Case Study - African Women’s Group Scotland
Bertha Yakubu who founded African Women's Group Scotland in 1994, contacted the Scottish Tech Army for help in creating an online environment to support the group’s information sharing programme as part of the supportive community for African women in Scotland. The group’s primary objective is to alleviate the isolation experienced by African women in Scotland and facilitate the exchange of valuable information. Recognising the importance of this cause, the Scottish Tech Army helped by setting up a Learning Management System (LMS). This LMS became a vital tool in providing additional support to families in need.
View the transcript below:
Victoria Denniston
My name is Victoria Dennison. I was the project manager on IT- 501, which was the African Women's Group learning platform.
Claire Gibson
My name is Claire Gibson and I worked with African Women's Group Scotland to help them decide on an LMS.
Bertha Yakubu
My name is Bertha Yakubu from Nigeria. My husband was studying here so I came to join him in 1989. Just like any other migrants, whenever you move from your home country, you have to retrain yourself. So I trained myself in IT. I've never seen computer before and then when I came up here, I worked with Aberdeen City Council for 20 years, the IT department and education. And 2018, I retired. And since then, the Africa, women have just taken over my life. The African Women's Group Scotland was founded in 1994. There were very few Africans here, mostly they were students that came with their families. The men went to school, the women stayed at home. And we're just alone, isolated. So one day, I was pregnant, and in the middle of the night, I was bleeding. And so the ambulance came and took me to the hospital and I was alone in the hospital, and I lost the pregnancy.
When I came out, I said, How many other women go through this. We don't know each other, we don't have anybody here. So I just walked down Union Street, any African woman I saw, I just greeted and collected her information. This is how the group started. Then the sole aim was just to meet and break the isolation and share information and know what is going on. Suddenly, we found ourselves being a voice for the African community in Aberdeen, and later on in Scotland, where possible, when we talk of equality, trying to make sure that equality is not just a word that is preached and practice, the during the lockdown was the schools, the schools were closed, which means that a lot of women just have to stop work, and stay at home. And they're supposed to help their children with their schoolwork and all this. But not every woman knows how to teach not every woman speaks English. Not every woman knows maths or science to help the children. So a lot of children did not get the help that they're supposed to get at home. And so they fell behind. And the parents are worried. They don't have money to hire extra teachers to give them extra lessons. And we say what can we do about it, because these children need support in order to bridge whatever gap that is there. So we decided that we're going to have an educational platform. And so we applied for funding, we got it. And building the platform wasn't easy. We'd have the idea in our head. But bringing it to fruition, it was difficult. But we approach some organization and they take me looked at our proposal and send us Claire and Victoria, who really worked with us very well and guided us and we're able to build the platform.
Claire Gibson
The solution we ended up with was Moodle. Really nice open source, very flexible LMS. Lots, it took us a lot of work to get there. We went through a needs analysis and decided, you know, the features that were non negotiable, nice to have. I presented four or five different options, they decided not to go with any of them, which often happens during these kind of scoping processes anyway, but it just helped to further refine what they absolutely did need as part of the part of the product. And that turned out to be a really big focus on democratizing the administration. So they didn't want to have kind of one gatekeeper for the platform. We wanted lots of different teachers to be able to upload lessons and content and you know, booking slots. So that kind of led us towards Moodle as as one of the obvious choices And in terms of the builds, we then were faced with a bit of a challenge to, you know, there was a skill gap for me personally, I hadn't ever set up a Moodle site before. But we managed to overcome that by reaching out on the Moodle forum for a developer. And they came in and set all the kind of technical domain side up for us. I stepped back in setup, the kind of permissions and you know all of the other soft bits around the Moodle site and also created a set of training videos. So really vital to the handover process for a project is just ensuring that that knowledge gets passed on. So and it's sort of a nice historical resource for them to be able to rewatch whenever they need to kind of get up to scratch with how to do any of the little fiddly bits. And the final stage, we're just deciding on now, which is the ongoing maintenance of the learning management system, as I'm sure lots of people know, online communities take a lot of maintenance and work to kind of get going. So that's the next exciting decision on the horizon for us is that who will take this platform forward.
Victoria Denniston
Of all the projects I worked on this one was an absolute joy for a number of reasons. The organization is absolutely grassroots dealing with real local needs with people who have nowhere else to turn, including local people struggling for money for computers to work from home, refugees and a whole load of other people. When I got in touch, they were always responsive. They were quick to come back. Their first question to me, as a carer was always How was my mum, which was great to deal with,
Claire Gibson
I think specific challenges to this project, were a sort of a reluctance to spend too much money upfront. So whenever you come up with any solution, we wanted to be quite nimble. So it meant that we had to be quite discerning about where we spent the budget. So it was quite a lot of research and prototyping with, you know, free solutions or free versions. Before we got to the point where we said, Okay, now you know, we're ready to invest. I think that was probably one of the biggest challenges that we had. The other challenge is that this is the first type of product that the charity had invested in. So we knew there was a need, or we knew that there was a sort of ask from the learners to have a product like this. But we weren't totally sure there wasn't a lot of data to go on that could drive us towards any one particular solution. So I think it just involved a lot of testing and prototyping before we reached the final decision of Moodle. For the final sort of note. I've really really enjoyed my work with African Women's Group Scotland. Just so much fun to kind of meet them and chat things through on a weekly or semi weekly basis. And just really proud to have been part of of something like this and just would really encourage anybody if you're thinking oh, I don't have the right skills, or maybe I can't add anything. You definitely can