Capacity Building

imc Supports eLearning Competence Centre in Ethiopia

Saarbruecken (GER), April 2009 - The Engineering Capacity Building Program (ecbp) is part of Germany's development cooperation with Ethiopia. Its efforts include the reform of higher education and the modernization of engineering curricula. imc, a German learning-solutions supplier, is supporting the establishment of an eLearning competence center in Addis Ababa, providing know-how for the recording of presentations and university lectures.




Ethiopia is in need of well-trained engineers. High-level engineering training is crucial to the country's dynamic and sustainable industrial development. Therefore, the Engineering Capacity Building Program (ecbp) puts emphasis on the modernization of engineering in higher education institutions: Since the beginning of the bilateral German-Ethiopian program in 2005, ecbp has fostered flexible curricula and promoted up-to-date topics in higher education curricula.

"ELearning in general and lecture recording in particular are very important as a response to the significant shortage in teaching resources available in Ethiopian higher education", Dr. Wolfgang Kraemer, imc's CEO, points out. Recording lectures makes the documentation and distribution of teaching materials available in institutions that do not have their own facilities.

The new eLearning competence centre, which is currently being set up at Addis Ababa University, will serve as a broker in the exchange and the distribution of learning materials in engineering.

"LECTURNITY is our software tool for presentation recording. It is used widely in the higher education sector to create e-lectures", Kraemer adds. "LECTURNITY is easy to use, implements integrated recording, editing, and publishing processes, and leads to excellent recording quality. We are very pleased about our Ethiopian partners' interest in using the tool and proud to make a contribution to fruitful development cooperation between the two countries."

LECTURNITY is a tool for the simultaneous recording of all sources of information used during the presentation process, e.g. presentation slides, handwritten annotations on the slides, audio and video, and additional video clips produced via the integrated screen- grabbing tool.


LECTURNITY, thus, produces authentic documentation of the lecture. Recorded documents are popular among student as valuable sources of information in periods of self-paced and self-directed learning.