We are pleased to announce our two forthcoming e/merge Africa events on gendered use of educational technologies by university educators and on use of MOOCs in Africa. If you’re coming to eLearning Africa we’re looking forward to meeting you. You can find us at Stand 27 or enter your details in our contact form to arrange a meeting and enter a draw for one of 25 e/merge Africa t shirts.

1. Our next online seminar runs from Monday 2 June – Friday 6 June 2014. Dr. Ruth Nsibirano & Dr. Consolata Kabonesa, from Makerere University, Uganda will present and lead a discussion and live meeting on “Time to Change: Gendered Perceptions on Use of Educational Technology for Teaching”. Further information is available on our sign up page.

2. Are you curious about MOOCs or already developing or running MOOCs in Africa? From Tuesday 17 June – Friday 27 June 2014 we present “Developing World MOOCs – a workshop on MOOCs in Africa” led by Sukaina Walji, Andrew Deacon and Janet Small from the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching, University of Cape Town, South Africa. Further information is available on our sign up page.

Dear Colleagues,

It gives us great pleasure to announce our next event: the Learning Design Workshop which will be led by Professor Grainne Conole, Director of the Institute of Learning Innovation at University of Leicester, United Kingdom and supported by Jolanda Morkel, Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa. This four week online workshop will run from 22 April to 16 May, with a short break midway.

Signup Page

The main objective of the workshop is to support participants to prepare courses for online and mobile environments. Participants will work in small groups (max 4) and should have a course in mind. This provides an excellent opportunity to work with colleagues in your own institution or across institutions to design or redesign a course together. Group members will engage with a range of learning design conceptual tools in collaborative environments (e.g. Google Drive) and share insights and learning with other groups in a closed Facebook group. There will be two live online meetings for Q&A, sharing and discussions.

The workshop will be supports participants in exploring the the 7Cs of learning design framework for blended and online course creation. This framework was developed at University of Leicester and the Open University in the UK.

Please come to the Signup Page to ensure your place in the workshop. No login required for signup. We have also opened a Facebook event for this workshop.

We are pleased to announce our next event starting 31 March which is focused on the effective use of mobile phones in learning. Christopher Pruijsen, CEO of Sterio.me will present on “mLearning via audio and GSM/feature phones”. He will lead a discussion about the design and use of this new mLearning product, which he developed together with two fellow entrepreneurs on a bus going from Harare to Cape Town. Come and join us with your questions and your insights concerning mLearning.

The online discussion and related resources will be available on our site at http://emergeafrica.net/live from the morning of 31 March. There will be a live meeting with Christopher Pruijsen on 2 April at 2 pm (GMT+2).

Please note a change in the programme. Batseba Seifu from The Africa Peace and Security Programme in Ethiopia has a requested a postponement of her presentation entitled “How to use tablets for effective adult education in Africa”. The new date will be announced as soon as it is agreed with Batseba.

Our schedule of regular activities is off to a good start with a very active Digital Storytelling Workshop led by Daniela Gachago and Jolanda De Villiers Morkel from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. Fifty colleagues have popped into the room and eight digital stories are in development.