One of the main goals for our internship was for Angela and I to pilot a biomedical equipment troubleshooting workshop for DIT students and find ways to integrate the workshop into the biomedical engineering curriculum. Keeping with this goal, we worked with DIT students, graduates, and lecturers to understand the curriculum and education system here.

At DIT, the biomedical engineering program is still relatively new (the first class matriculated 5 years ago), and the nascent department is housed under the electrical engineering department. In all of Tanzania, there are currently only two universities offer programs in biomedical engineering: DIT (where the highest degree offered is a technical diploma) and Arusha Technical College (where students can earn up to a Bachelo’s.)

The biomedical engineering curriculum at DIT lasts 3 years, and students accrue additional certifications at the end of each year (levels 5-7 in the chart below). In between years of study, students have the chance to go on Industrial Practical Training (IPT), a 2-month job shadowing opportunity that embeds students in the engineering departments of hospitals across Tanzania and even internationally.

Students take 12 modules per semester: 6 core courses (typically centered on a particular medical device) and 6 general education requirements (math, physics, finance, and the ilk). Grades are determined by high-stakes midterms (40%) and final exams (60%). All this sounds fairly banal, and you may wonder why I am going into such detail about these education requirements. Had Angela and I stopped after this assessment, we may not have seen a role for ourselves in the coursework here. However, peeling back some layers and asking questions of current and former students revealed some disparities between the curriculum’s design and practice.

For virtually all of their core classes (half of their coursework), our fellow interns had either never met their lecturers or met them only once. Their teachers, they explained, were typically busy professionals and adjuncts who lived and worked far away, so they rarely (if ever) show up to scheduled classes. Students end up attending fewer than half of the lectures on their syllabus, and they are left to study on their own and guess at what material will be covered on their exams. Even when lecturers make an appearance, they teach theoretical concepts without demonstrating on real devices. The students’ core curriculum is supposed to include 2 sessions of practical lab work per week, but almost all the sessions are cancelled or never scheduled.

The list of grievances go on, but students cite 2 major problems again and again with their education: lack of instructors and lack of practical training. This leads them to feel unprepared when they go for IPT or enter the workforce. When asked about DIT graduates, the head of engineering at Aga Khan hospital noted that they lack the required technical skillsets.

The challenges faced by DIT are compounded by the fact that the national government is pushing DIT to establish a Bachelors program for biomedical engineering. As Mr. Moshi, the head of curriculum for the biomedical engineering explained to us, the degree-conferring system in Tanzania is strictly hierarchical, with National Technical Association (NTA) levels assigned to each degree (detailed in the chart below). Instructors in a particular program must have an education level at least 1 above the students they are instructing (i.e. a Masters or above is required to teach Bachelors coursework). The current biomedical engineering staff, already spread thin, does not have lecturers qualified to teach Bachelors courses. Moshi expressed worries that he would have to hire unreliable adjuncts that were unlikely to stick around to teach upper-level coursework.  
Source: Tanzanian National Commission for Universities Qualification Framework

Armed with this enhanced understanding of the educational bacground at DIT, Angela and I set out to pilot the Rice biomedical equipment troubleshooting workshop.