It Is Difficult to Get Feedback

Students know best what students want. The more often they can really tell what they feel about the program, the better. In Tanzania this is, however, a difficult task to achieve. Students are not used to telling what they re-ally think about their teachers or their institution—it seems

that some students do not even believe that feedback can even lead anywhere. Others are reluctant to give critical feedback. However, when students do decide something to-gether, they are very strongly united behind their decisions.

A pitfall to this lesson in Tanzania is, however, that students often do not know enough about technology to make in-formed demands. A mass student movement about a poorly understood thing is scarcely constructive phenomenon and always hard to deal with.

This article is the first report of a three-year investiga-tion of the development of Tumaini University’s BIT pro-gram. In our future research, we focus on the challenges of online teaching in Tanzania, public-private partnership development, public perceptions of IT and ICT, issues of e-privacy, and course contextualization. In the end, we hope that this report encourages ambitious, alternative initiatives in IT education in developing countries, and clarifies some ambiguities regarding contextualized IT education.

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