Vision:
To provide a central e-Learning hub for
all scholars in Africa for the sake of Africa’s development.
all scholars in Africa for the sake of Africa’s development.
ASFIScholar
ASFIScholar is now launched, a place for African scholars and professionals, home and abroad, to learn, mentor, collaborate, publish and be visible.
Join ASFIScholar HereBackground
The proposed ASFIScholar is an e-Learning platform that incorporates some attractions of the social media, including blogging, chatting, mailing, podcasting, as well as video and teleconferencing to enable African academics, students, industry experts and employers to share resources, learn across borders, connect socially, and collaborate on impact-focused projects across the continent.
The platform is expected to re-invent the learning experience by encouraging result-focused collaboration between communities, researchers, industries across borders and cultures. It is also aimed at offering educational resources to all African scholars without borders. Experts from various fields of endeavour will be invited to contribute and share contents within the platform for the benefit of scientists in the continent.
AFSIScholar can be seen as the African version of Coursera or other related e-Learning platforms, but it is solely dedicated to Africans, with additional aspects of networking and collaboration among Africans for the sake of generating connected projects that will spur development of the continent.
Objectives
• Contribute to learning and development in Africa by enabling
mutual sharing of learning resources and collaboration across borders
• Create an avenue for Africans to learn using the newest approaches
and provide access to state-of-the-art learning resources across the globe.
• Create an avenue for Africans at home, Africans in the Diaspora
and other nationals to contribute educational resources to the development of Africa.
• Connect and engage with colleagues and high scientific
profile researchers across Africa
• Facilitate project-based learning platform that is supported
by all stakeholders in the education sector in Africa.
• Create a one-stop shop of rich educational resources for all Africans.
mutual sharing of learning resources and collaboration across borders
• Create an avenue for Africans to learn using the newest approaches
and provide access to state-of-the-art learning resources across the globe.
• Create an avenue for Africans at home, Africans in the Diaspora
and other nationals to contribute educational resources to the development of Africa.
• Connect and engage with colleagues and high scientific
profile researchers across Africa
• Facilitate project-based learning platform that is supported
by all stakeholders in the education sector in Africa.
• Create a one-stop shop of rich educational resources for all Africans.
Benefits
When completed, ASFIScholar will:
- • Provide opportunities for academics and researchers to stretch their influence beyond their local,
regional or national borders, thereby imparting more students other than the ones in their own
immediate environments. - • Offer a one-stop shop access to valuable educational resources that are available within the African
continent and in the custody of the friends of Africa in the Diaspora. - • Offer effective interaction and collaboration between Africans both at home and in the Diaspora to
impact positively on the quality of research and learning thus turning the purported “brain drain” to
“brain gain” of some sort.
Features
To ensure that the benefits of the platform are attained and to achieve needed networking and
collaboration among African scholars, ASFIScholar is implemented with features that will enable ongoing
interactions, productive learning, and fruitful collaborations. The following are features that will be embedded into the platform:
- • Video/teleconferencing: a live, visual connection between two or more people residing in separate locations for the purpose of communication.
- • Postcasting: a digital audio file made available on the Internet for downloading to a computer or mobile device.
- • Tutorials/quizzes: practice questions and quizzes for Scholars.
- • Users’ spaces: user’s personal space where the user’s projects, library files, and collaborative documents are organized.
- • Directory: spaces to follow based on users’ interests or discipline; a user can also search for scholars of choice for cross pollination of ideas.
- • Library: repository of books, journals, files, research/project documents and presentations in electronic form (eBooks, eJournals, etc.) that
can be shared among community of scholars. - • Forum: a space offering the chance for creating discussion threads on different topic areas among the community of scholars.
- • Messaging: space allowing users (faculty and students, students and students and industry leaders and students) to exchange emails and real-time chat
on the platform on issues of mutual interest. - • Dashboard: the space showing newsfeed of recent updates from faculty, scholars as well as all the information relating to the discipline of the scholar.
