Institutional Capacity Building Workshop for OER-based eLearning at Wawasan Open University, Penang, Malaysia- 29 January – 1 Feb 2013
Institutional Capacity Building Workshop for OER-based eLearning- 29 January – 1 Feb 2013
New Delhi- 16/01/2013- Open Educational Resources (OER) are emerging as one of the most critical contributions to the provision as well as the enhancement of learning and teaching quality in open and distance learning (ODL) organizations in Asia. While OERs can greatly improve the provision of learning opportunities for all, educational organizations that depend on copyrighted distance learning materials including textbooks can now use OERs to offer their courses and programmes far more cheaply and efficiently. Though, this is a very exciting opportunity, not many of institutions in the Commonwealth Asia are in a position to actually develop OERs or know how best to integrate existing OERs efficiently and effectively in teaching-learning. Realizing the potential of developing capacities of educational institutions in the region, the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA), New Delhi has started an activity to develop institutional capacities for OER integration in teaching and learning. Under this activity, CEMCA will be assisting the Wawasan Open University (WOU) – a private not-for-profit university in Penang, Malaysia to develop a professional development course on OER-based eLearning, and support local capacity development to prepare learning materials that uses best practices in situated cognition, reflective thinking, and storytelling.
The first workshop shall be held at Penang at the 12-storey Albukhary tower building of the University. Dr. Som Naidu, a leading scholar in learning technology and distance education, will facilitate the workshop where select staff members of WOU will participate. Apart from the local participants, the workshop will be attended by participants from ODL institutions in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia to share their best practices in use of OER. This preliminary content development workshop will be followed by two months of actual work by the faculty members of WOU to develop the learning materials, which will be further refined in another workshop to be held before June 2013. The course material so developed will be released as OER to help institutions adopt/adapt he same for developing professional development programme for their staff. CEMCA is also planning to use the material to lunch open course for capacity building on a regular interval using an appropriate eLearning platform. The activity is being implemented as part of CEMCA’s Three year Plan (2012-15) to enable higher education institutions use emerging technologies and practices to support ODL policies, systems and quality materials development.
