Information and Communications Technologies and Secondary Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: Policies, Practices, Trends and Recommendations

The following report discusses the use of Information Communications Technologies (ICTs) to improve access to, quality of, and delivery of secondary education within sub-Saharan Africa. It discusses the policy environment for ICTs in sub-Saharan Africa, their successes, challenges, andlessons learned, and it concludes with a broad and detailed set of recommendations for policymakers, donors, the private sector, designers, and implementers of ICTs in education programs. The report seeks to generally answer the question of how sub-Saharan African (SSA) governments can best use technology to improve access to secondary education, improve learning, strengthen management of schools and the education system, and foster innovation

CAN KIDS LEARN BY THEMSELVES USING TECHNOLOGY AND WHAT DO THEY LEARN?

This study presents the method and results of an experiment conducted to investigate whether kids (5-8 years) can use technology to learn in such unsupervised learning conditions. This study also assesses the skills and understanding that children develop through unsupervised technology exposure. The study, carried over 6 months, focused on two primary schools (School ‘A’ and School ‘B’) both found in Mauritius. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were adopted to collect data for this investigation. The qualitative data focused on interviews with kids, examination of the students’ work on PCs, observation in their ability to explore an interface, use a mouse, keyboard and the Internet. The quantitative data provide information which is easy to analyze statistically and fairly reliable. Descriptive statistics and charts have been used to analyze the quantitative data. It has been found that kids who had access to computers and Internet-based resources both at school and at home can self – educate themselves, but only to some extent because there will come such a moment when they will need a facilitator for guidanc

A Social Partnership Model to promote Educators' Development in Mauritius through Formal and Informal Capacity-building Initiatives

International audienceThe organization Helping Our People has been setup in 2011 by a team of education professionals working at the Virtual Centre for Innovative Technologies (VCILT) at the University of Mauritius. In 2009, the VCILT embarked on the SIDECAP project, funded by the EU-ACP in a consortium regrouping the Open University of the UK, the University of the West Indies, the University of the South Pacific and the University of the Highlands and Islands. The work of the VCILT in the context of the SIDECAP project was essentially focused on the repurposing of Open Educational Resources to fit in the local Mauritian Context. At the same time, the VCILT received an internal grant to work on the development of interactive learning materials using the integration of text-to-speech technology in instructionally designed PowerPoint presentations. In this paper we report how the research activities of the two projects led to a series of development and applications in the real-world context for the continuous professional development of educators, the establishment of a social entity, an NGO called Helping Our People, a partnership with Microsoft Indian Ocean and French Pacific under the Partners in Learning Program and the Youth Empowerment Program to alleviate the suffering of those living in vulnerable conditions in the country

Portrait of a deaf Mauritian student: how I propose to use educational games to ease up struggles faced in French elementary classes

Yearly in Mauritius, only a few deaf and hard of hearing students manage to get a passing mark in French language at elementary level. This shows that those students are encountering difficulties to perform well in this subject; in that they struggle to read and write. French language is basically the second or third language of deaf and hard of hearing students; after the bilingual -bicultural model of MSL (Mauritian Sign Language) and English, and Creole.Since no single method addresses all needs and the focus of the research lies in the need to improve knowledge transfer from teachers to deaf students, a combination of methodologies is necessary; thus the importance of the living theory approach. The project shall encompass developing educational games, and multimedia through the pragmatic paradigm point of view, exploring the practical relevance of the tools; while the theoretical framework will be based on action research. The purpose of the research is however not to replace the actual means of teaching French language to deaf students; but to rather act a paradigm shift to the current teaching method.A preliminary research showed that people learn more deeply from words and pictures than from words alone(Mayer & Anderson, 1992; Mayer & Moreno, 2002); and that games can potentially shape users’ behaviour(Dicheva, Dichev, Agre, & Angelova, 2015). Drawing from literature review to better understand whether or not Deaf and Hard of Hearing learners (DHH) may benefit from both multimedia and games in the classroom, a simple and appropriate learning aid which focuses on individually tailored behavior from specific criteria will be analysed.In this paper we will discuss the difficulties faced by Deaf students in French classes, how literature suggests that multimedia and gamification be used to ease up their struggles, and my proposed solution for a typical case study

Using Learning Analytics to Investigate Student Performance in Blended Learning Courses

Many higher education institutions today offer online delivery as an alternative or addition to provide more flexibility to learners. However, students being confronted with such services come with different expectations to what that means to their learning paths and behaviours. Learning Analytics is a rather new and innovative way of making student behaviour and performances explicit through analysing large sets of learner data. In this article, we take the case of online and blended learning from the University of Mauritius and hold the analysis of student interaction data against their performances and achievements. The study encompasses the entire population of first year students over two consecutive academic years of an undergraduate programme in Web and Multimedia Development. We classified the data into distinctive parts namely participation (or engagement), coursework marks, exam marks, and overall results to identify relationships that may influence student retention. 29.03.2017 | Wolfgang Greller, Mohammad Issack Santally, Ravindra Boojhawon, Yousra Rajabalee & Roopesh Kevin Sungku

Learning and Perceptual Styles Consideration in the Design of Hypermedia Courseware for Distance Learning

Abstract: In this study, we carry out a survey of the preferred learning and perceptual styles o