Capacity Building of Higher Education Teachers on e-Content Development using Moodle, Bathinda, Punjab

Capacity Building of Higher Education Teachers on e-Content Development using Moodle

New Delhi, September 17, 2015: Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA), New Delhi in collaboration with the Central University of Punjab, Bathinda (CUPB) organized a two-day (15-16 September, 2015) capacity building programme for university teachers on e-Content Development using Moodle at University premises.

The purpose of the training was to build capacity of teachers in providing them hands on training about the development of online courses. Since the University has been asked by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), New Delhi to develop Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the programme was intended to train the faculty in developing online courses. The University has already communicated to MHRD a list 41 interested faculty who will be developing 29 courses as MOOC. A total of 36 (30 faculty members and 6 Ph.D. scholars) attended the training programme.

Professor Ashok Dhawan, Dean of CUPB inaugurated the programme in the presence of Dr. Pankaj Khare, Registrar of CUPB and presided over by Prof. S.K. Bawa, Dean, School of Education. Dr. Shireeesh Pal Singh welcomed the resource person Mr Ashutosh Taunk. Prof. Dhawan highlighted the role of knowledge expansion in higher education and how countries like USA have effectively used the MOOCs for educational offerings. Dr. Khare spoke about the utility of the training for the faculties of CUPB. Prof. S.K. Bawa highlighted the use of ICT in classroom situations and also the importance of such trainings. The inauguration was concluded with vote of thanks by Dr. Satvinderpal Kaur.

The technical sessions started with a brief introduction on LMS and the need of implementing it in educational institution like CUPB. The Resource person helped the participants in gaining hands on experience on how to install Moodle, creating Admin page, how to enroll users and to assign student and teacher roles and also trained the participants on creating a course by uploading files such as PDF, videos, PowerPoints etc. The technical person installed Moodle on the server and created an IP address. The second day was focused on creating course using the IP address and on how multiple questions can be uploaded as Quiz. The method to take backups and to restore the same was also demonstrated. The trainer also introduced the participants to OER resources like OCW, Moodle HUB, Creative Commons Licenses, logo, copyright issues, plagiarism, similarity index, Moodle mobile and other free VLE tools. All the participants were also assigned a course and made as a teacher to the course on local server and also on KTS cloud. All have the logins to each, so that they can prepare the required content anywhere possible. Participants were also informed about Paypal, Microsoft, Google integrations and SSO capability.

The two days training was concluded with. Prof. R.K. Kohli, Vice Chancellor, addressing the participants during the valedictory highlighted that technology is the future medium of instruction and called upon  all the participants to keep pace with the changing technology to face the challenges ahead. The report of the workshop was presented by Dr. Jubilee Padmanabhan, and the certificates were distributed for all the participants by  The Vice Chancellor, CUPB. At the end Dr. Pankaj Khare, Registrar proposed the vote of thanks appreciating the contribution of CEMCA and overall success of the workshop.