Foreign ministers from Asia and the Middle East have backed a proposal to create an “electronic university” by next year.
Meanwhile, one of the poorest countries in Africa, Ethiopia, is spending a 10th of its gross domestic product each year on information technology, and Uganda has launched Africa’s first “e-school” as part of a continent-wide initiative targeting hundreds of thousands of schools.
Malaysia is providing $50-million to launch the e-university, set to open in 2007 with an initial intake of 4 100 students. It aims to have 28 450 students by 2011.
Undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degrees in information technology, science, health and engineering will be among the courses on offer, managed by Open University Malaysia, which has run online courses since 2002. The electronic university was endorsed at a meeting of the 30 member states of the Asia Cooperation Dialogue in Doha, Qatar.
So far, many African countries seem to be concentrating on schools before tackling the concept of e-varsities. Bugulumbya Secondary School, in Uganda’s remote Kamuli district, was given computers, internet facilities and cellphone connections as the first e-school last year in a project spearheaded by the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad).
The Nepad initiative will create an Africa-wide satellite network that will connect participating schools both to the internet and to points within each country that will broadcast educational content.
The goal is to transform all African secondary schools into e-schools within five years, and all primary schools within 10 years. This adds up to more than 600 000 e-schools. Participating countries include Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Mali, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal and South Africa.
Meanwhile, Ethiopia has transformed itself from a pre-industrial rural economy into something suitable for the high-speed information age. Its Schoolnet project tries to address the country’s lack of teachers. Schools already receive video lessons broadcast by satellite, but broadband transmission via the internet will give teachers at the receiving end greater control over the pre-prepared lessons.
The first phase of Schoolnet is up and running, with many of the secondary schools already receiving educational television broadcasts using terrestrial and satellite networks.
Educational content is being broadcast to large, flat-panel screens at those schools and the number of schools coming online is increasing consistently. The second phase of the project, which will provide the schools with personal computers, internet access and local area networks, has been under investigation.
Meanwhile, the Woredanet initiative aims to make government communications more efficient by connecting all 600 of Ethiopia’s local councils, known as woredas, to the 11 regional capitals for the first time. Woredanet is up and running, and quality testing is under way on the network.
The third phase, Agrinet, will connect more than 30 research and operational agricultural centers to stimulate growth in the agrarian economy, the dominant economic activity in the country.
To put this in context, at the time that tenders were sent out, Ethiopia had four telephones for every 1 000 inhabitants.
The equipment necessary to send and receive large volumes of voice, video and data traffic at high speeds sometimes had to be airlifted by the Ethiopian military, which dropped the material at many villages that were three days’ walk from the nearest road. The result: a countrywide network built from scratch, using a combination of fibre optic, microwave, wireless and satellite technologies. — SciDev.Net