eLearning Africa 2015 ICT for Expanding Access and Enhancing Quality in Education : Ethiopia's Perspective

Outline 1.Ethernet and Ethiopian Higher Education 2.SchoolNet and General Education 3.What Role the Private Sector in Education?

The EthERNet? Was initiated in 2001 The main aim was to build capacity of public universities to share educational resources and research among member institutions locally and globally, in a phased approach. First phase – Implementation of LAN/WAN Second Phase -Tele-Education and (MPLS/VPN) for Tele- Education purposes Third Phase - E-Library System Forth Phase – Tele-Medicine and Tele-Education at the Nine Mature Universities. Fifth Phase EthERNet project 40G backbone dedicated network interconnecting 36 Universities Sixth Phase – Private Cloud Datacenter and Collaboration Applications 3

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What can EthERNet Deliver to EPHLIs ?  Contribute to inter-institutional collaboration, research and human networking.  Promote joint institutional content development, access to large databases and sharing of research results  Use ICT technologies to make widely accessible teaching materials and tools such as multi-media based training …  Use EthERNet to share standard University ICT start- up templates and ‘cookbooks’ that can be customized as needed.  Helps solve the serious lack of ICT manpower on the part of new Universities 6

What can EthERNet Deliver to EPHLIs ?  Makes it easier to Share Educational & Research materials  Increase Access to Global Educational & Research knowledge  Speeds up collaboration with the Global, Continental and National Research and Educational Networks in the World  Promote linkages of the academic and research community with industry, government, etc  Create economy of scale for building and sharing high speed networks, expensive research equipment and other resources.  Makes Distance Learning easier.  Allow pooling and sharing of resources. 7

SchoolNet Improving the Quality of Learning and Teaching through the use of ICT ☛ SchoolNet, a nationwide network of more than 2000 secondary schools in Ethiopia under the Ministry of Education. ☛ As part of its efforts to enhance the quality of general education through ICT, the project aims to enhance the quality of learning and teaching in secondary schools ☛ At present 500 secondary schools are connected to the internet and each other using the existing Ethio Telecom terrestrial network of ADSL and having 2 Mbps bandwidth for both data and internet. 8

5 components for Implementation ✔ Staff capacity building ✔ Upgrade of the existing ICT infrastructure ✔ Development and implementation of change management plan in support of mainstreaming ICT for education; ✔ Development of regulatory environment ✔ National ICT standards and other guidelines

The Private Sector and Higher Education  Investment in Teaching at Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Levels to complement Government’s effort of increasing access at all levels.  A Fast Growing Economy with burgeoning Middle Income Class  A second most populous nation in Africa  A significant portion of youth population  Investment friendly, Stable Economic and Political System.

The Private Sector….  Invest in nurturing talent and Entrepreneurship capacity of the Graduates.  Engineering and Enterprising

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