U of N - Kikuyu OCW Installed
You may wonder why this was a good thing. By some miracle, the Kikuyu campus managed to get brand new replacement computers procured and installed in three days. They now have the nicest equipment I've seen in Kenya. Normally, the procurement process takes months. Getting 30 Pentium 4 machines with flat panel displays to rural Kenya in three days is akin to parting the Red Sea.
Yesterday, Marta and I went with several African Virtual University (AVU) staff members to meet the Kikuyu dean. AVU has been acting as a liaison between MIT's OCW and the U of N. Essentially, all we wanted to do is copy some files to their local computers. However, nothing gets done unless the dean okays it. So, we met with about 10 people in his office before we could set foot in the computer lab. It made us feel like he was the one doing us the favor.
Anyway, they've got a copy of the entire OCW site on their local machines now. The idea was that Kikuyu would then act as a local site where other African universities could connect to better than they could connect to MIT. However, Kikuyu doesn't even have any servers at its campus and has a slow, microwave radio connection to another U of N campus. It's also a liberal arts campus, so they don't have much use for MIT's course material. There is a different campus named (something like) Cheroma that is for IT and computer science students.
We're going to look into installing an OCW mirror there. Unfortunately, each campus has its own bureaucracy, so we'll have to go through the whole business of formally getting the dean's permission to enter his fiefdom.