Capacity Building in Digital Development for ACE Impact Centres

Creation of 6 Centres of Competence in Digital Education

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Six ACE Impact host Universities were competitively selected and are being supported and establish Centers of Competence in Digital Education on their campuses to promote the sustainable integration of digital education in the teaching processes, as a means of strengthening the quality of teaching as well as the competencies of graduates.

The 6 selected universities are:

  1. The National Open University of Nigeria,
  2. The University of Nigeria, Nsukka,
  3. The Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria,
  4. The University of Energy and Natural Resources, Sunyani, Ghana,
  5. l’Université Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso,
  6. l’Université d’Abomey-Calavi, Cotonou, Bénin.

The participating ACE Centers in these universities include the Africa Centre of Excellence on Technology Enhanced Learning (ACETEL), the Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Power and Energy Development (ACE-SPED), the Africa Center of Excellence in Population Health and Policy(ACEPHAP); the Center for Dryland Agriculture(CDA), the Regional Center for Energy and Environmental Sustainability (RCEES); CEA-Centre d’Etudes, de Formation et de Recherche en Gestion des Risques Sociaux (CEFORGRIS) and CEA-SMIA (Centre d’Excellence Africain en Sciences, Mathématiques, Informatique et Application.

This pilot initiative will provide the participating institutions with the training and coaching to transform their educational curricula by integrating modern digital education methods. Each selected University will commit funding from their ACE Impact project (s) towards acquisition of the necessary equipment and a venue to house their C-CoDE. Thirty (30) faculty, three (3) pedagogy engineers and two (2) technical specialists have been identified from each participating university and are being trained. This pilot is being implemented from September 2021 to July 2022.

The broader goal is for the selected Centers to eventually serve other African higher education institutions using a training-the-trainers model, within the broader ACE Impact project portfolio and beyond – across the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) region.

This project is a collaboration between EPFL and the Association of African Universities (AAU) in the framework of the African Centres of Excellence in Higher Education for Development Impact (ACE Impact) Project.