IMC supports set-up of e-learning competence centre in Ethiopia

Lecture Recording becomes integral part of the Engineering Curriculum in Ethiopian Higher Education

Saarbruecken,  March 2009 – The Engineering Capacity Building Program (ecbp) is part of Germany’s development cooperation with Ethiopia. Its focus is, among others, on the reform of higher education and the modernization of engineering curricula. IMC supports the set-up of an e-learning competence centre in Addis Abeba and provides know-how for the recording of presentations and university lectures.

Ethiopia is in need of well-trained engineers. High-level engineering training is crucial to the country’s dynamic and sustainable industrial development. The Engineering Capacity Building Program (ecbp), therefore, puts emphasis on the modernization of engineering in higher education institutions: Since the beginning of the bilateral German-Ethiopian program in 2005, ecbp has fostered flexible curricula and promoted up-to-date topics in higher education curricula.
„E-learning in general and lecture recording in particular are very adequate as a response to the significant shortage in teaching resources available in Ethiopian higher education,” Dr. Wolfgang Kraemer, IMC’s Chief Executive Officer, points out. Lecture recording allows for the documentation and distribution of teaching material, which becomes available in institutions that do not have the competencies available on their own. The new e-learning competence centre, which currently is being set up at Addis Abeba University, will serve as a broker in the exchange and the distribution of learning material in egineering.
„LECTURNITY is our software tool for presentation recording. It is used widely in the Higher Education sector as a powerful solution for creating e-lectures“, Kraemer adds. „LECTURNITY is easy to use, implements integrated recording, editing, and publishing processes, and leads to excellent recording quality. We are very pleased about the interest of our Ethiopian partners in using the tool, and IMC is proud to make a contribution to fruitful development cooperation between the two countries. “

LECTURNITY is a tool for the simultaneous recording of all sources of information used during the presentation process, e.g. presentation slides, handwritten annotations on the slides, audio and video, additional video clips produced via the integrated screen grabbing tool.  LECTURNITY, thus, produces an authentic documentation of the lecture; recording documents are popular among student as valuable sources of information in periods of self-paced and self-directed learning.