2003, ICOOL was held for the first time in Mauritius. In July 2005 it was in South Africa in the context of the IFIP-TC3 World Conference on Computers in Education (WCCE 2005). ICOOL 2007 will be organised in Malaysia in partnership with the Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang.

The primary objectives of the LLC are to transform pedagogical practices, to introduce new working methods based on ICT, and to stimulate communication and human networking based on the hypothesis of an implicit continuity between technology and society. When this continuity is not so obvious, we need to create it and place people at the centre of the development process.

What is typical for Africa regarding the integration of ICT in pedagogically meaningful ways?


Prof. Alain Senteni: As usually proposed in communities of practice, we believe in learning as an attempt to answer questions about:

• identity: what are we becoming?
• meaning: what is our experience and our culture?
• community: where do we belong ?
• practice: what are we doing ?

The implementation strategy proposed to promote such learning and knowledge-creation processes relies on the active formation of identities that can reflect on pedagogical and institutional discourses, from the individual to the community, from the local to the global. It also relies on the ability to find new solutions to educational problems within a global and increasingly knowledge-based context; this is about innovation. Finally, it relies as well on the development of interpersonal relations, transcending the limits of institutionalised social fields. That is about networking, building across institutional barriers, and relations based on interpersonal trust and reciprocity.

In line with projects such as the UNESCO-MOST, we emphasise the changing role of the local in the innovation process, in the emergence of networks, and in the construction of identities within the processes of globalization. We also try to strengthen the power of local connections in relation to processes of a global scope. This means that it is not for us to define what is typical for Africa in this process, but rather for African colleagues themselves. We can only help initiate the process and support it. I think this should be one of the major outcomes of such events as eLA or WITFOR. This is also why there is a need for methodologies combining empowerment, close embeddedness, and reflective distance to allow for idea-driven construction of visions for the future.