Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 4 | Linking African Universities with MIT iLabs, page 5

The African Connection
The link between Africa and MIT was forged in 2003, when the vice chancellors of several sub-Saharan universities receiving Carnegie Corporation support visited MIT and toured a number of educational initiatives, including iLabs. They immediately saw how this new concept could help bridge the gap in their universities’ science and engineering departments and, with encouragement from iLab’s developers, asked the Corporation to consider sponsoring an African iLab initiative. The project got the go-ahead in 2004 after a feasibility study confirmed its potential to enrich education in developing countries. Well aware that the study also revealed significant challenges these countries face, del Alamo’s team nevertheless enthusiastically followed the feasibility study with a proposal for a joint program “to find ways to mitigate or altogether eliminate these barriers.”

For Africa’s technology leaders, MIT’s involvement is a welcome move forward. Kehinde praises their “concern for the plight of developing countries with grossly inadequate experimental capabilities. It is notable,” he says, “that a renowned university like MIT is interested in conducting research that takes into consideration the effect of the divide between the more advanced universities with state-of-the-art equipment, and the problems of the developing countries with respect to inadequate human, material and infrastructure resources for teaching and research.” Together, the teams have organized a three-prong program for leveraging the iLab platform: 1) curriculum enrichment incorporating existing and upcoming experiments; 2) contribution to iLab architecture development, resulting in new labs compatible with the African learning process; 3) promoting the iLab architecture, with modifications as needed, as an industry standard. Kehinde has set an ambitious timetable for making contributions to the architecture, and looks forward to the time when “collaboration and cooperation between the continent’s higher institutions may offer the easiest path to mutual development.”

OAU engineering professor Kunle Kehinde.

One realization on the technology front was that iLabs, which were developed in an environment del Alamo describes as “awash with bandwidth,” are not necessarily suitable for “bandwidth-starved situations” that exist in many developing countries. In particular, the MIT team found that their clients (software programs that run a lab user’s computer) were too “fat” or “verbose” for Africa, and they have since developed a new “thin” client for the microelectronics lab, specifically designed for environments where the bandwidth is very restricted. On the bright side, the connectivity situation should soon improve. As a member of the Bandwidth Consortium (a coalition of African universities and education organizations formed for bulk purchasing of bandwidth) OAU, with annual costs for less-than-adequate bandwidth currently running up to $125,000, has recently obtained access to vastly expanded Internet capacity at approximately one-third the cost. This improvement resulted from the Bandwidth Initiative, a collaborative project of the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa, which involves the Ford, MacArthur, Rockefeller, Hewlett and Mellon foundations and Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Besides Internet capacity, sub-Saharan Africa has a dire need for increased human capacity. At OAU, Kehinde has struggled to find the right students not only to utilize the iLabs, but to help handle development and maintenance as well. Kehinde believes in preparing technology students for a future of multitasking as “a reality that everyone who works in an electronics or ICT-related field has to face.” His own responsibilities include overseeing the staff and the experiments, contributing to curriculum development and coordinating workshops as well as the all-important exchange program.

Kehinde is also a key player in creating new experiments, and his earlier work on operational amplifiers (electrical circuit building blocks), or op-amps, published years ago in the United Kingdom, is the basis of a project encompassing thirteen separate experiments that came online early in 2006. Eventually, he aims to have his team create an extensive portfolio of such labs incorporating the MIT iLab Shared Architecture.

It’s this act of engineering and refining “uniquely African” projects Kehinde clearly finds most rewarding. “In the process of creating iLabs experiments we are trying to employ alternative methods that will achieve the same results,” he explains. “For example, we started out by replacing the costlier manufactured matrix switch with simpler switches. We also added some locally available integrated circuits for better performance.”

OAU students attend an iLab workshop.

As of mid-January 2006, MIT graduate students Mitros and Gikandi had spent their first week sizing up OAU’s iLab and, as they put it, “working on the same things as in the U.S., only in Nigeria. …Impressions are generally positive,” they report. Their immediate plans are to talk more extensively with the African team about how to increase collaboration, as well as to observe classes at all levels: primary, secondary and tertiary—an opportunity they are “very excited about.”

Mitros made note of the shortage in both electronics equipment and teaching staff (two oscilloscopes and five faculty for several hundred students) and the relative inflexibility of coursework compared to higher education in the United States. “Free electives are discouraged, for example, and the workload is designed with the intention of people not taking any classes outside of their program,” he found. However, Mitros is gratified that his scaled-down lab, the Mini, “has, thus far, had a positive reception.” Plans are already in the works for two undergraduates to develop their own iLab projects around it.

In Kehinde’s view, virtual labs in general, and the iLabs in particular, hold the greatest promise for developing nations. “We are grateful to MIT for sharing this new idea with Africa,” he says. “Now we need to work together to best complement MIT’s efforts. The idea is not to deviate from MIT’s aims,” he stresses, but to work together to evolve a notable MIT standard. The African partners need to forge a common front to investigate how this platform can be used to correct deficiencies plaguing the academic system. Ultimately, our vision for this collaboration is a truly distributed virtual lab where OAU develops N experiments, Makerere, in Uganda, develops X experiments and Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania, develops Y. All experiments will then be pooled. Students of all universities needn’t even know exactly where the experiments they are doing are housed.”

Nothing could make del Alamo happier than to see iLabs roll out across the continent. Whatever the outcome, he’s already been surprised to find that “the African project is satisfying in ways that exceed any expectation. When it began, it was just a relatively small part of my total career. Now it is the major part. And I love it,” he says. “This is what tenure can do: give you the freedom to take a risk and pursue an idea because you believe in it, without the fear of failure.” What’s his definition of success? “It’s simple,” he says, “that the African partners feel the iLab concept is sound, accept it and enhance it.”

Karen Theroux is an editor/writer in the Corporation’s Public Affairs department with many years’ experience in educational publishing.