January–December 2006
Education is vitally important to lasting democracy and economic growth in Africa. Unfortunately, lack of learning materials, scarcity of qualified teachers, the epidemic of AIDS, and financial constraints are massive obstacles to learning across the continent. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) offer one way of delivering higher education to residents of Sub-Saharan Africa who would otherwise have no access to such institutions. By incorporating the technologies of MIT’s OpenCourse- Ware (OCW) and iLabs to provide remote access to MIT laboratories, the project demonstrated a sustainable model for sharing education content with this part of the developing world, initially Cameroon, Zambia, and Kenya. Besides providing a valuable resource to the African universities involved, MIT students were also able to evaluate the effectiveness of the new technologies and prove, over great distances, the power of remote learning.
Student Participants: Mohamed Haji, Fawah Akwo, Jamira Cotton, Marta Luczynska
Faculty Advisor: Prof. Shigeru Miyagawa