Eiffel Corp, the official partner for WebCT in Africa since 1998, delivers a holistic and innovative range of services and products for the global higher education community.

Eiffel Corp serves 32 institutions directly in Africa and over 130 internationally. We have trained over a 1000 users in how to maximise their use of WebCT the past seven years.

Our team is passionate about education and training, we focus on niche markets found within these sectors. We only operate where we can add value!

Many ask why we choose the name Eiffel?

“Today the Eiffel Tower represents one of the most recognisable structures in the western world. Set in Paris and visited by millions of foreigners each year, as the world begets more technology the Eiffel tower seems to only increase in beauty and simplicity.

The name Eiffel for us primarily represents our desire as a company in Africa to conduct business globally, to construct an enduring positive legacy, to challenge perceptions about Africa, to think out the box, to create sustainable jobs and transfer unique globally relevant skill sets locally -all the while staying ever engaged and focused in one of the every day love of our lives- learning.” Andre van der Merwe – CEO

"The original founder of the Eiffel Tower, Gustav Eiffel, was an absolute visionary who endured much persecution from the elite world of literature and the arts at the time. In its early years the Eiffel tower stirred huge debate and controversy."

"Protest against the Tower of Monsieur Eiffel", published in the newspaper Le Temps, is addressed to the World's Fair's director of works, Monsieur Alphand. It is signed by several big names from the world of literature and the arts: Charles Gounod, Guy de Maupassant, Alexandre Dumas junior, François Coppée, Leconte de Lisle, Sully Prudhomme, William Bouguereau, Ernest Meissonier, Victorien Sardou, Charles Garnier and others to whom posterity has been less kind. Other satirists pushed the violent diatribe even further, hurling insults like: “this truly tragic street lamp" (Léon Bloy), "this belfry skeleton" (Paul Verlaine), "this mast of iron gymnasium apparatus, incomplete, confused and deformed" (François Coppée), "this high and skinny pyramid of iron ladders, this giant ungainly skeleton upon a base that looks built to carry a colossal monument of Cyclops, but which just peters out into a ridiculous thin shape like a factory chimney" (Maupassant), "a half-built factory pipe, a carcass waiting to be fleshed out with freestone or brick, a funnel-shaped grill, a hole-riddled suppository" (Joris-Karl Huysmans).

Once the Tower was finished the criticism burnt itself out in the presence of the completed masterpiece, and in the light of the enormous popular success with which it was greeted. It received two million visitors during the World's Fair of 1889.”

http://www.tour-eiffel.fr/teiffel/uk/documentation/dossiers/page/debats.html
(Accessed 20/06/05)

"Gustave Eiffel’s Tower was an idea ahead of its time, which has stood the ultimate durability test. Spurred on by the advances and outcomes of the industrial revolution, the Eiffel Tower represented a significant achievement and celebration of the new possibilities. Perhaps the Eiffel Tower represented for Gustav Eiffel and his team the new economy of the late 1800's.

We believe that the Internet, particularly the convergence of learning and the Internet within the time which our company was founded shares many simularities with the vision and construction of the Eiffel Tower in 1886. It was only a few years after the Internet was born that higher education sat up and realised the outstanding potential. It took the Parisians some time to appreciate the relevance, beauty, function and value of the Eiffel tower.

I can clearly recall launching our company in 1998, many potential university clients simply responded “…don’t contact us, we will contact you when...if we are ever ready." At times I felt as if we were doomed to failure even before we began! But we pushed on. We knew that the technology could make a significant difference in thousands of students and lecturers lives and it would enable us to work within our love for learning. Gwen vd Merwe (Co founder of Eiffel Corp, my wife) and I met at a teachers training college, and eight years later we were desperate to get back to the education space and leave the corporate space we had migrated to and were engaging in. For over a year before we met Murray Golberg (founder of WebCT) in 1998 we spent countless hours researching and investigating our next steps.

Thankfully as the past seven years progressed since 1998, we have seen more and more institutions taking elearning and in particular blended learning, very seriously. Though sadly we still come across institutions who fail to realise and embrace the full potential blended learning can deliver on campus.

To envision the future of learning we have to cast off what we know today as our only version of reality, look ahead - challenge convention and think outside the box, take risks -just like Gustav Eiffel.

Today we at Eiffel Corp aspire to serve the ever expanding continuum of learning which is increasingly being bombarded by technology at acute right angles. We want to live where learning and technology intersect, right at the learning and technology intersection edge. Yet to exist there and help create a balance. As our company byline reads- to:

Cultivate Learning. Innovate Technology

We consider ourselves exremely fortunate and blessed to do what we do."

Andre vd Merwe
CEO
Eiffel Corp
23/09/05