A few months ago I received a Google Alert about the West Africa E-Leaning Conference and Exhibition (WAeLCE) to be held at the University of Lagos on March 27-28. Yesterday, I received another alert about the conference, this time an article from the Guardian Nigeria.  In Addressing Challenges of Nigeria’s e-Learning Initiatives, Adeyeni Adepetuni discussed the role information communication technology (ICT) and eLearning plays in Nigeria.

Today’s educational world depends on ICT; there are opportunities for close co-operation with colleagues in the same or even other fields though networking and internet services; educators are challenged to new methods of acquiring knowledge through knowledge sharing and are ultimately connected to the world.

West Africa E-Leaning Conference and Exhibition (WAeLCE)

The context to this challenge can be summarized by the state of supply versus demand as described in the conference press release: “only 28% out of 1.5 million prospective applicants gained admission into Nigerian universities in 2012.” As a result, ICT is critical in addressing unmet demand and has the potential to revolutionize the field of education.

I found Adepetuni’s comments on the need for new educational standards relevant to our project; the K4Health/Nigeria Web-Based Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Program for Medical Laboratory Scientists.

When developing eLearning courses, course authors (I’m including myself here) often struggle with developing quiz questions and wait until the very end of the course development process to start thinking about what questions to ask. Often, we look at questions solely for assessment purposes, which is a crucial role that questions play, but a limited view.

Before we talk about the other roles that questions play, let’s take a closer look at how to develop good assessment questions. The primary purpose of assessment questions is to measure whether or not learning has taken place. Some strategies that you can take in developing good assessment questions include:

• Review the detailed learning objectives when you write your quiz questions. Because those objectives state what the learner should learn by the end of the training, they serve as a good base for both fine-tuning the content you will cover and the knowledge acquisition to be measured.
• Link the questions directly to the performance you spell out in the detailed learning objectives.
• Plan on writing a sufficient bank of questions that can be drawn upon for their multiple uses so that key concepts are reinforced throughout the learning process. 

These tips apply to eLearning courses, other types of virtual trainings, and face-to-face trainings.

Knowledge management is enjoying a wave of popularity in USAID projects, where recent years have seen growing recognition of the value of explicit strategies to improve documentation and dissemination of program learning during project implementation. This is a positive and welcome trend. But what happens to the “knowledge” generated once the project ends? USAID has its own knowledge management repository in the Development Exchange Clearinghouse, but how do we ensure that valuable program knowledge continues to benefit the country once the USAID project ends?

Students use materials at the AIDS Resource Center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

© 2012 Sarah V. Harlan/JHU•CCP, Courtesy of Photoshare

At a recent HIPNet meeting, a group of us dug into the question of how can we better foster and nurture in-country knowledge hubs where lessons learned, tools, and good practices developed under projects could have a sustained home in-country after project support ends. The conversation first grappled with what we mean by in-country knowledge hubs. It turns out, we mean many different things, from kiosks of materials set up in an implementing partner’s office (CCP in Ghana), to small library of materials and web page (WASH resource center in Amhara Health Bureau/Ethiopia, supported by World Bank) to web pages with resources (Drupal-based site CCP did for SHARENET in South Africa) to intranet-like web page to manage files (file management page like Basecamp). Interestingly, those who participated in the conversation had the most experience with virtual hubs.