Presentation slides of Dr. Jarkko Suhonen at X International Interdisciplinary Scientific Research Congress (X CIC), June 12-14, 2014, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

1. edTech
ICT-based Education to Make a Difference
http://www.uef.fi/edtech

2. Learning technologies for
contextualized education
Expertise1

3. Example: Mobile Games for contextualised
education
• Museum education
• Science education in Forestry, Mathematics
and Science Fair
• Tourism

4. Story based mobile game for mathematics:
UFractions

5. ICT for Development
Expertise2

6. Long term R&D projects in Africa
• Contextualised IT Bachelor Degree Programme in
Tanzania
• Robotic and tangible technologies based education in
Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique
• Staff and student exchange programme: NSS Business
Informatics on the Ground
• edTech Hub at Dar es Salaam
• PhD student training and research capacity building
• College of Business Education

7. Human Language Technologies
Expertise3

8. Example: Text mining in business and
education
• Business intelligence to support eLeadership
• analysis of own brand vs. competitor’s
• evaluating product popularity
• automatic mining of customers’ opinion from social media
(prototypes for Facebook, Twitter)
• Emotion detection and Sentiment Analysis
• social media
• learning diaries
• cyberbullying detection

9. Science and Technology
Dissemination
Expertise4

10. Example: SciFest.fi – Festival of Science and
Technology

11. edTech Hub at Dar es Salaam
• Co-operation between University of Eastern Finland
(UEF) and College of Business Education (CBE)
• Aim: improve the quality of teaching and learning, and
nourish the development of research in CBE
• Serves also as a platform for other collaboration

12. Motivation
• Most Tanzanian HEI’s focus mainly on undergraduate
education, especially in IT related fields, while
research outputs are generally low
• Faculty members are mostly master’s degree holders
• Faculty members are heavily loaded with teaching and
administrative duties
=> lack of support for research and a shallow
research culture

13. Solution
• Set up a doctoral training school hosted jointly by UEF and
CBE
• Five CBE faculty members are given postgraduate training on-
site
• The PhD candidates form a research group, which focuses on
the research topic of Business Informatics
• The PhD candidates study at the UEF edTeach-group’s
impdet.org online doctoral programme
• The first phase of the initiative is scheduled to last four years,
during which the first batch of 5 faculty members is expected to
graduate

14. Research topics addressing societal challenges
• Empowering women entrepreneurs in Tanzania
through mobile technologies
• Technology for enhancing the small scale farming
community. The case of Chamwino district, Dodoma,
Tanzania.
• Transforming street vending business using mobile
technologies in Tanzania

15. Long term goals
• Sustaining a fully functional research group at CBE
• Hosting a number of contextually relevant research projects
• Attractive for local and international academia
• Connections with local and international business
• A steady stream of internationally recognized scientific publications
• Understanding about best practices for supporting the growth of
research culture in a Tanzania HEI
• Creating a global edTech Hub network

16. Current activities and contact
• Launch event of the edTech Hub, Dar es Salaam, June 25th
• Want to collaborate, co-create, co-educate and do joint research in
Tanzania?
• Do you have interesting research ideas?
• Business ideas?
• Want to visit Tanzania for fun?
• Contact: Dr. Mikko Apiola, mikko.apiola@ieee.org
• Are you interested in hosting an edTech Hub in your
country/region/institution?
• Dr. Jarkko Suhonen, jarkko.suhonen@uef.fi
• Dr. Calkin Suero Montero, calkin.montero@uef.fi