“Oteri Omae: The Lecturer” — creating a personal teaching platform for engineering students in Kenya

Mr Oteri Omae Malack is a lecturer in the department of Telecommunication and Information Engineering at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology in Kenya.

He has developed his own online learning platform to teach students taking engineering, computer science and technology courses. The platform is a personal initiative, begun in 2019, which collects together a range of digital resources that he has developed into what he calls a “one-stop shop”. Mr Omae intends to commercialize the content and to develop content for other levels of education.

The collection combines a range of content, including video and audio files, digital documents, and mobile applications that he has developed to support his courses.

Although the platform is still under development, students are already beginning to use it. Around 240 students have already accessed content on analogue electronics.

As part of the platform, Mr Omae has also developed a YouTube channel, through which he covers some of the theoretical aspects of his courses, as well as offering practical demonstrations. The videos can be watched online or downloaded onto mobile phones for viewing offline.

He estimates that around 5,000 students have been able to access his recordings, spanning 20 faculties from different universities.

Mr Omae has developed both the channel and the wider platform in his spare time, which has slowed its completion. But he has encouraged by feedback from students, who indicate that the videos are useful, and have asked him to produce more.

Interview conducted by Dr Augustine Mwangi, University of Nairobi.

Mr Omae’s work also features in another story: Mobile labs that enable Kenyan engineering students to run virtual simulations, wherever they are