Meeting with Richard of the Ministry of Health

Today I had the opportunity to meet with Richard from the Ministry of Health here in Rwanda. He is currently working on developing communication lines and training between the different hospitals in Rwanda. Currently three hospitals have been connected through a fiber optic network and are having a chinese company set up classrooms where live broadcasting between the hospitals can be connected over the LAN.

We discussed what the school has been doing and he was fairly interested in Moodle. He explained that they were paying a man to develop software and maintain the software which was similar to what we are already doing. His price is very low however and ex-patriots probably wouldn't be able to set up the Moodle server for less than what he is charging, let alone provide the training necessary to keep the service running.

His ideas however were very interesting. He was particularly interested in the Knowledge center and looked forward to the time when a searchable information database could be used by doctors at the hospitals.

He also mentioned that the school could look into using their network for teaching live courses using the rooms that they had set up until the school gets connected to the fiber optic network.

I will be meeting again with Richard and an individual from South Africa on Wednesday.

Prior to Distance Class - Teacher Communication

This was an email where Eddie and I discussed a few technical aspects of the course, the times for the course, and other ingredients to make the course go well.

-----
I checked up on a few things and everything should be good to go for your course. Just to let you know, if the power goes out while you are teaching online you may experience 5 minutes of delay where students aren't responding or interacting while the generator kicks back on. Also sometimes Terracom begins working on the connection without any notice, if this happens the internet may turn on and off (on for 20 minutes off for 5 minutes, etc.). This doesn't happen all the time, but just wanted to make you aware of it just in case it happens. Also make sure that Adam is informed not to do server updates during class times. Sometimes early in the morning the espnur.org/courses/ web site doesn't work while the rest of the internet is working. I think the server is doing backups or something, I am not sure. It usually works fine in the afternoon however.

Here are some things that you can help me with:

1. please confirm if my class is scheduled for 24th, 25th and 26th.

The 24th, 25th, and 26th will work wonderful. I will make sure we have the computer lab.

2. Let me know what time Mountain is 2 pm Rwanda.

Utah is 8 hours earlier than Rwanda
For example:
2:00 p.m. in Rwanda is
6:00 a.m. in Utah (http://www.worldtimeserver.com/current_time_in_US-UT.aspx)

3. Please upload the students to Learn to Learn (LtoL) and give them access to the class on the Friday prior. Can you print out log in instructions to Moodle (we need to find a name for RSPH's Moodle, The one that Neal and I are working on is called "Aristotle")? Include eddloo@yahoo.com as the contact for assistance.

LtoL is your class I presume. Most of the students were registered yesterday during class. I will register the rest on Friday.

4. My plan is to artificially create a Distance education model. The afternoons will be divided into 2 sections. From 2-4pm it will be fully online. They will be in the class, logged in and the only support they have is me in Logan. From 4-6, they go off line and have tutorial to work on some in-class activities. Here is where I need you assistance. They will be required to use the evenings to do off line activities on their own so that they can continue with the online activities the next 2-4 pm online event.

I will be available to assist during the class hours. Some students return to work at 5:30 to 5:45 p.m. and will need instructions about the off line work/after hours content before 6:00 p.m. This has been a struggle for each class.

5. There will be 1 major deliverable i.e., a reflection paper. Assessment will be based on 40% online activities, 30% paper, and 30% offline participation.

How would you like me to grade offline participation?

6. Can you please share this idea with the class?

We talked about it yesterday when we registered for the course.

7. In the handout that you give them, please direct them to the syllabus. There are pre-course activities that they will be required to do.

Sounds great, I will check out the syllabus and pre-course activities and write up some instructions.

-----

It will be necessary in the future to make teachers aware of some of these technical difficulties before they start course design so problems that arise from internet connection can be dealt with.

Tanya's Paper

Don't put thing off until the last minute, that's what I always say. The paper that I have finished creating the visual design for had to be re-edited yesterday which took a little time, but was to be expected. However sending the large pdf file has been a nightmare. Delphine has not been able to open the file and so I sent her another copy which also has not been openable or saveable to her computer. She sent the copy of the file to many government organizations to review and they couldn't open the file either.

I am going to put the paper in the Moodle course that I created and tell her to download it there because we are experiencing difficulties in sending it by email.

Time to start wrapping things up

With three weeks left before the end of the internship it is time to start wrapping up the educational packages that I have created into CD format so that they can be reproduced if anything happens to the online format.

I hope to get all of the Certificate Training Program materials onto one CD (audio not included) and written recommendations of how to best continue course development. The CD's for individual courses also need to be wrapped up with the audio so that they could be given to individuals who need to take a course at a distance without internet connection.

In addition to this a training session is being set up for the faculty to teach them how to use Moodle and how to start developing their courses.

Midnight Training

Last night at about 9:00 p.m. Judo arrived. We sat down for almost 40 minutes and worked on teaching him the ropes of being a Moodle administrator. He was very tired, but stuck with me.

We covered most of the simple aspects of Moodle such as adding courses, adding users, confirming users, and how to edit courses. I don't know how much stuck in his head, but it shows that us techies work longer hours than most.

I also feel bad for Judo, he is overworked and underpaid for what he does for the school. If they paid him more money, he wouldn't have to work three jobs to make ends meet and they would have less tech problems at the school.

Almost Caught Up

I just finished entering the content for Francine's courses. I am so excited. Her class was incredibly complex, mainly because there was too much paperwork involved. It would have been easier to give students a subject to search and have them find relevant information online then to describe their results in a bibliography that would be given to the teacher.

Anyways, I am feeling euphoric at the moment. Finishing entering content for two courses on a slow internet connection in one day truly is a miracle. Rock on!

Training Continues

John De Dieu has been playing a little with Moodle and has entered another assignment into the course without assistance. We have given him administrator access for the Moodle Server and will receive training on adding courses and how to edit the courses and add users in addition to continuing learning tools for course development.

This needs to be accomplished within three weeks because training of faculty will occur on August 1st - 5th for faculty to begin entering data into Moodle. I also am setting a goal of getting all of the course content entered for the courses before this date so I can work exclusively with faculty in getting their courses online.

Presentation to Dr. Daniel

Laura and I met with Dr. Daniel, the National Malaria Control Coordinator, today and presented the iCompanion as well as the Moodle course management system. He really enjoyed the iCompanion and the Moodle package. He especially liked the Epidemiology course. While in the meeting, he enrolled in the Malaria course from his office, posted a question, and was excited about the possibilities of receiving an answer from professors at Tulane. He will be reviewing the course over the weekend on the iCompanion and over the internet, then will give us back the equipment on Monday. We explained that the course won't be taught until the fall or possibly the spring, but we would contact the professors and tell them they have a student. I have already added Dr. James, Dr. Wesson, Dr. Wiser, and Dr. Krogstad as professors and Laura is contacting them to reply to Dr. Daniel's question.

We also discussed some of the possibilities of creating courses and training for Malaria and briefly discussed ways in which the iCompanion and Moodle could be used to develop human resource capacity. Because it appeared to go so well, Laura is going to try to set up other meetings with government officials to discuss what we are doing. I hope that the meetings take place before I leave. Presenting is so much fun.

Class Exam Beta Test

John de Dieu and I set up an exam to be taken through Moodle today. Overall the beta test was a success and we hope the students did well on their exam. A few glitches were identified:

1. The confirmation email was sent to the "spam" messages of many students
2. Some students had their email settings to delete the "spam" automatically which made it necessary to confirm these students manually.
3. When uploading multiple files instructions need to be given to the students on how to zip files into one.

The majority of the students were successful on the beta test and we experienced very few problems. I hope to continue helping teachers set up courses to be used by their students while they are in the class.

Moodle Training Begins

I realize now that I should have begun training individuals earlier in my internship on how to use the software for course development. Yesterday I began teaching John de Dieu the Moodle software and the Breeze software. He was excited to begin the training and he is going to use it today to give a test online to his students.

We also discussed creating an account for each teacher at the school so they can use it to organize their courses, distribute files, give exams, give assignments, and to post grades.

We will be holding a training session at the end of this term and it would be great if we could have these teacher logins to be ready.

Reflections - Additional Work

As the only instructional designer on site and perhaps the only computer guru that is always stationed on the campus I have taken many different roles from local and adjunct faculty as well as students.

Some of the projects that I have undertaken include:
- Adding instructors and numerous courses to Moodle
- Editing settings for school in Moodle
- Taking pictures of faculty and editing them for use in an online setting
- Creating a new NUR-SPH logo using photoshop and illustrator
- Designing Malaria CD cover using photoshop and illustrator
- Designing graphics and visuals to be used in a paper to be published
- Repairing distance education equipment
- Adding Adobe Reader software to computers
- Fixing numerous laptops when they don't work
- Testing different microphones
- Working on improving the internet speed and bandwidth
- Checking flash drives for viruses
- Working on the web site design and helping Solange add content
- Talking with Neal and Eddie about different projects
- Setting up projectors for faculty

Many different odd jobs have arisen throughout my stay here in Rwanda. This on top of other activities makes me very busy, but at least I feel like I am part of the team.

Reflections - Course Creation

Here is the creative process that I have been following. After I give this process I will write what I would have done differently looking back.

1. Meet with instructor
2. Obtain course outline and collect instructor materials
3. Build HTML framework and record lectures
4. Enter content into HTML framework and publish lectures using Breeze
5. Get instructor feedback
6. Finish HTML course for use on CD
7. Enter content into Moodle
8. Add features to Moodle for use in teaching at a distance

This sequence has been followed for developing the first three courses. Unfortunately obtaining instructor materials has slowed down the rest of the sequence. Recording lectures has also made it difficult to set up the framework for the course in HTML and in Moodle. As a result I will use the following sequence for building the courses in the future. I will make adjustments if the sequence is less successful.

1. Meet the instructor
2. Obtain course outline and objectives
3. Set up timeline with the instructor for obtaining course materials
4. Build Moodle framework
5. Get instructor feedback on framework and ask what Moodle tools they would like to use
6. Obtain information on what assignments will be given and where to place them in the framework.
7. Start obtaining course materials and audio recordings
8. Build HTML framework for CD and enter course content
9. Get instructor feedback and obtain added information on questions and activities
10. Continue to collect content and enter into Moodle and into HTML framework
11. Give teacher access to Moodle and briefly train on how to change and update information.

I will use this format for continued course design. We will see if additional changes need to be made. This creation process is under the assumption that teachers will be creating content when they arrive in Rwanda which has been the case for the previous instructors.

Reflections - Teachers and Preparation

Up to this point I have created the following courses:
- Distance Education Course Design
- Clinical Aspects of HIV/AIDS and Opportunistic Infections
- Advanced Research Methods in Public Health

Participated in creating:
- Malaria

And am currently working on
- Behavioral Change
- Qualitative Research Methods
- Quantitative Research Methods

Of the three courses that I have created, the Advanced Research Methods course was the easiest to facilitate. Thom had a direct lecture based teaching format and was well prepared with segmented slide shows and a well designed course syllabus and daily outline. In a matter of two weeks his course was ready to go both in Moodle and in CD format.

The other two courses have taken upwards of four weeks even though the content has been about the same. The instructors either did not have the lectures prepared or had not thought about presenting them in a segmented format. One teacher did not have a syllabus or outline for the course and took three to four days to come up with a finalized structure. One lecture consisted of 100+ slides and was to be the entire course. After discussion the lecture was broken up into smaller segments and the course went much more smoothly.

I have noticed that improvements in presentation could also be made if daily instructional objectives were clear. In fact these objectives were never written down and I always had to ask for the content for the day and how they would like to arrange the daily activities. Imparting information by stand and deliver teaching has been the norm.

For the first three courses I sat in the classroom while the instructors were giving the presentation. I recorded the audio using a wireless microphone. Because of the large files or PowerPoint glitches, the computer would crash from time to time and lose the audio file. This made the instructors frustrated because they didn't want to record the audio outside of class. To make up for this I found that if I didn't run any other programs while recording the computer wouldn't crash. Sometimes I would run another audio recording program outside of PowerPoint to make sure we had a backup. This worked o.k., but identifying where to splice the audio was tedious work even marking each slide.

Recording the lecture outside of class needs to be accomplished by the teacher until better technology can be obtained at the NUR-SPH. For example student questions are never heard on the lapel microphone and teachers fail to restate the question before answering. When there have been two instructors presenting, switching microphones from one to another has resulted in lost audio segments and lost translations. The mixer we are currently using only has one microphone input.

Teaching in two languages has also been extremely difficult. Teachers often switch from English to French mid-sentence. Although it takes twice as long to cover the content and makes recording live audio a nightmare, my main fear is our audience. Because we are mixing English and French only those individuals who speak both languages will be able to take the courses. Purely English speakers will be lost. For example, I don't speak french and so I never know if they are on a tangent or still in a related subject matter. Purely French speakers will also be on the sidelines. The lecture slides need to be in one language. Presentations need to be in one language with a translator talking in the other, or the instructor needs to give the presentation in both languages. If we don't take this approach Ugandans will not be able to take the courses. Many Rwandese will also struggle. The language problem is the most complex and I haven't devised an adequate solution.

I suggest that teachers work with an instructional designer in creating course materials before they come to Rwanda. In this way the two or three weeks that they are on site will not be focused on course development, but will be focused on student development.

I also suggest that teachers record at least a "reader's digest" version of the lectures before coming to Rwanda. If course materials are prepared before arriving in Rwanda the materials can be placed online where the internet speed is faster and where IT support is larger.

Local teachers will need some assistance in creating these materials and I have asked to be able to train an individual here at the school.