I was reading through a topic on marketing personas, fictional characters used to represent your customer or target audience. You will give your persona a name, age, interests and any other characteristic you deem necessary to be able to visualise them. Then it hit me that I should be using the same concept when designing lesson plans. In fact, this should be relatively easy as I often know who I will be teaching or training. I will write an update at a later stage to tell you how well it is going.
The four things I believe are stopping more Africans from taking advantage of e-learning are: Electricity: With most parts of Africa having little or no electricity supply, it becomes a moot point accessing the Internet. And yes, one could use phones but these require charging. Connectivity : There is still not enough bandwidth availalable and sometimes connection speeds could be crippling. I tried watching a Youtube video in Freetown recently and had to give up after 1 hour. Equipment: Laptops, Tablets and even Smartphones are still too expensive for the average student. Payment: Although a lot of online resources are free, some very good Africa-focused education products are paid for: Pass , African Virtual School , and Eneza Education . Students or their parents do not have easy access to credit/debit cards or are not aware of alternative payments. I believe that once these barriers are reduced, E-learning in Africa will take off.
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