The use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in developing countries like Tanzania is considered to be a necessity in order to overcome the challenges that are hindering the country from developing in all sectors and also from reducing the digital divide. As ICT is becoming more and more integrated in societies world wide, its effects are clearly seen i.e. on peoples’ lives, on countries’ economy, opens doors to new opportunities, change how people learn etc. Applying ICT to empower education is one of the national strategies in eradicating poverty in Tanzania. This licentiate research is about the use of ICT tools in the secondary schools arena particularly in the development of e-Learning content and delivery for self learning environment. The main aim is trying to reduce the long time existing problems of lack of learning and teaching resources and inadequacy of qualified teachers in rural secondary schools in Tanzania. The research is focused on two secondary schools as pilot schools at Kibaha district Pwani region. The licentiate research involves multidisciplinary principles in the development of the e-Learning resources. The knowledge of instructional design, learning objects, theories in pedagogy and software engineering principles has been acquired in the course of this study. The licentiate research is also based on the participatory action research methodology throughout the conduction of the research. The licentiate thesis is developed based on the data obtained from the two surveys conducted in a number of secondary schools in Tanzania, data from the readily available reports, literature review and from the participatory activities with the stakeholders. The main stakeholders are students, teachers, head teachers, and Ministry of Education and Vocational Training (MoEVT) officials. This is an applied type of research designed to solve a practical problem, the outcome of this study is a trial package of e-Learning material for secondary schools at the pilot site. The end product of the whole e-Learning research is the e-Learning Management System (e-LMS) and the proposed name for the system is TanSSe-L (Tanzania Secondary School e-Learning) system. The e-Learning contents will be delivered using a blended mode approach. Three delivery options are considered, first, of using the e-LMS (TanSSe-L) or local server for online delivery, second of using Compact Disc Read Only Memory (CD-ROM) for offline delivery and third of using face to face (F2F) for classroom delivery. This licentiate research is part of the on going e-Learning research work which will lead to a doctoral thesis.

e-learning, as defined to be the use of information and communications technology (ICT) for supporting the educational processes, has motivated Tanzania to apply ICT in its education system. Tanzania secondary schools in rural areas are geographically and socially isolated. Rural Tanzania secondary schools face a number of problems including ways in getting learning materials, as well as inadequacy in qualified teachers. The impact of these problems is poor performance in National Examinations. This poor performance however is highly noted in science and mathematics subjects. The problem in getting learning materials can be reduced by employing ICT in secondary school education system. This research develops an interactive e-learning management system (e-LMS) to be used by Tanzanian secondary schools. The research is aiming to support teaching and learning functions by allowing creation and storage of learning materials, making them available, easily accessed and sharable among students from different secondary schools in Tanzania in a more organized way. Tanzania has only one curriculum for all secondary schools registered under the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training (MoEVT). During development stage it will not be easy to involve all scattered Tanzanian secondary schools. The research is focusing to two selected pilot schools; Kibaha secondary school and Wali-ul-Asr girls’ seminary in Kibaha town, Pwani region. Features of the e-LMS will represent the standard form of any other secondary school registered by the MoEVT. The complete implementation of the e-LMS to these selected pilot schools will later be extended to all other secondary schools in Tanzania. The development uses Object-Oriented System Analysis and Design (OOSAD) approach along with the power of modeling as it has been emphasized by Model Driven Architecture (MDA). Unified Modeling Language (UML) is mainly used in both cases. To create an interoperable system, UML is integrated with extensible markup language (XML) during model transformation from e-LMS Platform Independent Model (PIM) to e-LMS Platform Specific Model (PSM). Development will make use of open source software. For context specific development, participatory action research methodology is adopted and the inputs are well presented in developing e-LMS. Customization of open source learning management system (LMS) platforms is employed to help generate a timely solution to e-LMS development. Finally, this thesis also considers the need for replication and mirroring of the database for the purpose of making learning materials highly available to end-users.