VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY COURSES AVAILABLE ONLINE
Another milestone in the development of the Virtual
University for Small States of the Commonwealth (VUSSC) has been achieved with
the online posting of its newly developed course materials. The materials are
available through COL's website, which provides free access to these
university-level courses, along with many other courses.
The VUSSC course materials were developed at a series of
pan-Commonwealth workshops facilitated by COL. Over the past two years, the
Governments of Mauritius, Samoa, Singapore and Trinidad & Tobago have hosted
VUSSC workshops to train educators in information and communication technology (ICT)
skills. Participants at the workshops began to create course materials,
continuing their collaboration after returning home.
More than 80 people have taken part in VUSSC workshops,
and many have engaged in training others in the skills they have learned. For
instance, workshop participants from Maldives hosted a workshop on eLearning and
wiki skills for 20 educators at the Maldives College of Higher Education, and a
three-year course on eLearning teaching and training for educators will begin in
Maldives in July 2008. The ministries of education of Seychelles and the Bahamas
have agreed to host the fifth and sixth VUSSC workshops in 2008.
At the most recent content development workshop in Samoa,
25 educators from 13 countries began to develop course materials in the area of
Disaster Management. The course focuses in large part on mitigating climate
change as an integral part of disaster management. After learning ICT skills,
the workshop participants turned their focus to creating over 200 pages of
learning materials on the topic.
The course materials developed at all four workshops are
being converted into course modules using COL's Instructional Design Template.
The courses are now freely available in multiple formats on COL's website.
Institutions, educators, students, non-governmental organisations (NGOs),
governments and lifelong learners can download the materials, customise and use
them in their own programmes.
The
course modules on COL's website include:
