Africa Center of Excellence for Climate Smart Agriculture and Biodiversity Conservation has successfully conducted training for Climate SABC students on Digital and information literacy, and research tools at Haramaya University resource center’s Hall in the last week. The training has been organized in collaboration with the office of the Library and information service directorate for five consecutive days from February 02/2021-05/2021.
The training has got its commencement with the opening speech of Dr. Bobe Bedadi, deputy center leader of ACE Climate SABC. Dr. Bobe has introduced all the staff of the center to the new entry students and some senior students who have participated in the training. Dr. Bobe has expressed the importance of the training topics for students, particularly those who are to begin their postgraduate study at the center. As information and education is getting digital and the virtual learning platform is becoming a preference of the time in today’s world, getting trained in digital and information literacy is a great opportunity, he says. In addition, he stressed that it is very difficult for postgraduate students to be successful in their education and research endeavors without those digital and information literacy skills.
The courses of the training were offered by instructors from fields of information technology and library sciences with the active participation of Mr. Tilahun Shiferaw from the Library and information service directorate office, Mr. Ashenafi Tulu from the Department of Information Science, and Mr. Seifu Neda from the Department of Statistics.
The training lasted for five days and about 35 students, including regional students coming from some of the eastern and southern African countries, were participated in the training. The training has covered topics of Information literacy such as E-library, Web information search skills, and strategies, Application Software, Windows operating system environment, Referencing styles and basic software such as disk cleaners, internet download manager, and IDM CC. The training has also covered an introduction to the R software that would help the students in their research endeavors and any kind of data management.
The participants of the training have expressed their ideas, opinions, and comments on the training sessions during the closing remarks. They expressed that it was very good opportunity for them that they are introduced to the skills before they start their coursework. They stressed that the training on digital and information literacy skills was very good, comprehensive, detailed, and very relevant to them. Since many of the trainees were new to the R software and the R requires more time, they suggest additional training on R and other helpful software that are relevant to the research methodologies through which they would conduct their research.
ACE Climate SABC Project manager, Dr. Mulugeta Damie says in his closing remarks, the training was planned out of sudden and astoundingly was very successful. He acknowledged the participants of the training and all ACE Climate SABC’s managing staff who coordinated the training. Dr. Mulugeta also says, “it was a training on which we became aware of our potential that we can do everything with respect to students learning and short term training that would help them build their capacity and skills at the center, and we know that the time allotted to the training was not enough and I assure you that we will organize related training on software and methodologies in the future”.
