Development of digital campuses for education, 3D modelling

The pilot phase of an Africa Digital Campus, which will be set up for its first two years at the Virtual University of Burkina Faso in Ouagadougou, has been launched by Professor Fréderic Ouattara, Burkina Faso’s minister for higher education, scientific research and innovation.

Meanwhile, a first training session in digitisation and 3D modelling has successfully taken place at Omar Bongo University in Gabon, organised by CNFL, or the Campus Numérique Francophone de Libreville.

Burkina Faso

The Africa Digital Campus project will be supported jointly by the West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN); AUF, the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie; and IRD, the French Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, reported Sidwaya. AFD, the French Development Agency, is funding the 1 million euro (US$1.1 million) project.

At the launch ceremony, Ouattara praised the innovative character of the project bringing together distance learning students and teachers, and said it would provide solutions to problems affecting the country’s universities, reported Sidwaya.

“For us, it is an effective tool which will not only improve our education offer through the provisioning of study resources online, but also increase teachers’ educational capacity and reduce the academic backwardness which is a stranglehold on the universities,” Sidwaya reported him as saying.

According to Damien Alline, the project’s coordinator at the IRD, scaling up will work if Burkina Faso, among other things, manages to open up its e-learning areas and university interconnection.

The e-learning success of the Virtual University of Burkina Faso was already a good impetus for the country.

“The idea is to help to reach a certain stage to speed up the existing process by enabling the production of more quality online courses which will encourage students to enrol in this kind of unit to be able to take degrees,” Sidwaya quoted Alline as saying.

The project will also support teachers so they can produce courses according to the required methodology and work comfortably on the e-learning platform.”

Alline also emphasised that the pilot phase involved getting quick results on a small scale.

“The pilot project will concern about 100 students and a few teachers whom we can really support at close quarters, to get results very fast and show the impact we can get with this investment,” Sidwaya reported him as saying.

It would be this impact which would finally be submitted to the decision-makers – the government and backers – to convince them to continue the impetus and move to a national scale, according to Sidwaya.

Jean-Marie Dipama, the Virtual University’s president, was pleased that the African Digital Campus project was based on the e-learning system already existing in Burkina’s universities, a system that he had built up.

“Whoever talks about distance education is talking about an infrastructure in which to store resources and access them through communications technologies. This project represents an alliance in the spirit of pooling different resources,” Sidwaya reported him as saying.

Anne-Marie Sawadogo, of the AFD’s Sahel regional office, emphasised the challenge of overcoming the impediments caused by COVID-19 and insecurity. “Being able to learn at distance changes lives,” she said from her own experience, reported Sidwaya.

Gabon

The CNFL training session at Omar Bongo University, the first of its kind, taught participants the modelling of objects for printing and preparation of the printer to complete 3D printing, reported Gabonews.

Marky-Dasset Ndong Bitegue, an entrepreneur in the food sector who attended the course, was satisfied with the outcome.

“At the end of this training, I can produce an object with 3D. Examples of what I can produce are a key ring, chairs and other things like tables and so on,” Gabonews reported him as saying.

Auclaire Letamba, who taught the course, was also satisfied, having achieved its aims.

“Personally, I am satisfied after five days of training, we have been able to produce a model that the students initiated themselves. They developed a project, the specifications and then the model was made. Given this achievement, the students are capable of modelling. That’s to say, determine the technical term that enables them to cut the item layer by layer, and make the item.”

This trial phase in digitisation and modelling was aimed at arousing the interest of the public, including industrialists, teachers, students and administrative professionals, in the use of 3D technology, said Gabonews. — Compiled by Jane Marshall.

This article is drawn from local media. University World News cannot vouch for the accuracy of the original reports.