Our department started to offer a number of short courses to the public. The aims behind starting these courses are:

1.       Open new sources of income for the staff department.

2.       Raise money for the department to be able start a number of projects aiming at enhancing the learning and teaching of English Language at the University of Khartoum.

One of the courses which we offered was designed by the department staff. The course was entitled "Academic Writing". The idea behind this course was to train participant in different writing skills starting from paragraphs to writing a thesis. We took the course description and went to Training Department at the Ministry of Higher Education and showed them the idea behind the course and told them we are ready to train other university teachers.  After some letters moving between us and them we were able to get the first chance to train 20 participants from different governmental universities. At that stage we were really frightened of this new experience but we were encouraged when we saw the participants coming from different Sudanese Universities so happy for being chosen to participate in our course. Although we targeted  the younger generation of teachers we had PhD holders coming and saying they are ready to pay the fees on their own so as to participate in the course.

Before one week of the start of the course we had a number of meetings to organize the way the course was going to be delivered. Due to the fact that all the participants were university teachers we decided to introduce to them new methodologies of delivery so as not only to train them on writing skills but also to train them on how to train.

By the end of the course we were astonished by the participants happiness of learning so much from the trainers. All them rated the course from very good to excellent. The Ministry gave us  a contract for  four courses to be conducted through 2009.

We are very happy, satisfied, and proud because we were able the accomplish the following :

1.       Open new revenues of income for the department and its staff.

2.       Start  the first steps of raising English language proficiency among other university teachers.

3.       Introduce new methodologies in teacher training.

4.       Gain the confidence of the Higher Ministry of Education the highest body responsible for higher  education in Sudan.

5.       Motivating the department's staff for further accomplishments.

We have taken a break to evaluate the course and the performance of the trainers and then we will start the long journey  of training other University teachers.