edushare meeting - Bhutan presentation

Martin Weller
7:19am 8 December 2009 Permalink

Frank Rennie sets out the overall project. Aim was to develop 'institutional capacity' in terms of staff development and also development of new types of content. Builds on previous EU project with Bhutan looking at elearning.

Series of activity:

• establish wiki,
• promote research on how distributed administrative systems and European notions of distance learning fit in the Bhutanese context,
• examining benchmarking
• looked at preparation of materials
• workshops in each country examining specific elements eg benchmarking quality (Bhutan), developing an OU (Nepal), looking at how to use OERs (Maldives), technology (UHI), etc
• workshops set up as cascading events, so attendees then ran further workshops

Martin Weller
7:40am 8 December 2009 Permalink

Presentation from Royal University of Bhutan.

One university in the country consisting of 11 colleges, spread out over the country.

Karma Tshering is conducting MPhil in looking at quality assurance, benchmarking across a distributed campus as part of the project. This type of research had not been done in Bhutan before.

After OU meeting where OpenLearn was demonstrated, one Bhutanese colleague has now started using multi-media and have started professional development programme for agriculture.

Sustainable courses - 2 courses prepared as a result of the project (teaching math through rhymes, sustainable harvesting and marketing of incense plants). Came as a result of attending the technology workshop at UHI.

After meeting in Bhutan, role play scenarios with 30 Bhutanese colleagues, sharing practice of different systems in colleges. Raised profile of quality assurance.

In general the project has led to a greater awareness of practice in other universities and also within their own institution. They have started work on a VLE based on ideas from the project.

Future wishes, learn more about:

• use of OERs
• Quality of online learning
• Active learning
• Development of transferable and soft skills in learners

Karen Cropper
9:05am 8 December 2009 Permalink

Is there any general background information about the Edushare project that you could link to?