|
|
|
Programme overview and outline
Goal
The overall goal of this initiative is to provide information and resources and to develop skills and knowledge in selected universities and research institutions, on strategies and techniques for managing and optimising bandwidth usage. The end result will be greater efficiency of bandwidth and access to networked resources by researchers and educationalists to support research and associated capacity development.
Objectives
- To design and develop tools and training resources to aid institutions in understanding the bandwidth problem and in implementing strategies to address bandwidth management and optimisation.
- The training resources and supporting materials will be structured and targeted at three key groups; executive management, senior management and information intermediaries and IT staff. Each group will be targeted by a number of specific but complimentary modules. Each group set of modules will form stand-alone resources for dissemination and delivery as appropriate and in a cascading model.
- To design and develop the materials as a collaborative exercise with training and subject experts from a range of organisations from the north and south (to include INASP, VLIR, southern partners and others), as a means of developing the highest quality, locally appropriate materials and building local capacity in training programme design and delivery.
- To pilot the delivery of one, national level workshop in an initial series of bandwidth optimisation briefing and training workshops in a selected African country (provisionally Zambia).
- To deliver and manage a series of cascading travelling workshops at national, local and institutional levels in selected countries and institutions.
- To ensure that the workshop materials are fully available to any interested parties (via release under an Open Access/non-restrictive copyright licence and as part of the ItrainOnline MMTK initiative) via a distributed knowledge base and are disseminated and used in a range of initiatives e.g. ItrainOnline, Connectivity Africa, Foundation Partnership, PERI training workshop programmes, IICD training programmes, AAU General Conference, etc.
- To promote and disseminate the materials and outcomes of these activities. To include online distribution and limited distribution on CD-Rom.
Target audience
Primary
Target audience for training materials, tools and resources; trainers involved in the delivery of bandwidth optimisation and resource management skills development and awareness raising activities in selected VLIR and African partner universities.
Target audience of training workshops; workshop participants will be selected from VLIR and African partner universities from three key groups:
- Executive management - policy and governance
- Senior management - policies and procedures, design and planning
- Information intermediaries and IT staff - training and information related policies, technical policies, tools and solutions, implementation and daily administration
Secondary
Groups and individuals from those groups outlined above but from non-university research centres within Africa and beyond.
Activities overview
The following activities provide an overview of the proposed programme:
- Project initiation and selection of local partners - partners who are committed to being involved in this activity include: TENET (South Africa), AfriConnect (UK and Zambia) and others TBC. Consultation with active and potential partners will be undertaken to refine the final participant's details.
- Planning and programme development in consultation with eventual participating organisations.
- Collaborative planning and development workshop (4-5 days). To include the development of training activity outlines, learning objectives, programme content, pedagogic delivery framework and materials as appropriate.
- Distributed development of materials and supporting resources (this will involve partners writing materials and the commissioning of materials from third parties).
- Delivery of pilot workshop at a national level, plus national trainers from selected countries and organisations. This will be split into two sessions; a training workshop (to pilot the workshop and accompanying materials) and a trainers' review/training of trainer session.
- Revision of the materials, wide dissemination of the tools through VLIR, IDRC, INASP, Higher Education Partnership, ItrainOnline MMTK, AAU, etc. via publications, websites, conferences, meetings, etc. Preparation of materials to be used as "stand-alone" training and reference resources.
- Follow on travelling national level workshops - several running in parallel, with trainers travelling and exchanging between countries.
- Follow on institutional level training workshops
- Iterative review and development of the materials and process at each stage
|