Ethiopia

In the following section I will introduce the state of the art technologies in Ethiopian Educational system. What we call state of the art technology is a relative term from country to country. What we say a state of the art technology for Ethiopia may not be the state of the art technology for Finland. According to Merriam Webster Online dictionary, the state of the art technology is defined as “ the level of development (as of a device, procedure, process, technique, or science) reached at any particular time usually as a result of modern methods”. From this definition, we can learn that a state-of-art technology means any technology that is used to change the current practice or way of doing things in a better way. The new technology is also believed that i t also brings better benefit from the old technology in terms of economy, efficiency, motivation on the part of the users. Ethiopian Educational system suffers from problem of The above mentioned problems are not the only problems but there are also other problems. The government well realized that the quality of education is declining from time to time as a result of the problems mentioned above. The government took different initiative to improve the current educational crises. Integration of ICT in the Ethiopian educational system is well underlined and is included in the policy document with clear objectives and strategies (EICTDA, 2006). Following the policy, Ethiopian government initiated three initiatives, namely, Ethiopian National Schoolnet Initiative, the National ICTs in Higher Education Initiatives, the National ICT Education, Training and Awareness Initiative to integrate ICT at different levels of educational systems. The Schoolnet initiative is aimed at facilitating the deployment and the exploitation of ICTs to facilitate, teaching and learning process within the Ethiopian school system, including the primary, secondary, technical and vocational schools. Of those different components of ICT integration project, Plasma project was initiated by the Prime Minister Office in 2003 (Assefa, 2008). Ministry of Education and Educational Media Agency were assigned to implement the project. The main rationales of the Plasma project were: The Plasma mode of education was fully implemented in all high schools (from grade 10 to 12) of the country in 2004 (See Fig. 1). It was used to teach physics, chemistry, biology, English and civics for grade 10, 11 and 12 students on live transmission by satellite. In 2006 live broadcast was also started for general business and technical drawing teaching.
 * State of the Art Technologies in Ethiopia **
 * 1. What is the state of the art technology? **
 * 2. State of the art technologies used in Ethiopian Educational System **
 * overcrowded students per classroom which ranges from 70 to 80 students,
 * shortage of additional reference materials,
 * shortage of qualified teachers
 * Language problem to understand textbooks and other reference materials as most of the materials are available only in English
 * Short of well equipped infrastructure such as laboratory, library and the like
 * Lack of student motivation for learning
 * Traditional chalk and talk style of teaching and
 * Lack of discipline in the classroom among students
 * 2.1**   **Plasma mode of education**
 * 1) to train youths with the new technology and prepare them for the 21st century knowledge economy
 * 2) Shortage of qualified teachers especially in remote and inaccessible areas of the country. In those areas, a teacher teaches many different subjects in which he/she is not specialized
 * 3) To make available teaching materials easily all overall the country. In the traditional method, there was a serious problem of duplicating textbooks and distributing them to all schools on time.

Source:- Bitew, 2008 The allocation of time is given in the following table. During live transmission the role of the teacher is to supervise students to attend attentively the program and check students doing questions asked. The time allocated for teachers is only 10 minutes that is used to summarize the lesson transmitted on live and the other 2 minutes are warming up time. In addition, one or two computer labs were set up in all high schools to create Internet connectivity. One VSAT also installed for the Internet. In schools where is no electric service, a generator was supplied. But the school was responsible to buy the fuel for the generator. As reported from schools teachers and students, the main advantage of the Plasma mode of education were (Assefa, 2008, Bitew, 2008): The main drawbacks of the plasma mode of education are (Assefa, 2008, Bitew, 2008): ** 2.2 ****One child and One Laptop Project** This project is started in three selected pilot schools. The main purpose of this project is to create digital literate citizens. Access to information technologies in Ethiopian situations is very difficult for the large segment of the population. But we are living in a digital society, a society that is proficient in using ICT and processing information. Unless students trained in this technology starting from their school age, the country cannot achieve its development goals. The Laptops have the following features: The pictures show how the laptop looks like.
 * Grade |||| period per week (one period = 45 minutes) |||| Time Allocation (Minutes) || Teacher Responsibility ||
 * || Plasma || Teacher || Plasma || teacher || ||
 * 10 ||  3  ||  1  ||  30  ||  12  || Summarizing lesson broadcasted by Plasma ||
 * 11 ||  3  ||  1  ||  30  ||  12  ||   “ ||
 * 12 ||  3  ||  1  ||  30  ||  12  ||  “ ||
 * Achievement of Plasma Mode of Education **
 * It supported chalk and talk style of lecture by visual demonstration. This is good to explain some technical and abstract concepts like digestion in biology
 * Substitute laboratories to for demonstration. Most schools are not equipped with laboratories to teach chemistry lab.
 * The lesson is fully delivered in English and help to develop the English language skill of students unlike the face to face class where teachers use Amharic language with English intermittently.
 * In addition, it has also questions intermittently in the lesson and creates a sort of interactive class though the transmission is a one way.
 * Drawbacks of the Plasma Mode of Education **
 * The transmission is fast and students cannot follow up. The programs are prepared in South Africa. The readers use a different dialect than the English dialect used in Ethiopia. As result, students start to understand the dialect in the 11th and 12 grades. They could not take notes. The program favors only visual and auditory students and ignoring kinesthetic learners. Students prefer to learn by traditional face to face mode of teaching.
 * The time allocation is not based on the complexity of the concept. As the teachers observed, one some simple concepts and demonstrations, it uses up to 40 minutes but on some complex concepts, it rushes in five minutes. Students missed important concepts.
 * It is one way transmission. It is not teacher or student controlled. If there is a power problem, there is no means to repeat the program. It is broadcasted from one central location. It does not have also time for exercise.
 * there is no training even at university level for teachers how to integrate ICT in education
 * there is no monitoring and evaluation activities to identify implementation problems and fix those problems to make the new program sustainable and productive
 * Students don’t have capacity to buy additional reference materials to fill the gap created by the Plasma mode of education. In addition, they stay through out the day in the classroom. They don’t have time to read and do individual exercise.
 * Kernel is from OLPC release 8.2.0. USB boot fix in ramdisk is the only change that was applied to OLPC-distributed files.
 * Ubuntu packages are properly identified as manually/automatically installed for easier customization, patched files are diverted, so package manager won't replace them on upgrades.
 * Network Manager 0.7 is in Intrepid -- there is no need for custom repositories.
 * Clive package in Intrepid is also up to the latest version, so tubewatcher script is included without clive replacement.
 * Firefox default configuration is adapted to screen resolution (larger fonts but no scaling for images), and libraries that come with xulrunner are replaced with ones that come with Firefox 3.0.4 release (for some reason libraries from xulrunner package occasionally replace images with noise).
 * syslog is removed -- logging to SD or USB takes large amount of resources.
 * Power management is by default enabled, "aggressive" power management mode that "invisibly" suspends on inactivity is by default disabled but can be enabled with **sudo touch /etc/xo-suspend/aggressive** and reboot, disabled with **sudo rm /etc/xo-suspend/aggressive** and reboot
 * GTK theme is adapted to the changes in theme engines that come with Ubuntu -- it looks slightly better now, though differences are minimal.
 * Splash screen is shown on boot and shutdown.



Besides the Laptops the following additional benefit:
 * **Cheap and affordable**, if not the government buy and distribute to students. The current price of the laptop is 170 USD but they are distributed at a price of 100 USD to developing countries (Tedla, 2008). As the price is a subsidy, the laptops are, at the moment, distributed only to government schools. In the near future, there is hope these laptops will be sold for private schools.
 * **Portable** – can be easily movable


 * **Self contained** to limit damages due to installation and uninstallation of software. In this process the laptop may be exposed to virus and create problems on the students.
 * **Low power consumption**. According to Thomas Ralf, Manager of e-business solutions at Ministry of Capacity Building, "It only consumers 10% of power as compared to the normal computer, increasing its sustainability for use in remote areas, where only one-minute charging is enough for ten minutes operation,"( Tedla, 2007).
 * **Flexibility** - the computer is readable even under the exposure of sunlight enabling children to use it in remote areas. The following picture shows as students using the laptops in open air field.



Source:- Derndorfer, 2008

The mini-laptop, which is designed with different educational applications, can connect with the internet if an access point is available. It has built-in camera so that students can take picture and share with their friends. They can be connected to Wireless Internet if it is available in the school compound. Presently there is no school which is supplied with Wireless Network service. Currently the laptops are loaded with the students’ textbook, encyclopedia and supportive animations lessons. The Manager of the e-business solution also mentioned that "The children will learn abstract thinking in a constructive way of learning." This is just the expectation of the project Manager, there is no work done with regard to curriculum and instruction design to use the laptops to support higher order thinking capabilities. **2.3** ** Video Conferencing ** The Ministry of Education has initiated a distance learning initiative using video-conferencing with the Indira Gandhi National Open University in India ( // Hare, 2007) //. The project has started accepting students, mostly teachers, and offering master’s degrees in economics, marketing, and business administration. The project has three centers at Addis Ababa University, Alemaya University, and St Mary’s College. This distance education program is started to train professionals in fields which are not offered by local universities. There is no study made locally to justify the video conferencing learning environment is better than the traditional face to face learning environment. The public does not have a positive attitude as compared to the traditional face to face class as it is currently experimented at pilot stage. **Pedagogical Benefit** This mode of education is just like face to face education. The students can see and hear the instructor when she/he gives lectures. On the other hand students can also ask questions. The main advantage of this mode of education is that students from different countries can attend the same class without relocating their home country. It is up to the design of the instructor to make the course interactive and support students to develop higher order thinking. On the technology side, it can support to create student-centered learning. Unless we implement student-centered learning, it is very difficult to address the different student needs in video conferencing learning environment. This mode of education is good to exchange cultural values among the students without paying too much cost for travel and accommodation. As we are living in a globalized society, cultural interchange is very important to develop a citizen that can easily adapt to different cultural settings. This mode of education has many benefits.
 * Pedagogical use of Laptop **
 * Benefits **


 * It is used to train students in fields which are not offered by local universities.
 *     It reduces the cost of training. If all students send abroad for the same training, the transport cost and accommodation costs makes the total training cost very expensive especially for poor country like Ethiopia.
 *     Possibility to create training opportunity for many students
 * Developing experiences in distance mode of education

The government of Ethiopia has made different initiatives to transform the traditional mode of education by ICT supported mode of education. Only the Plasma mode of education is extensively implemented and different researchers are done on its strength and weakness. The other modes of education are new and researchers are not done as their importance with regard to their benefit. In general the government is ambitious to use ICT in its educational system and different projects are currently underway. The new technology has its own good and bad sides. Since it is a new technology, there are resistance and failures but in the process educational technology will play a lot to change the quality of education in Ethiopia. In summary, the state of the art technologies will help to > > ** Reference ** >
 * 4. Summery of state-of-the art Education in Ethiopia **
 * Reduce the cost of delivery
 * Exposed students to new technologies
 * Overcome shortage of instructional media that is used for demonstration
 * To create interactive learning environment
 * To provide better quality education where qualified teachers are not available
 * Provide education fields which are not available in local universities
 * 1) Assefa, T. (2008). The Rational and Practice of Plasma Mode of Education in Ethiopian High Schools: the case of Addis Ababa City Administration: //The Third National Conference on Educational Challenges in Ethiopia//, Organized by College of Education, Addis Ababa University, May 27-30, 2008, Ethiopia.
 * 2) Bitew, G. D. (2008). Using "plasma TV" broadcasts in Ethiopian secondary schools: A brief survey. //Australasian Journal of Educational Technology//, 24(2), 150-167.  http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet24/bitew.html
 * 3) Derndorfer, C. (2008). OLPC Oceania Interview by OLPC News - Part I. Retrieved on November 20, 2008 from http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/oceania/olpc_oceania_interview_by_olpc.html
 * 4) EICTDA, National Information and Communications Technology Policy, July 2006 (unpublished paper)
 * 5) Hare, H. (2007). ICT in Education in Ethiopia. Retrieved on December 5, 2008 from http://www.infodev.org/en/Document.402.aspx
 * 6) Yeneakal, Tedla. (2008). One laptop per child' concept trial under way in Ethiopian schools. Retrieved on November 25, 2008 from http://www.ecbp.biz/metanav/media/newspage/browse/1/article/46/one-laptop.html