Learning4Content/Workshops/Face-to-Face schedule/L4C38/Workshop Report

The Kenya Institute of Education (KIE), through the Assistant Director –Open and Distance Learning (Mrs. Elizabeth Mbasu) made a request to the Commonwealth of Learning to conduct three L4C workshops to build capacity to various Educational Practitioners within Kenya Institute of Education. This workshop was conducted by Nicholas Kimolo and was attended by 15 participants comprising of 5 women and 10 men from the Research Department.

The workshop was scheduled for four days but was extended to cover an extra of one day. More specifically the objectives of this workshop were:


 * 1) To build capacity to selected persons from the KIE in content development and publishing and focusing (for now) on instructors and content developers.
 * 2) Expose participants to the use of WikiEducator and Open Educational Resources
 * 3) Expose the participants to multimedia (Video and Audio) content design including animation, image manipulation and flash using Open Source Software Technologies
 * 4) To plan on the development of selected Lessons within WikiEducator

Workshop Proceedings
Opening remarks were made by Elizabeth Mbasu, who thanked the Commonwealth of Learning for supporting the workshop. She also summarized the objectives of the workshop detailing the long-term objective to be the development of relevant training materials that can be used by KIE in achieving its Open and Distance Learning Objectives.

After the Opening remarks, the COL Consultant (Mr. Nicholas Kimolo) introduced the participants to the WikiEducator and Open Educational Resources. This was then followed by a presentation on Open Educational Resources and a justification of the choice to develop materials as OERs. Participants were also introduced to sources of already existing OER’s that can be of benefit to them and of which they can use with immediate effect. The participants were introduced to the COL ODL Template and its functionality as this was seen as the standard of which all the content developed will adhere to. The participants then proceeded to work on the WikiEducator as per the agenda and were introduced to WikiEducator and were able to cover the relevant topics according to the WikiEducator tutorials.

The participants were able to produce a Collection of sample lessons from the Research Department. The participants agreed to continue working on their content to enhance its functionality and its effectiveness for use as learning materials.

Workshop Outcomes
The workshop was able to deliver on its objectives. The team trained will continue to develop its content on the WikiEducator platform. It was also agreed that KIE will develop a content portal within WikiEducator that the institute will use to host its content in addition to their website. Upon completion of the training, the following were the outcomes:
 * 1) To work in the digitalization of both existing curriculum and content in the Department and make some of the content available to the WikiEducator portal; and
 * 2) Organize several inhouse workshops within KIE and especially one targeting senior management in the next three months to continue the ongoing capacity building in the area of Open and Distance Learning and OER Content Development within the WikiEducator.