edTech

ICT-based Education to Make a Difference

http://www.uef.fi/edtech

Learning technologies for contextualized education

Expertise1

Example: Mobile Games for contextualised education

• Museum education• Science education in Forestry, Mathematics

and Science Fair• Tourism

Story based mobile game for mathematics: UFractions

ICT for Development

Expertise2

Long term R&D projects in Africa

• Contextualised IT Bachelor Degree Programme in Tanzania

• Robotic and tangible technologies based education in Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique

• Staff and student exchange programme: NSS Business Informatics on the Ground

• edTech Hub at Dar es Salaam • PhD student training and research capacity building

• College of Business Education

Human Language Technologies

Expertise3

Example: Text mining in business and education

• Business intelligence to support eLeadership• analysis of own brand vs. competitor’s

• evaluating product popularity

• automatic mining of customers’ opinion from social media (prototypes for Facebook, Twitter)

• Emotion detection and Sentiment Analysis• social media

• learning diaries

• cyberbullying detection

Science and Technology Dissemination

Expertise4

Example: SciFest.fi – Festival of Science and Technology

edTech Hub at Dar es Salaam

• Co-operation between University of Eastern Finland (UEF) and College of Business Education (CBE)

• Aim: improve the quality of teaching and learning, and nourish the development of research in CBE

• Serves also as a platform for other collaboration

Motivation

• Most Tanzanian HEI’s focus mainly on undergraduate education, especially in IT related fields, while research outputs are generally low

• Faculty members are mostly master’s degree holders• Faculty members are heavily loaded with teaching and

administrative duties

=> lack of support for research and a shallow research culture

Solution

• Set up a doctoral training school hosted jointly by UEF and CBE

• Five CBE faculty members are given postgraduate training on-site

• The PhD candidates form a research group, which focuses on the research topic of Business Informatics

• The PhD candidates study at the UEF edTeach-group’s impdet.org online doctoral programme

• The first phase of the initiative is scheduled to last four years, during which the first batch of 5 faculty members is expected to graduate

Research topics addressing societal challenges

• Empowering women entrepreneurs in Tanzania through mobile technologies

• Technology for enhancing the small scale farming community. The case of Chamwino district, Dodoma, Tanzania.

• Transforming street vending business using mobile technologies in Tanzania

Long term goals

• Sustaining a fully functional research group at CBE• Hosting a number of contextually relevant research projects

• Attractive for local and international academia

• Connections with local and international business

• A steady stream of internationally recognized scientific publications

• Understanding about best practices for supporting the growth of research culture in a Tanzania HEI

• Creating a global edTech Hub network

Current activities and contact

• Launch event of the edTech Hub, Dar es Salaam, June 25th

• Want to collaborate, co-create, co-educate and do joint research in Tanzania?• Do you have interesting research ideas?

• Business ideas?

• Want to visit Tanzania for fun?

• Contact: Dr. Mikko Apiola, mikko.apiola@ieee.org

• Are you interested in hosting an edTech Hub in your country/region/institution?

• Dr. Jarkko Suhonen, jarkko.suhonen@uef.fi

• Dr. Calkin Suero Montero, calkin.montero@uef.fi