ADC holds Community Day in Burkina Faso
The partners of the Africa Digital Campus (ADC) project have organised a ‘Community Day’ on e-learning at the Virtual University of Burkina Faso (UV-BF) in Ouagadougou. The goal was to facilitate the adoption of distance learning in higher education. This workshop sought to establish a community of knowledge and practice in Burkina Faso.
About thirty teacher-researchers from the Virtual University of Burkina Faso met for discussions and experience sharing. This was in response to the series of training sessions held between July and September 2022 on scripting, designing, and implementing courses and evaluating learning.
The participants initially explored the idea of communities of learning and practice through an interchange of plenary lectures and instances. The next step was to define their own “E-Learning” community in Burkina Faso, working individually and in groups. The viewpoints and success elements of an African digital education community were then discussed.
One participant commented, “I will now be able to benefit from the experiences of my e-learning colleagues to improve my performance in my online courses” at the end of the day. Another person said, “It is imperative to establish a community of practice to advance digital education. While doing anything alone is challenging, there is no reason why we can’t achieve it while working together.
The 30 participants are just a cohort out of the 70 teacher-researchers from UV-BF who are engaged in the pilot of the ADC project. The beneficiaries are expected to leverage the project to produce online training modules to facilitate pedagogy in various academic disciplines, including health and telemedicine, cybersecurity, etc.