Educating and training everywhere

 

Barbara Thiané Diagne

Head of the Cooperation and Professional Integration Department at the Université virtuelle du Sénégal

In Senegal, most training centres are concentrated in large cities and very few are available in rural areas. To level the playing field, the government set up the Université virtuelle du Sénégal (UVS), a public university whose courses are mostly online.

UVS addresses two issues. It supports traditional universities and presents a new, innovative way of learning, providing complete accredited courses for students wherever they live. Everyone who enrols receives a laptop. Classes are scripted and take place in virtual classrooms where students can interact with their professor in real time. These online classes also include MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) developed by local and international partner universities.

UVS facilities also include Virtual Learning Environments (VLE), as well as modern buildings with the latest equipment and broadband internet. With these resources, people can participate in learning activities and access ICT in their communities.

More about Université virtuelle du Sénégal

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In five years, our student body has grown 15-fold and our almost 30,000 students today rank UVS as the country’s second largest university in terms of enrolment. We have 18 different courses and most of them are geared towards the job prospects emerging in the digital realm. These digital courses were only available in private schools before. That’s one of the reasons why UVS has become a top public institution of choice for future students.

Our first cohort graduated in March 2018. We’re creating the Alumni network now and will be setting up Master’s courses soon. We aim to train an ever growing number of students across Senegal, to help close the country’s digital divide and make the Université virtuelle du Sénégal one of the world’s best universities.

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