The e-Learning Africa Conference: A Report from Addis Ababa
Neil Butcher reports on this conference organized in Ethiopia in May, 2006 under the patronage of the Federal Republic of Ethiopia’s Ministry of Capacity Building and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa.
The e-Learning Africa Conference took place in Addis Ababa from May 24 to 26, 2006. According to the conference website, it was the largest event on educational technologies and development ever to have taken place in Africa, attracting 832 participants from 80 countries (over 70% of whom were from African countries). This was indeed a major gathering, with many of the people around the continent in the field of educational technology gathering to discuss e-learning issues.
The conference itself was preceded by 13 pre-conference workshops covering different themes, which seem to have been well-attended. I personally attended a workshop organized by UNESCO and the European Foundation for Quality in eLearning on Quality for e-Learning in Africa, where I was also required to facilitate a session on the UNESCO Knowledge Base for Open and Distance Learning ( This was the primary reason for my attendance at the conference. Most of the pre-conference workshops were informative and engaging, offering good opportunities for discussion and debate of key issues.
From there, we moved into the main conference, which followed a very traditional organizational structure of opening plenary sessions and keynote speeches on each day, followed by a series of parallel sessions. On the face of it, the choice seemed somewhat bewildering, with more than 250 speakers presenting papers over the course of the conference. Amongst these were many interesting presentations (and many more which looked interesting, but where there were difficulties attending multiple sessions).
Most importantly, the conference provided an excellent opportunity for networking with peers involved in educational technology from around the continent. From this perspective the conference was a great success, as so many key people were gathered together and opportunities for interaction were fantastic. Having noted this, however, the conference was also flawed in several really important ways. First, there were simply too many papers being presented within the timeframe. Each parallel session included presentation of around five to six papers, leaving almost no meaningful opportunity for engagement and debate. Speakers always seemed rushed, and question-time typically ran into the breaks to accommodate just the most preliminary questions.
Second, the method of organizing sessions seemed incoherent. In the sessions that I attended, papers seemed to have been clustered opportunistically rather than because they matched the theme of the session. This was quite frustrating as it reduced opportunities for constructing meaningful intellectual debate. It also seemed apparent from early on that little quality control had been done to process submissions. Thus, while there were many excellent papers, there were also too many papers and presentations that simply should not have been included in the conference programme.
The quality of papers in general left me a little disappointed at the progress we have made in e-learning in Africa in recent years. Certainly, the conference demonstrated a growing range of activity, but it appears that critical engagement with the potential and pitfalls of e-learning has not yet begun in many instances. Thus, use of technology seems still be beset by ongoing myths: technology will make education cheaper; technology will help to deliver learning to much larger numbers of learners; technology will compensate for weaknesses in the teaching force; and so on. I had hoped by now that the years of experience would have enabled the debate to move to a more sophisticated level, but this did not emerge at the conference. I think this may have had as much to do with the way the conference was organized as anything else though.
The perplexing aspect of this is that the conference seems to have attracted significant donor support from international donors and multi-national companies. I know that many African organizations have struggled to raise funding for similar kinds of conferences, but this conference – organized by a European conference company – seems not to have experienced similar problems. My experience of this conference confirms for me that African organizations are just as capable as their European counterparts of organizing high quality conference experiences. Hopefully, in any follow-up event, the donors will see fit to allow African organizations who truly understand the issues in educational technology on the continent to arrange the conference and to stimulate a more sophisticated debate about what e-learning can and cannot contribute to education in Africa.