Dear editor,

Now that students and educators in Rwanda can now access course materials from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, through its OpenCourseWare hosted online by the National University of Rwanda (NUR), education standards are expected to improve.

The partnership made between NUR and MIT is of great advantage to Rwandans generally, because learning and teaching materials from MIT have become more accessible to local university students through the NUR’s campus network.

This is a time when the traditional education system based on ‘Chalk and Talk’ will fade away and a new approach that is IT based will stem up.

Students and staff within the university’s network and other higher institutions of learning in Rwanda will access the didactic materials without struggling with the barrier of Internet bandwidth in the country.

However, efforts to make these educational materials more accessible to students and educators from Rwanda with an inadequate Internet connection is a tough barrier that I believe will soon be solved by the already ongoing installation of the optical-fiber cables.

Kiyovu