Multi Tasking an IT Professional Attribute

The birds chirp, cackle, and call continuously as I lift my head slowly off my pillow. It is Saturday and boy has the week gone by fast. Laura Haas arrived yesterday and things fell right into stride as I explained some of the things that have been accomplished since I have arrived in Kigali. Since you probably don’t know what those things are, I’ll give you a brief description here.

I finished a draft of an online Qualitative Analysis course, taught last summer by Lisanne Brown. Placing this course online has been difficult because of the limited bandwidth here in Kigali, but I finally got it up into the projects section of my web site. A few changes need to be made to the course, but I would like to get some feedback from Lisanne Brown before I proceed further.

I met with Solange and discussed designing courses with marketing in mind. We had a great talk about the RSPH (Rwanda School of Public Health) web site and discussed fixes that need to be made to make the web site more marketing oriented and professional. She is not the web designer, but in charge of marketing the RSPH. Adam who lives in America is the web designer and we will be passing on the information to him next week.

I met with Joseph, faculty professor at the RSPH, to discuss his course and what changes needed to be made to make the course usable at a distance. He was incredibly fun to work with and had great materials to begin development.

I worked with Judo to get the distance learning classroom up and running. We have all of the information and programs that we need, except macromedia breeze presenter. I’m hoping that Laura has this software here at the school, but if not we will have to get it from Eddie.

I sat in on a class with John de Dieu and observed his teaching style. He is teaching a technical class on Epi Info, but a lot of time was wasted and better instructional principles could have been followed. Laura has asked that I begin teaching a class on how to teach adults at a distance.

I talked with Laura and Josh about a presentation that is going to be made in July dealing with Malaria. This is perhaps the most important aspect of my internship. They want to present two online courses on research methods to USAID, the CDC, and another organization to show how the school already impacts many areas in Africa and with funding has the potential to improve Malaria research and treatment in the region.

In addition to these things I obtained course materials from Paulin, a faculty member at the National University of Rwanda, and materials from a French instructor whose name I don’t remember.

Finally I began working on a packet to give instructors when they start to collect or build materials for a distance education class.