The Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) launched the DE policy in June 2013. The presentation of the DE policy took the form of a mini workshop organised by the TEC where stakeholders in the tertiary education sector were invited to present issues related to DE provision in Mauritius from their perspective.
I was one of the presenters and I talked on copyright and intellectual property issues related to distance education. There was also a presentation from one of our former masters student Mr Avinash Oojorah who is now a lecturer from the MIE. The talk was related to makers and takers of technology.
In short, the key points made by our good friend were centred around questions namely:
- Why are we poor takers of technology? Why don't we use all the features of an LMS such as MOODLE?
- Why don't we become makers of technology, for instance developing our own LMS?
- The TEC should consider setting up an incubator for research in education technologies and/or distance education
Nice presentation and good questions except that............. we have most of the answers!
My reply to the first point is simple. We at the VCILT, we have always looked into ways to become SMART rather than poor takers of technology. A 'rich' taker of technology does not mean that ALL features on an LMS should be used. Indeed a rich taker should be a smart taker. The rule of thumb is that use what you need and discard what is not needed. The policy at the VCILT before adopting any new feature is that thorough technical and pedagogical testing should be done prior to its deployment for full use.
With respect to the second point, in 2004 the VCILT had embarked on a very ambitious project of developing our own learning platform. It was developed and used but sustaining such an initiative was very costly and the unprecedented growth of open source initiatives made it ridiculous and devoid of logic to continue to develop a platform when our primary aim was to provide a service to the academic and student community. To 'make' technology does not necessarily mean we develop our authoring tools or develop software from scratch. The open-source community is an excellent proof for this. An innovative service produced from one technology that exist can in turn become in its own right another piece of technology.
As for the last point, the TEC is a regulatory body and I believe it is not its mandate to house an incubator for research in education technologies and distance education. The country has three or four public universities and institutions like the MIE/MGI etc are here and its their mandate to have research incubators. The VCILT since 2002 has been in itself a research and development incubator in education technologies, e-learning and open and online learning....
Quite a few examples can be given on the last point. In 2002-03 the VCILT worked on an interactive multimedia CDROM for History and Geography funded by the MRC with the collaboration of MIE and MES. Practically 10 years ago.....This was a revolutionary product cum incubator technology which saw a real implementation about a decade later e.g in the form of Sankore project.
Lets talk about an incubator for human capital in the field of education technologies. Again the pioneering role of the VCILT is more than obvious as we are feeding the human resource inputs to institutions like the MIE in terms of trained edtechies..
Quite a few examples can be given on the last point. In 2002-03 the VCILT worked on an interactive multimedia CDROM for History and Geography funded by the MRC with the collaboration of MIE and MES. Practically 10 years ago.....This was a revolutionary product cum incubator technology which saw a real implementation about a decade later e.g in the form of Sankore project.
Lets talk about an incubator for human capital in the field of education technologies. Again the pioneering role of the VCILT is more than obvious as we are feeding the human resource inputs to institutions like the MIE in terms of trained edtechies..
