17 – 21 August 2015

Come and join us for this seminar with Bernard Nkuyubwatsi from the University of Leicester, UK on policies and the implementation of open access and open distance learning. Please sign up using the form below

This online seminar provide insights and a challenge to stakeholders in tertiary education who are interested in the use of open, distance and e-learning, open educational practices and open learning practices to reach underprivileged learners. It is particularly relevant to those who are implementing or planning to implement opening up tertiary education in under-resourced settings.
Open, distance and e-learning, open educational practices and open learning practices have enabled the expansion of learning opportunities beyond physical university boundaries. The implementation of open, distance learning by a conventional education university can however be challenging when the university does not have a specific open education agenda. My paper offers a critical discussion of the challenges of opening up tertiary education in Rwanda within a traditional education mold. Despite a completed open distance learning project and a plethora of political rhetoric on the use of open distance learning to accelerate the transformation toward knowledge-based economy, half of students who were admitted in the public tertiary education in 2014/2015 could not attend their undergraduate education.
I argue that transformation towards a knowledge economy which is politically championed cannot be achieved without servicing the overwhelming majority of secondary education graduates who qualify and wish to attend tertiary education. Government and institutional policy documents that champion open access and open distance learning in Rwanda are surveyed and contrasted to practices among different categories of stakeholders. Using a framework for collaboratively opening up education, I will make recommendations for reaching learners who wish to attend tertiary education but are not included due to their underprivileged situations.

This seminar ended on Friday 21 August – Please view the resources on the landing page here!

Bernard Nkuyubwatsi is a PhD research student at University of Leicester under the Commonwealth Scholar Award. His research focuses on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Open Educational Resources (OER) for widening participation in higher education. Bernard is also a member of the Global Open Educational Resources Graduate Network (GO-GN), The Open Education Working Group, The Open Policy Network (OPN) and Global Scholar Network (GSN).

10 – 14 August 2015

This event has ended – presentation resources are still available here

More and more institutions have eLearning programmes in place and many have had for quite a while. On the question on how to assess the maturity of eLearning programmes Antoinette Mukendwa from Polytechnic of Namibia  will lead this one week seminar on e-Learning maturity models in Higher Educational Institutions. The schedule for the week will be the following:

Monday 10 August: Presentation resources and discussion forum will be made available on e/merge Africa live site. Presentation resources and discussion forum will remain available until Friday 14 August.

Tuesday 11 August at 2 pm (South African time GMT+2): Antoinette Mukendwa will host an online live presentation via Adobe Connect giving participants a good opportunity to engage with the topic. Please access our Adobe Connect meeting room here. At the prompt please choose Enter as a guest, provide a name then choose Enter room. For more details on how to join our Adobe Connect sessions please view this short guide

Friday 14 August: Official closing of this seminar. Presentation resources and online live session recording will remain available

Please sign up using the form below.

The e-Learning Maturity (eMM) model is a powerful and sophisticated business process model which has been customised for use in benchmarking e-learning systems and processes. This seminar will assist you in considering how to use the eMM to assess and/or compare the capability of your institution/organisation to sustainably develop, deploy and support e-learning.
The eMM was conceptualised as a benchmarking framework to guide and support institutions collaborating or working individually on their e-learning capability (Marshall, 2012). The eMM does this by providing a clear picture of an institution’s strengths and weaknesses, combined with a pathway for improving capability. The eMM provides a mechanism for organisations to determine their own priorities, with sufficient flexibility to select technologies and pedagogies that are appropriate to learners, staff and stakeholder expectations (Marshall, 2010). A key aspect of the eMM is that it does not rank institutions, but rather acknowledges the reality that all institutions will have aspects of strength and weakness that can be learnt from and improved (Marshall, 2010).

References:

Marshall, S. (2010). A quality framework for continuous improvement of e-learning: The e-learning Maturity Model. International Journal of e-learning and Distance Education, 24 (1), p. 143 -166.

Antoinette Mukendwa is Coordinator: Educational Technology at Polytechnic of Namibia

A two weeks online course facilitated by:
Rashad Mohammad, Michigan State University
Daniela Gachago, Cape Peninsula University of Technology
Jolanda Morkel, Cape Peninsula University of Technology

Duration: 22 June 2015 – 3 July 2015 – With an unofficial start 15 June 2015!

From Monday 22 June we officially started the course with the first online event, followed by two more events on Friday 26 June and Friday 3 July. Although this course has now ended webinar recordings and slides are remain available on our resource site for inspiration!

Straight from the horse’s mouth may sound like the best way to get information, but not if you don’t understand the whinnies and neighs. Likewise, scientists and researchers may have the best understanding of their own work but struggle to explain it to people who are not experts of their field. Science communication is becoming more and more important in increasing research uptake, i.e. the dissemination of your research output beyond conferences and academic publications.

This 2-weeks online course will introduce you to ideas around science communication, focusing on one particular way of communicating your research journey: in the form of digital research stories.

This online course targets researchers, but could benefit anyone interested in engaging the public, decision makers and others members of the community with information that is technical or otherwise unfamiliar to the audience.

The first week focuses on writing and constructing an understandable narrative. It teaches you to kill jargon, focus topics, decide what not to write, use active voice, report what’s interesting rather than merely important, use word and graphic images and omit needless words. The second week will introduce you to the idea of storyboarding, helping you to find the right images for your story. Furthermore we will discuss tools you could use to create your digital story. Follow-up workshops can be organised for people needing more practical support in developing their stories.

Digital research stories have many functions: it’s the kind of thing that you can use for a Linked-In profile, an item for your CV, a way to demonstrate your communication skills to employers. It is an asset that can bolster grant applications, improve your teaching, make your research more discoverable and applicable.

These are some videos produced by a researcher who took this class.

Making healthy cereals
A scientist look into Centralia, Pennsylvania, United States