Interview of the ESMT's CEO Adamou MOUSSA SALEY in Dakar
The CEO of the Ecole Supérieure multinationale des télécommunications (ESMT) in Dakar, Senegal, Mr Moussa Salay talks about his vision of digital education and his expectations.
Can you introduce the ESMT and your involvement in the C-CoDES ?
I’m the head director of the Ecole Supérieure multinationale des télécommunications in Dakar, Senegal. Our school was funded in 1987 by 7 states - Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Burkina-Faso, Bénin, Mauritania and Nigeria - to bring TIC skills to the public. I’m in charge of the administration, and I’m involved in the pedagogy. I’ve been also working on the C-CoDES development for 6 months as a manager : I take part in coaching the team which handle ESMT digital transformation.
What brought you to the C-Codes project ?
The offer came before COVID. We already had experience in online courses and already established a strategy in those 7 countries. Online teaching gives every student a chance to learn even for those with no access to school.
The staff was very involved in the C-Codes project. What brought us to work with EPFL is the training and an access the best resources in order to offer new content with quality. Everyone in ESMT is working hard to perfect our courses with the C-Codes project and creates new ones, in order to develop our school.
How can C-Codes help promote excellency ?
Excellency is the capacity to distinguish yourself from others through creativity, innovation and value making. C-Codes allows that with digital transition, a support in applied development, learning new skills and their long term effect on people’s capabilities. That’s what matters to me : the development of people’s capabilities and enriching the inner value of TIC by learning new skills.
We’re aiming at providing new skills with different level in TIC:
First with students in LMD post Bac training, we have about a thousand students. We also have continuing education to support states member of ESMT, state administration, private companies on different thematics related to technological progress and market demand : 5G, 4G, cybersecurity, digitalization. We do expertise and pratical support for companies : we help them evaluating their services.
Which new skills are essentials in your search for excellency in digital education ?
Signaling for example, is an essential skill. In the offline section, student will have access to a lot of content for them to reappropriate. In order to do so, there is a lot of skills to master. We have teachers who know signaling, but only in a standard way, used in physical classroom, but when we deal with online training; different standards are involved. There’s also skills to learn from designers to make a content more attractive, students need to feel comfortable during their courses. Another aspect of online courses is the creation of modules, that we want to master though the C-Codes project.
What is stimulating about the C-CoDES project ?
What’s stimulating for me as the head of ESMT is making all our courses accessible. Not being present only in Senegal, but in all French speaking Africa and developing the online course platform is our priority. We aim to develop a new master in artificial intelligence, as wall as a master in technologies related to health science : All Africa must be able to have access to our courses and we want to meet this goal through C-CoDES.
Our second aim is management. With this project, our ambition is to act on the courses platfom from a distance. We need reliable feedback ont the quality of our courses. For example, I would like to get from the platform a report on every courses and teachers in order to be aware of student appreciation and their attendence. This feels very important to me as in online courses, we work with teachers not based in Senegal, that I cannot meet physically in ESMT. That’s why we need a reliable feedback on their work for an optimal management of modules and courses.
What challenges the C-CoDES project will face ?
The biggest challenge is to succeed : with partners like EPFL, we need to prove our capacity to fulfill the project by using wisely the ressources at hand. The goal of such partnership is to make sure that tomorrow, we’ll offer high level courses on 5G and artificial intelligences to our countries’s companies.