THE META COURSE: IMPLEMENTATION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF

DAR ES SALAAM, TANZANIA

BY ANDREW KIONDO

DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF DAR ES SALAAM

I. INTRODUCTION

Ford Foundation support for academic activities at the University of Dar es Salaam and particularly at the Department oaf Political Science and Public Administration is not new. The department has been enjoying this support as far back as the 1970s. Mainly the support has focused on many activities including research, scholarship/training, institutional capacity building and conferences. However towards the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, a new focus has emerged: the support of innovation in program delivery. We have in mind here the support to two distinctive projects namely the East African Uongozi Institute (1998) and the Tufts- Makerere – Dar es Salaam Curriculum Co- Development Project (2000).

The two projects share several assumptions and aspirations. They both involve universities in East Africa and North America together, they don’t replace but enhance classroom teaching, students from participating Universities interact and the projects are both FORD FOUNDATION supported! However, whereas East African Uongozi Institute participants interact and live together in one premise) those from the curriculum Co Development Project interact through the Internet only.

The Uongozi Institute Program brings together students from the University of Dar es Salaam, University of Nairobi, Makerere University and students from North American Universities coordinated from University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). For a period of six to eight weeks about sixty students undergo a program that starts with a one week community service field work. Then they participate in a series of lectures panels given by leading intellectuals and officials from the public service sector, the private sector, and the civil society sector. Finally, the program involves several educational field trips and visits to important learning sights such as exchange markets and museums.

Both programs use interactive learning “to help students come to an active appreciation of alternative points of view” (See the presentation in this panel by Robinson). However, the Curriculum Co- Development Program aims at enhancing knowledge acquisition by the use of a series of computer assisted learning experiences that are lacking in the Uongozi Institute program. This presentation will focus on the curriculum co development project activities at the University of Dar es Salaam.

II. CURRICULUM CO DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF DAR ES SALAAM

CCD activities at the University of Dar es Salaam are so far based at the department of Political Science and Public Administration and for the academic year 2000/2001 they have involved one course only namely PS 319 (Regional Integration). The course begins with the current theoretical and conceptual discourse on regional integration. It then proceeds on to expose students to various theories of regional integration. Finally the theories are put to test by testing their application from the experiences of the practice of regional integration in Europe, Africa, Latin America, North America and Asia. Plans are on the way to use the experience and lessons learnt in this one course to extend activities to cover two more courses: 1) International Law and 2) Gender and Politics in Africa

CCD activities at Dar es Salaam started on January 8, 2001. This is when the second term at the University of Dar es Salaam started. But before that date, a lot of preparatory activities were done towards end of the first term in December 2000. The preparatory activities included;

(i) Selecting on line student participants: This was necessary because the course (i.e. PS 319) involved fifty-four students while room for participating students required only twenty five students from Dar es Salaam. We finally selected twenty four students for pairing them to twelve computers during training sessions.

(ii) Training the selected participating students: After surveying the available training programs at the University, we settled for the University of Dar es Salaam Library training program. The two week training program was done jointly by the Library trainers and the project technical support person Mr. Hilal Seif Mohamed (See Appendix A).

(iii) The Project Online Teaching Program: Program online delivery was done through a number of activities including weekly discussions, class assignments, course reading documents, E-mail correspondence and individualized discussions and interactive website exercises such as the virtual chart.

Of the above activities, the virtual chart was probably the most innovative and interesting part of the project. It involved students and teachers from the three Universities chatting together on the Internet. Well-structured issues were posted on the course website before hand, for students to discuss and give their views; and students were free to raise their own issues among themselves and or with individual members of staff teaching the metacourse in the three Universities.

While this part of the project was very interesting and innovative by getting all participating students and staff from all the three Universities together on the Internet at the same time, the problem was to get suitable time. With a time difference of eight hours between the USA and East Africa, students and staff from Tufts University had to be on their computers at six in the morning to meet with their East African counterparts at two in the afternoon!

III. Problems Encountered: Experiences From the South

The most significant problems noted from the Southern Universities experience were lack of: (a) adequate facilities, (b) easy computer accessibility and (c) a reliable local area network. Dar es Salaam was lucky because of the prior establishment of a reliable network at the Computing Centre and a timely establishment of the Faculty of Arts Computer Lab. The Computer Lab established by an assistance of sixty computers: twenty from the Ford Foundation and forty from the University of Dar es Salaam, served as the main computer accessing point for the participating students. Other points were the University Library and the Computing Centre. However, students still faced problems as explained in Appendix A.

At Makerere, non availability of a reliable network and computers for participating students even delayed the takeoff of the project there but two months after Dar es Salaam and Tufts students and staff were online already, Makerere participants announced their participation with a loud bang!

Another problem faced by the Southern Universities was that the CCD was a new phenomenon in the Universities. Because of the novelty of the project and the fact that it involved only one course for each University, most students were very eager to participate and yet there was no room for all students who wished to participate. At Makerere it was worse with hundreds of students competing for twenty-five places only.

Despite these noted problems in the South, the CCD program recorded an overall a success there. Appendixes B and C at the end of this presentation show how some of the participating students succeeded to beat the computer accessibility problems by recording high accessibility points shown in the appendix charts.

As noted in this and previous presentation in this panel (see Prof. Robinson’s presentation) the innovativeness of the CCD project lies in the positive use of information technology to be able to bring together students and staff from Northern and Southern Universities to an interactive learning environment. This is more important because elsewhere, ICT and globalization have been known to marginalize rather than benefit the South!