Bahir Dar University to Link All Campuses Online for Br 98 Million

Bahir Dar University

The new technology will enables students to access resources, schedules, grades.

The Yibab campus, which opened in September 2012, houses the Law and Land Administration departments, whilst Zenzelima, which opened a year earlier, is dedicated to agriculture. The University is already in the process of undertaking a 68 million Br IT network infrastructure development project, since 2011, for the much older and bigger Peda and Poly campuses. These projects, undertaken by the Information Network Security Agency (INSA), are scheduled for completion in June 2013.

The plan is to equip the four campuses in Bahir Dar with three types of services, according to Molla Ababu, vice president for Information & Strategic Communications for the University.

The first service, procurement & store management systems, is designed to control where the resources and properties of the University are at any given time. This system will also enable students to be aware of the availability of books at the library. This is in conjunction with a second system, which enables students to access the library with a local area network (LAN) and discover where on the shelves to find the books.

The third service enables students and parents to view the status of a student at the University, at anytime, even after leaving the University. Students only need to have an account to register, and can then check the schedules, exam results and class grades posted by professors.

"There were complaints over the registration phase, since it was taking at least two weeks to register and using up a lot of resources," said Molla.

Currently, the University has 42,000 students in its 57 undergraduate and 39 postgraduate programs, up from 35,000 students in 2011/12. These include 20,000 regular, 19,000 extension and 3,000 distance and summer course students. It also has 30 PhD candidates in construction management, material science, teaching English as a foreign language and educational psychology. It graduated 7,017 undergraduate and postgraduate students in 2012.

To accommodate the needs of the students and faculty, a total of 12 servers are required across the four campuses. "The University used some of its electrical engineering and computer science students in the project, paying each of them 10,000 Br," said Molla.

"We are in communications with ethio-telecom about installing the fibre optics cables, which are the backbone to connecting the four campuses with internet; planned to start by October 2013,"Atnafu Alemu, executive director for the ICT Development Office, and consulting manager of the Network Building Project at the University and the INSA, told Fortune.

The necessary software for the project was developed by the System Design & Development Case Team, a branch to the Information & Strategic Communications office. "We have a plan to sell the software to other universities that are planning to develop similar infrastructure in the future," Atnafu said.

Bahir Dar University launched a 30 million Br Information Technology infrastructure development on Friday, March 29, 2013, for its new Yibab and Zenzelima campuses. The projects for each campus were, a month ago, awarded to Neuro Net Plc and Symbol Technology Plc, respectively, each for 15 million Br.