Open Source & More IT for African Business

About This Course

Open Source & More IT for African Business has been developed by it@ab, the Southern African Network on "Information Technology in African Business", a project of InWEnt - Capacity Building International, Germany, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). See also http://www.it-ab.org.

Open Source & More IT for African Business is a series of advanced e-learning courses on Information Technology (IT) focussing on the needs of business related IT consultancy in Africa. The courses introduce relevant and adapted key concepts and applications such as

• E-Business Applications & Architecture
• IT Security
• Open Source IT
• Web Publishing
• E-Learning as well as
• Zope & the Collaborative Learning Environment CLE2.

The focus lies on "Free and Open Source Software" (FOSS) as a key technology to drive innovation, add local value and create sustainable and affordable ICT solutions.

To access the course, please follow the links in the table of contents below.

The courses are organized as online modules for self-study and include lessons, tests and selected references. They provide an overview on and introduction to important concepts from intermediate to advanced level. This way, they are addressing a wide range of potential users. These include both IT specialists and executive staff from IT businesses in Africa and beyond, technology-savvy development practitioners as well as power users of IT.

If you are interested in upcoming training courses and events on Free and Open Source Software in Africa, please also see http://www.ict-innovation.org

Message from InWEnt

We are very pleased to present the release of Open Source & More IT for African Business, a series of advanced e-learning courses on Information Technology (IT) focussing on the needs of business related IT consultancy in Africa.

We would like to thank the team of authors and trainers, which has been active in shaping and updating the modules of the course. We particularly appreciate the contributors from Africa, which include a number of InWEnt alumni of the advanced programmes on business related IT consultancy. In the past years, more than 60 IT specialists participated in the extensive one-year training programmes of it@ab in Germany.

In the spirit of sharing and mutual capacity-building, this series of e-learning courses is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence. We are therefore looking forward to seeing further distribution, remixing and updating of the courses contained in Open Source & More IT for African Business (You can download the SCORM files and the eXelearning sources for the course at http://cle2.it-inwent.org/DesignSpace/osam/). We are eager to learn about your experiences and stories around the e-learning courses and wish you a good and efficient learning experience.

Balthas Seibold for the it@inwent Team

How to Use This Course

There are three different ways of accessing the content of this course:

1. Anonymous browsing access

   Even if you do not have a user account for this site, you can browse the complete contents of this course and fully participate in the exercises. However, your exercise results will not be stored on the server, so that you won't be able to use the learning progress tracking features. To access a learning module anonymously, simply click on one of the links to the course modules in the table of contents below. This will take you to the summary page for this module, which contains a list of lessons. Click on one of the links labeled "Open lesson in browse mode" to get to the course contents.

2. Full access with progress tracking

   If you want, you can also get a personal user account for the CLE2 platform in order to fully use the learning progress tracking features. The learning platform will then tell you which lessons you have attempted so far and for which lessons you already passed the final tests. With a personal user account you can also request an affirmation of your succesful participation in the elearning course. To get a personal user account and for an affirmation, please write an email to Petra Hagemann (petra.hagemann[at]inwent.org)

Table of Contents

• Part 1: E-Business Applications & Architecture
  • Module 1.1: E-Business Applications Overview
  • Module 1.2: E-Business Applications
  • Module 1.3: E-Business Technology
  • Module 1.4: Electronic Markets
• Part 2: IT Security
  • Module 2.1: IT Security
    • Risks and General Measures
    • Best Practice to Secure Systems
    • Hands on: Secure Mail Server
• Part 3: Open Source IT
  • Module 3.1: Open Source IT
    • Ubuntu Linux Installation
    • Multimedia
    • Web Server
    • Groupware
    • Network Printing
• Part 4: Web Publishing
  • Module 4.1: Web Publishing
    • Capabilities and Opportunities of the WWW
    • Quality Aspects in Web Design
    • Technologies and Tools
    • The Web Publishing Process
  • Additional Material (PDF): An Introduction to HTML and XHTML
  • Additional Material (PDF): Embedding Forms
  • Additional Material (PDF): Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
  • Additional Material (PDF): Introduction to PHP
  • Additional Material (PDF): Database Applications for the Web with PHP and MySQL
• Part 5: E-Learning
  • Module 5.1: Marketing Basics
  • Module 5.2: Request for a Proposal
  • Module 5.3: Technical E-Learning Consulting
  • Module 5.4: Quality Assurance in E-Learning Projects
• Part 6: Zope & Collaborative Learning Environment CLE2
  • Module 6.1: Zope
  • Module 6.2: CLE2

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