Featured L4C Participant: Manta Nowbuth

The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence. Rabindranath Tagore

Hi, I am am Manta Devi Nowbuth from Mauritius. I qualified as a Civil Engineer and am Associate Professor from the Department of Civil Engineering of the University of Mauritius.

Education is more than sharing of information. It helps to convey ideas, to share experiences, to communicate, and much more. In the digital world, Education brings together people from various cultures. WikiEducator is a forum which I feel fully addresses the purpose of education, especially through its wide network of participants.

My Learning4Content experience

I joined the Learning4Content workshop to gain experience in developing education materials online and to participate with a wider community of online learners. My best experience of the workshop were the discussion forums. My own experience was enriched through the sharing of ideas with people from different parts of the world. I got to appreciate how the opinion of learners is informed, not only by their experience but also by the facilities and technologies that a learner has.

Life after the Learning4Content workshop

Since the L4C workshop, I have been working on the development of educational resources on water quality and its impacts of health. I am planning to invite a group of secondary level teachers to join me for an initiation into the WikiEducator family. These teachers will be involved in the implementation of information technology in secondary education. I have also contributed to the Mauritius country page on WikiEducator.

The Republic of Mauritius is a small isolated island, covering about 2000km2, and located in the Indian Ocean off the eastern coast of the Republic of Madagascar. Currently the population is slightly above 1.2 million. Mauritius is small, so why do we talk about distance education! Actually there is indeed a demand for distance education in Mauritius too. School leavers favour going into employment soon after leaving school. So they are interested in the flexible nature associated with the distance modes of learning. In addition, Government is encouraging working people to continue with tertiary education and there is growing investment in infrastructure and information communition technologies to suppor distance education. WikiEducator's focus on developing materials for distance education provides an attractive avenue educators in Mauritius to contribute to the national distance education objectives.