E-LEARNING INNOVATION IN ETHIOPIAN HIGHER EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS: CASE STUDY OF MADAWALBU UNIVERSITY

Education is the power tool of development and poverty alleviation. Information communication technology (ICT) has an indispensable role in this era of technology to share knowledge and information, and to being the agent for development. Before two centuries, the world was running the business and communications using in manual ways information dissemination. In this period of knowledge based economy, educational advancement plays the critical role for nations’ development to cope up with ever growing scenarios. However the educational advancement in developing countries lags behind by the lack of technology integration in education.

The main purpose of this study is to innovate the current education system of Ethiopian higher educational institutions through ICT to assist learning, to increase knowledge sharing and accessibility and to reduce time, cost and waste. To conduct this study, questionnaire and author's observation used as primary data for current situation analysis and need to be assessed later in the field. The related works are reviewed as a secondary data. The questionnaires before development are collected from 60 students and 10 teachers to justify the hypothesis. The prototype of web based e-learning system has been designed to develop by integrating asynchronous and synchronous methods of teaching. Both of the methods are important to use for regular students. More specifically the synchronous method is developed for distance and summer education students. The data analysis result has shown that students and teachers are more interested in using elearning system than the current traditional learning system. It is also evaluated that the economic value of e-learning system is much higher than the current traditional education system.