An Elluminate
Success Story

Elluminate vOffice™ Connects North American Teachers with African Students

By Dr. Therrezinha Fernandes, PILAF Project Coordinator, and Sidiki Traore, Manager, Dakar Regional Office.

Initially launched in Washington in 1997 as a World Bank project, the African Virtual University (AVU) was later transferred to Nairobi, Kenya in 2002. Five African governments—Kenya, Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, and Cote d’Ivoire—signed a charter establishing the AVU as an Inter-Governmental Organization.

The AVU has its headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya and a regional office in Dakar, Senegal to service our partner institutions in Francophone and Anglophone West Africa. During the 10 years of its existence, the AVU has acquired the largest network of Open Distance and e-Learning (ODeL) institutions in Africa.

The AVU’s greatest asset is our ability to work across borders and language groups, and we needed an easy-to-use and user-friendly eLearning solution to deliver our courses throughout Africa. We were looking for a platform that did not need a large bandwidth or have too many technical requirements to be functional because of the technical difficulties experienced by of some of our Africans partner institutions.

A single-room Elluminate vOffice™ is perfect for our needs in the Dakar office: we use it for some of our “short-course" certificate programs for English and journalism, enabling us to connect teachers located in the United States and Canada with students in Somalia and Burundi. We selected the product because it was easy to use, user friendly, very practical, and not too demanding in terms of technical requirements. In addition, the Elluminate solution was less expensive than the alternatives we considered. We implemented Elluminate on a Windows platform in just a few days. It was simple and very fast.

Elluminate provides more flexibility, it's easy to use, and the participants are very enthusiastic. Our teachers and students love it! We estimate that using Elluminate technology has saved us around USD $9K over our previous platform. In the future, we anticipate upgrading to a multi-room Elluminate Live! virtual classroom.

"It's so easy to use," said AVU's Washington-based English teacher Cara Fulton. “It's also very interactive. Everyone can talk, chat, write on the board, and share documents and applications. It sounds very high-tech, and it is, but it only takes a second to learn. What's really great is that if you miss class, it's a snap to review the playback."