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During 2009 SAIDE assisted members of staff at
the Universidade Católica de Moçambique
(UCM) develop a set of education technology project
proposals and budgets that directly addressed the needs
of the institution. Each project focused on teaching
and learning and looked for ways that technology might
assist in enhancing the various courses on offer. Andrew
Moore reports on his visit on behalf of SAIDE.
UCM is one of the participating universities in the
Partnership in Higher Education Educational Technology
Initiative(PHEA). The purpose of the project is to support
interventions in universities to make increasingly effective
use of educational technology to address some of the
underlying educational challenges facing the higher
educational sector in Africa. This will require a focus
on capacity development to initiate and sustain effective
educational technology projects which impact on the
nature and quality of the student learning experience
and outcomes, as well as a focus on knowledge creation
and dissemination across and between partner universities
on the use of educational technology.
The proposals developed in the workshop have been approved
by the PHEA and so the challenge now lies in the effective
implementation of the projects. SAIDE is assisting in
the implementation of the following projects currently
underway at UCM:
- A capacity building project for both academic and
technical staff to build effective courseware for
delivery via a Learner Management System(LMS). In
this instance, Moodle.
- A capacity building project for the coordinators,
tutors and students of the Distance Education Unit.
It looks at how technology can enhance the design
and production of the materials, as well as provide
basic ICT skills to all stakeholders.
- The development of teaching and learning materials
for the Health Sciences Faculty adapted from existing
Open Education Resources (OER).
- The development of an ICT policy, and the buy-in
necessary from the Faculty heads, to bind the dispersed
campuses that currently work autonomously.
SAIDE has already developed and run Learning Management
Systems (LMS) workshops in November 2009 and April 2010.
The workshops were conducted from within the Moodle
platform and covered elements of courseware design such
as how to develop effective courseware, learning theory
and methodology, instructional design, quality assurance
and workflow processes by way of example. This way technology
was taught without being the primary focus of the workshops.
The first UCM online courses, the product of these workshops,
are expected to be made available online during June/July
2010.
Progress in the other projects includes the running
of an Instructional Design workshop to help capacitate
the Distance Education coordinators to revise and adapt
existing courseware. The idea is to revise those courses
that have a poor success record by reworking them to
better engage the learners, provide additional support,
enrich the content and rework activities so that they
are contextually relevant.
An OER workshop is earmarked for August 2010 for the
Health Sciences staff. They will practice the adaptation
process of sourcing, evaluating and reworking quality
OER to suit the Mozambique context.
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