Workshop Announcement

How to produce an instructional module on the Internet

A pre-conference workshop of the eLearning Africa Conference 2006 in Addis Ababa:

A two-day, hands-on workshop for teachers, professors, trainers and educational experts with a three-week eLearning phase on the Internet.

Trainer: Sebastian Hoffmann is a partner at Hoffmann & Reif Consultants, Germany, http://www.hoffmann-reif.com

Sebastian is a pioneer in developing eLearning services. He has contributed significantly to the building of one of the first German eLearning competence centers back in 1996: the “tele-akademie” of the University of Applied Sciences in Furtwangen, a remote location in the Black Forest. In November 2001 the “tele-akademie“ was awarded as the best academic eLearning provider in Germany. Sebastian is author and moderator of several on-line courses. Since 1997 he has been engaged in eLearning capacity building in Africa and Asia. He is a main designer of the “Comprehensive Package for Building eLearning Organisations”, a programme that had been developed jointly with the German agency for technical cooperation GTZ: http://www.hoffmann-reif.com/e3091/e16/index_eng.html#e1024

Venue: Graduate School of Telecommunications and Information Technology, Addis Ababa.

Content: Delivering learning through networks requires the materialisation of knowledge into media. Therefore course production and publishing become a core component of staff development for institutions or individuals wishing to embark on eLearning services.



Content and methods of this workshop are action- and result-oriented. The participants will actually produce eLearning content along the lines of a “Rapid eLearning Production” methodology.



Participants are guided to design their eLearning course module, to produce it on their networked PCs and to publish it on-the-fly on the Internet. Each participant will become the owner of a designated personal space on an eLearning platform. Here participants will produce and publish their own eLearning module with the help of a cutting-edge Open Source based content management system.



The workshop will start with an introductory presentation on instructional design and web publishing. Then follows a live demonstration and hands-on exercises on the Internet. Based on this warming-up phase, the participants are coached by the trainers to produce and publish their own eLearning course module. This is done by taking digitalised teaching material and aids such as text, graphics, photos, transparencies etc the participants bring in from their actual lessons or seminars and by using this material for constructing an eLearning module.

The workshop will accommodate a maximum of 20 participants.

Related to each personal result a certificate will be awarded.



The participants will prepare themselves for the workshop by studying workshop relevant resources provided on the eLearning platform. During the workshop the eLearning platform will serve as a workbench for all activities. During the two weeks follow-up phase the eLearning platform will support further activities related to the transfer of acquired skills to the workplace.

Target Audience: Workshop participants are educationalists, teachers, trainers, and professors who are already familiar with

  • working on a PC on the Internet,
  • and instructional design.

They want to get insights into eLearning and web-based course production and they appreciate a workshop in which their active participation is required.

Prerequisite Knowledge and Requirements: Only those participants should attend the workshop who have a clear mandate to extend their own face to face teaching through media based teaching services. The participant´s project will be assessed through an online assessment procedure. Every participant has to bring teaching material such as text, graphics, photos, transparencies etc related to the subject she/he is teaching in a digital format to the workshop.

Outcomes: The participants will apply newly acquired knowledge to their teaching and training practice. They will perform the following tasks (outcome in brackets):

  • practice a Rapid eLearning methodology for courseware development (course module);
  • author a WebQuest document (WebQuest);
  • publish instructional content on an eLearning platform (course home page);
  • experience blended learning (documented learning interaction);
  • teach online (tutor messages);
  • use online evaluation tools (online evaluation forms).