Workshop on Design and Development of the Project on "Impacting Education and Open schooling through OER- Making a difference among the learners"

New Delhi, April 30, 2018: Bangladesh Open University (BOU) in collaboration with the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA) organized a training Workshop on Design and Development of the Project on 23–26 April 2018 at BOU Seminar Hall, Gazipur. This workshop was organized to design the framework of the project on ‘Impacting Education and Open Schooling through OER- Making a Difference among the Learners by BOU’ from July 2018. Prof Santosh Panda, an internationally renowned distance educator from IGNOU-India, provided expertise support to all participating faculties to design the 3-year project to take BOU to the next phase of development by reforming its pedagogy and quality, include OER and MOOCs in all its programmes, reform the teacher education programmes including developing E-MEd, bringing VET to the main focus of the Open University specifically for open schooling. In addition, Dr. Manas Ranjan Panigrahi - Program Officer, CEMCA – was also a resource person in the workshop. Dr. Manas said, in his address, “CEMCA entered into a contribution agreement with BOU for a preparatory phase between February and June 2018 to assess the strength and weaknesses, and to identify the strategies which should be converted into an outcome oriented full-fledged proposal with results-based management (RBM) framework by June 2018 for implementing the project from July 2018 for three years. As a part of this preparatory phase, BOU needs to identify certain capacity building programs and project development procedures. The output of this phase would be capacity building and finalizing integrated proposal. On the basis of this proposal of the project can be launched during July 2018”.

In this workshop School of Education had nominated 18 (13 faculties + 5 Study Center Coordinators) and the Open School nominated 15 (10 faculties + 5 Study Center Coordinators) and they were trained on integrating approach to uplift the quality of the existing courses of studies of the open schooling and teacher education programs through open and distance learning (ODL) leveraging open educational resources (OER) at BOU and the vocational education and training (VET) program through open schooling.

In this 4-day-extended workshop, participants were given exposure in the area of pedagogic integration and features of OER as well as designing and developing of project. On the first day participants were oriented with the higher education (HE) and results-based management (RBM) framework of the project. Dr. Panigrahi presented the COL-CEMCA’s Integrated Higher Education model and RBM framework which is more concentrates on the impact rather outputs. The tentative project will be implemented from July 2018 and passing the preparatory stage which concentrated on couples of research activities. In the first day, Mr. Mizanoor Rahman, Assistant Professor at the Open School presented the results of the studies (i.e. SWOT analysis, policy analysis, and questionnaire survey) as a part of the Needs Assessment Survey (NAS) to fit the project as per the result-based management framework.

2 nd day, Professor Panda oriented participants with theories and practices of the framework of the project and day-3 and day-4 concentrated on designing the framework for the project on implementation of the VET and education programs through ODL. The workshop, finally, came out with a fruitful framework and strategized the outcome oriented full-fledged proposal. Professor Sufia Begum, Dean, School of Education; Dr. Sabina Yeasmin, Dean, Open School and Dr. Md. Shafiqul Alam, Joint Director, Training patronized the workshop from beginning to end.