As explained in earlier news “Basic education certificate online presentation“, June 6th, 2010, the first group of tutors completed the Basic Certificate in Online Education.

What is the next step?

The next step is the Advanced Certificate in Online Education Course, consisting of online and F2F sessions, that extends from the month of September 2010 till the month of April 2011.

The objectives of this phase are:

• A wider knowledge of Web tools to produce didactic materials.
• Improved quality of online courses.
• Achieve a tighter integration between classroom teaching and online material, including more collaborative activities for students.
• Improved student usage of the computer labs and the learning platform.

To achieve these goals a combination of actions is required:

• F2F workshops,
• Online support for tutors and
• Specific support in improving the materials and teaching methodologies.

The performance indicators and requirements for participants are a critical component for this course.

New Basic Online Education Certificate

Considering the increasing interest of teachers in participating in these courses, a Basic Online Education Certificate Course will start in November 2010 for a new group of tutors.

Two weeks of intensive training and tutorials with Mekelle University  professors have been organized in March. During these sessions the tutors presented their course progress, and instructors expressed recommendations and tips to improve both the  course structure and content.

There were also lectures on specific software tools such as image editing, video editing, animations and file management. These workshops were organized around the practical work and personal attention to support the needs of each tutor for the correct development of their courses. The next step will be allowing  students into each course materials and learning activities

The number of tutors trained, courses developed and participating students wil give us a good indicator of the project progress and provide us with practical experience on the computer labs functionality.

With the experience from the workshop in November 2009, we started a reflection that result in some changes in the courses development that are congruent with our objectives.

In order to better accommodate with the different study styles and workload, two courses have been designed based on the MoodleBites online training Courses. Each ourse certificate is associated with different course requirements. The basic course certificate deals with course structure design  and moodle functions like quizzes, forums and assignments. The advanced course certificate deals with the basic requirements plus activities created with rapid e-learning tools like Mind Maps, pdf-convertion, picture editing  and manipulation.

Our main goal is still to engage and support the teachers to achieve a basic course structure in Moodle so they will be able to show an embedded online course with some content and activities for the second semester.

What’s next?

With the intention to collect each tutors progress and to deliver support and guidelines to upload their materials, a series of Workshop for tutors has been scheduled, as weekly training sessions.

At the same time, the second the Face-To-Face week is been organizing in March month, containing such as these topics:

• Course progress presentation: each tutor presents their course status and participates in the evaluation of the other courses progress.
• Some advanced Moodle functions like advanced quizzes and directory upload.
• Standard course format, to reach a coherent course appearance.
• Use of Open Educational Resources (educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone), to include as course content.
• Use of some rapid e-learning tools.