Abstract:

Expreriences in teaching Project Management Techniques for ICT and other projects in Madagascar and Bénin in Africa.

Lecturer ir. Wim De Bruyn teached 4 courses of 1 week about project management in Bénin (West-Africa) and Madagascar (East-Africa) for ICT and other project managers. All participants asked to extend these courses by 4-5 extra webconference sessions between Europe (Gent) and Africa (Cotonou and Antanananarivo). Besides Polytechnical universites also private organisations like Ex-change Belgium and Goticom, CdC Antanananarivo, Cotonou CTB-BTC were interacting.
Finally it was clear that mixed learning environments are important for Africa to develop local talent further. Step after step the local ICT and web-infrastructure is growing and by making use of installations of both private companies, World Bank E-conferece centers and Belgian Webconference infrastructures, both private and academic practical formats of e-conference sessions were adding value to these Project Management Excellence trainings for Project Mangement Professionals.

We will present practical curricula for these topics, capabilities of getting certified, similarities between different courses, cultural differences and motivation for these teaching and training methods.

Course contents are based on the PMP material of www.pmi.org. Comparisons with other standards for project management like Prince2 and Prince3 will be demonstrated. Planning of international, multi-party groups remain important and modern scheduling methodologies connected with management structures will be demonstrated (Scrum, X-treme programming).

Experiences, results and comparison with other more classical teaching methods will be presented.

Cultural differences about power distance, masculine behaviour and organisational relevance will be discussed. (Hofstede)

Impact analysis and results.

Clearly during the study these distance learning methods had an important impact on the way to teach in developing countries.

Practical results and recommandations are formulated and open for discussion.

Keywords:

e-learning, Africa, mixed learning, webconferences, learning machines, e-learning and webconference environments.