File:Opening Up Education in Rwanda.pdf

This short report describes the context for opening up education in Rwanda. Its focus is on higher education, although there is some coverage of schooling and also NGO activity.

In Rwanda there are many developments in high-speed networking and a substantial amount of distance education being delivered in and into the country. These provide a fruitful context for future development of OER, MOOCs and open education generally. Among the highlights are:

• Rwandan primary school children benefit from the One Laptop per Child Project funded by the One Laptop per Child Association.
• Open Learning Exchange Rwanda (OLE) promotes information on Public Health and Environment using ICT.
• Nokia and the Government of Rwanda have agreed a pilot project (SocialEDU) for free educational content. This will be available via edX linked to Facebook.
• Rwanda has a TESSA community and the University of Rwanda College of Education is a TESSA partner.
• The UK OU began a project in 2010 named Open University Rwanda whereby it was advising the Rwandan Government on setting up distance learning nationally.
• Kepler is providing university qualifications through blended learning making use of MOOCS and linking students with employers. Courses are provided in the following areas: Business Management & Finance, Computer Science, and Engineering

This report is being released within POERUP under the normal POERUP guidelines of Creative Commons 4.0, as above. We hope that those more familiar with Rwanda in recent years will add their input to improve future versions documenting the achievements of Rwanda in ICT for education, and open education in particular.

The report was written by Charlotte Doody and edited by Paul Bacsich. Paul has a long-standing interest in Rwanda since his work there on projects for Imfundo in the early 2000s on planning for what became RwEdNet.

For more information (even if somewhat out of date) see the wiki page http://www.virtualcampuses.eu/index.php/Rwanda