Supporting Distant Learning through Open College

Recently, I was invited to present my pre-research slides at the "Research and Short Professional Courses Workshop" (held on the 23rd of April 2015) to the senior Staff of the Open College, University of Papua New Guinea about my drive to bridgea the Digital Divide in Papua New Guinea through the development and establishment of a virtual classroom.  At this workshop, I shared some of the references relating to online learning especially using a virtual classroom (Virtual Klasrum [VK], as I called to localize the term).  

sharing mapped locations of project

I also shared some of the pre-research activities and findings I did with my people at the village level.  The concept was new to all of those who were present at the workshop; though it was related to an element of what had already been introduced into the college through their Open Sourced Moodle system which they've developed and trialed out.  The VK/VC concept exploded their imaginations further to the endless possibilities that technology can provide to take learning further to our rural areas.  

The Virtual Klasrum research I carried out started in 2012 after I realized the need to support the people in the village and nearby villages with basic knowledge that are necessary for their development, especially by providing information that is vital to help them sustain their livelihood through small projects they intend to initiate. 

clarifying the vk concept

The idea was to create a knowledge platform that is available 24/ 7 for people in my village or even other remote villages to access whenever they stumbled into situations requiring seeking of knowledge on "How-Tos" to get them moving so that can motivate them to excel in whatever ideas they come up with.  The challenge is to create a system that can be accessed by everyone including those in remote places using available services.  There are countless barriers to achieve the fruition of such ideas however there are also possibilities because the advancement of technology today and in the future will help make them happen.

staff interacting during question time.

Since it was my first presentation regarding the exposure of this pre-researched subject, I prepared it to be pure theoretical so that was made known to the attending staff.  However, I did gave references to evidences of what had already been done as well as carried out so far and what other things or areas that I hoped to advance into.  Above all, the overall intention is to create a living product that can serve the entire nation, connecting our people in the village with those in urban areas including the outer world.  Moreover, this living product can be part of the people and be a system that provides streamed information that are necessary for them so they wouldn't rely much on continuous outside support other than being reliable to help contribute to nation building. 

discussions after the presentation.

(Photographs: courtesy of ArTech, shots by Bingmalu Yalamu)

Interactive Appz to enhance Learning

Since the beginning of April, I've started working on interactive applications and children's games to help me expand my understanding on interactive learning and also support the drive to leverage digital literacy in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific. 

The interactive media industry in the country is not popular especially looking at it from the application development perspective.  You would barely hear people talk about developing applications that target training and development using local contents.  I've tried searching around for similar development teams here, however still haven't been successful.  This had prompted me to come up with one or few applications which I hope would push me to further develop even more engaging applications which can be used to help those wanting to acquire digital knowledge through uniquely fun ways.

These days, the learning process is presented in amazingly innovative and engaging ways throughout the world and interactive learning is increasingly being used throughout most learning platforms and systems.  With that in mind, I thought It'd be good to work along the line of developing rich media content from local knowledge (data) utilizing interactive media.

The first application I created this Month, was a simple yet fun and innovative approach (I think) to learning that embeds traditional concepts to modern experience in an engaging and fun way.  Further to that, I developed again another fun application that uses the concepts of a platform game however has different stages of learning and challenges which the user will go through.  Just recently before this post was written, I worked on another simple game for kids to play with the concept of engaging them to find their way around from one end of a wall to their target through obstacles or enemy lines, as normally referred to in gaming environment.

With all these games and even others yet to be developed, I hoped to use existing experiences and apply standard learning approaches to engage different audiences.  There were few things I've noted that were common in most of our learners and the one that stood out the most was visual messages;

    1) People are used to visual messages and they learn very quickly, their memory can hold visual message longer than written.  But it'd be a standard rule to include what they are good at (visuals) with texts and audio to meet current presentation standards.    

    2) Literacy level is low, and with the influx of people moving in from rural to urban areas, most of them still lack better understanding of reading written content so again, visual message works better, but with the inclusions of audio and texts.

Further to the fact about the power of visual messages, it is obvious that people are deeply rooted to their society or tribes.  Cutting them from their tribe or society is something that might probably take decades to happen.  With this strong bond that people had with their societies, it had given me confidence to develop interactive media content with visual messages that portray the purpose of the learning as well accompanied by custom themes to reflect the backgrounds of the audience; making them be part of this learning process.