Towards Student-centred Information And Communication Technologies In Tanzanian Higher Learning Institutions: The Dar Es Salaam Institute Of Technology Case

Higher education exercises a direct influence on national productivity, which largely determines living standards and a country's ability to compete in the global economy. To achieve the higher education functional goals, ICT need be harnessed to its full potentiality. Globally ICT adaptation in education sector lags behind other sectors like military, health and entertainment. In Tanzanian Higher education sector the ICT use and adaptation level is even lower.The thesis explores the use and adaptation of Information and Communication Technologies that supports student-centred learning in Tanzanian High Learning Institutions.The situational analysis has revealed that only one Institute (The Open University of Tanzania) has ICT platform that encourages collaboration and student-centred paradigm and that very few Institutes have Students' Information Management Systems. Out of the listed 46 Higher learning Institutes only 66% of them have their presence in the web. Some of them has well-developed campus computing infrastructure.The thesis takes advantage of the existing ICT infrastructure at Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology as the case study; to design an elaborate Student Information Management System architecture. The architecture is Browser-Server to facilitate high availability and maintenances. The SIMS architecture is partitioned and layered into logical tiers to achieve the non-functional requirements in scalability, development flexibility and reusability. A comprehensive relational database system was designed to implement the prototype application. The database was designed to send email to individual student's grade posting using triggers upon field updates. A simulated email to SMS gateway was used to enable the SIMS to harness the mobile phone popularity in Tanzania. The Virtual Learning Environment framework was adapted from the Open-Source based Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment (Moodle).Basing on DIT experience, the adaptation to student-based ICTs is seen as a function of organizational and personal cultural factors like personal PC skills, access to PC and social attitudes. Given the political will at organizational level, the individual institutes can smoothen the adaptation process by planning the migration to affordable ICT technologies, sustaining them through development of skilled ICT manpower and popularizing them amongst it members.