ICT Development Center
When Adigrat University started to integrate ICT in its system, it established the ICT Center to handle issues related to ICT. Ever since its establishment, the ICT center has been working closely with different sections of the university to create awareness of ICT, to introduce new technologies into the university and most importantly to help students acquire basic computer skills which is required in the market. These services have been evolving with the growth of the university to incorporate additional tasks. The major task of the ICT center had been creating a conducive environment for ICT related courses by providing ICT Labs and relevant software and hardware support. However, in the recent years the involvement of ICT center in course offerings is significantly reduced since most of the faculties have established their own computer laboratories. The other area which the ICT center is involved in is providing short-term trainings to the university community.
From the conception to the implementation of the network infrastructure, the ICT center has been enthusiastically participating in every activity such as, 50mig/s broadband network connection to theUniversity. Established in 2004 with one webmaster and a secretary, this team is responsible for developing and maintaining automated services and environments; Undertaking system analysis and development; involving in software procurements and preparing quality control mechanisms for software are some of its responsibilities. Furthermore the ICT Center have the following Services:
- Ensuring proper and timely delivery of computing services
- Developing quality computing service strategy, systems and procedures (Timely Delivery of Application Software’s Websites and Software Specifications)
- Integrating ICT to the various academic and administrative functions of the university
- Developing quality -learning service strategy, systems and procedure
- Providing the optimum set of learning technologies and introduce -learning
- Providing a reliable, secure and available administrative computing environment
- Preparing quality control mechanisms for software purchases.
The university ICT center is currently working to widen networking and communication, Outdoor wireless (Wi-Fi) connection and infrastructure and services. As the operations of this department are vast, ICT professionals of varied field of specialization, skill and knowledge level are required. These include:System Administrators and Network Administrator– handles different components of the network including servers, routers, and switches.
One of the purposes of the Adigrat university ICT center is providing user support. Currently the center is training to implement an open source helpdesk management system, named OTRS, to facilitate the support provision to users. The strategic plan of the university states that the future academic and administrative tasks of the university highly depend on the effective utilization of ICT infrastructures and services. Management Information Systems (MIS) will be implemented to take the administration of the university to a higher level. The requirements of the academic wing are also expected to increase to integrate -learning with the classical teaching-learning process in the near future.
