Earlier this week, the University of the Western Cape (UWC), South Africa, announced that it had received a grant of ZAR 3.7 million (approximately EUR 473 000) from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada. The purpose of the grant is to establish a network of African universities to build free software for use in higher education on the continent. The project, known as the African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR), is working on a second-generation learning management system suitable for the bandwidth environment of Africa while being at the cutting edge of e-learning. The group will also be developing applications for use in managing student enrolment as well as other aspects of university administration. An important part of the AVOIR project is also research into processes of collaboration and free and open source software development in the African context, as well as research into the design of e-learning systems.
Aside from UWC, the Universities which are participating in the project are the University of Jos (Nigeria), Universite Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar (Senegal),20 Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (Kenya), University of Nairobi (Kenya), Makerere University (Uganda), University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Catholic University of Mozambique (Mozambique) and The University of Eduardo Modlane (Mozambique). In addition, a number of other universities are collaborating with the AVOIR project through other means of support, including the University of Ghana Legon (Ghana), the University of Port Elizabeth and Peninsula Technikon (South Africa)...................
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