Moodling with Rwandan

Researchers

Ravi Murugesan

• INASP

– “International Network for Availability of

Scientific Publications”

– Charity based in Oxford

– Promotes scholarly information for

development

• AuthorAID

– One of INASP’s projects

– Supports developing country researchers in

publishing their work

Training at AuthorAID

• Workshops on publishing research for

university researchers in partner countries

– Ethiopia, Rwanda, Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania,

Nepal, Cuba…

• Over 25 workshops facilitated by

AuthorAID staff since 2007

– Many “cascaded” workshops as well

E-learning

• Initially supposed to be a set of e-learning

modules put up on the website

• Then a Moodle enthusiast was hired

Pilot e-learning course

• “Writing a Research Paper for Publication”

• Set up on Moodle 2.1

• 6-week, fully online course

– October to November 2011

• One instructor (me) and 28 learners

– Academic staff at the National University of

Rwanda

Activities in the course

• Forum

• Lesson (most of the course)

• Feedback

• Glossary

• Database

Facing the challenges

• E-learning adoption: slow in Africa

• English: Second language in Rwanda

• Mostly first-time e-learners in the pilot

course

Encouraging enrolment

• Clear course description

– Circulated by email well in advance

• Preparatory course before the actual

course

• Light weekly workload (2 to 3 hours)

• Self-registration and self-enrolment

Accessible, interesting content

• Moodle’s default theme used for low-

bandwidth connections

• Short sentences and simple words in the

content

• Questions interspersed (lesson module)

– Of 118 pages in the course, 74 had questions

• Not more than 200 words per page in

lessons

Question page in a lesson

Encouraging study and completion

• Preparatory course and learning

guidelines

• Regular announcements (news forum)

• Prompt responses to questions

• Monitoring learners’ progress every week

• Checking with learners who fell behind

• End-of-course assignment

• Two-week extension

Assignment with database module

Glossary with questions and

answers

Outcomes

• 25 of 28 learners (89%) completed

the course

• Good feedback

Screenshots from analysis page of

feedback module

Next steps

Moodle for AuthorAID; maybe for

INASP too!

AuthorAID

community

INASP

community

Thank you

Write to me (rmurugesan@inasp.info) to see

the course and give me feedback