Ethiopian Data Literacy and Community Development - Post Workshop Learning Environment

Abstract

Ethiopian Universities' records are free of century-old academic traditions and therefore able to adjust to trends without giving up academic behavior or tradition. The volume of university libraries will linger on as a measure of the academic performance of universities. This allows Ethiopian universities to leapfrog and enter the digital era and to gain digital presence in line with the top-ranked universities - without having special academic honors. The digital era equalizes traditional and young universities. Both have to learn to find their identities and ways in the digital space. As many academically well-acknowledged universities demonstrate that tradition is often rather a burden than an advantage in the digital space. Therefore, Ethiopian universities are encouraged by politicians and the international research community to position themselves along with well-ranked universities. The prerequisite lays in the state-of-art infrastructure and lecturers' credentials to become digital literate in order to pass it further to counterparts and students. Digital literacy redefines literacy skills as well as academic work and tradition. However, good training resources for researchers looking to develop these skills are scarce and it is difficult to determine where to start. Training in data and computing skills is still largely absent from researchers in their undergraduate and graduate programs. Hence, a series of workshops to the topic "increase digital literacy for the researchers" had been delivered for young Ethiopian researchers. More than 400 researchers and librarians have been trained in The Carpentries. More than 23 participants from 23 Ethiopian Universities and 3 international participants of H3ABioNet which is a Pan African Bioinformatics network from Sudan, Kenya and Uganda have attended a train-the-trainer workshop in Addis Ababa in order to build a network and to add more instructors in to the ecosystem. In view of sustainability, the Ethiopian Carpentry team has developed different activities as post-workshop activities. The Ethiopian Carpentry Team considers coding as craftsmanship and stresses in line with this approach: practice makes perfect. Additional incentives such as R-competition titled as "Code the Future" of R-Hackfests prepare are conceptualized and open for trainees to excel in their coding skills. R-Ladies as sister organizations at several campuses from R-Ladies Addis Ababa have been set up as local umbrella organizations, which offer Carpentry workshops and coordinate the calls for participation in the R-competition and R-Hackfest. The question is, how do these activities reach out to the academic community. The methodology applied in this research will present different post-workshop activities. A survey will bring light on the activities and their outreach to the academic community. Questionnaires will be developed and sent out to workshop organizers to collect answers from previous Carpentry Workshop participants on one side and to librarians on the other side. Trainers will be interviewed. The questionnaires will cover the Carpentry workshop's experiences in part one. Part two will focus on an applied approach with some tests. The results will be captured and coded for further use. The analysis of the findings will be presented as the mirror of the post-workshop activities offered. The discussion will refer to the findings and will discuss the revealed shortcomings and what could be done to overcome those. Suggestions will be collected from the Ethiopian Carpentry Team and will be brought to a focus group for further discussion and analysis. Jointly, best practices will be elaborated and will be taken as a benchmark on which an evaluation and monitoring system will be built together with a management information system. Respective indicators will be developed to measure the performance of instructors and participants. The outcome from the survey will be compared with the pre-workshop and post-workshop Carpentry surveys conducted online in Ethiopia by The Carpentry. It will be the task of this research to find answers to the variations. The post-workshop activities performance will be explained in that light. The proposal will contribute significantly towards SciDataCon and International Data Week program. The proposal would include statistics of politicians' encouragement and the international research community to rank themselves and universities.