Office
of the Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal. Tuesday, March 31, 2020. As
part of its outreach thrust and giving back to the region in light of
the COVID-19 Pandemic, The
University of the West Indies (UWI) Open Campus
has been assisting regional education stakeholders to identify
alternative ways of providing continuing education for their
students.

The
Campus is leading six hours of professional development training for
stakeholders in St Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, Saint Lucia,
the British Virgin Islands, St Kitts and Nevis, Barbados and
Anguilla. Three webinars are being conducted during the week of March
30 to April 3 focusing on topics such as: using a web conferencing
tool to facilitate online delivery of content; basics for use of the
Moodle Learning Management System; and, how to engage students in the
online environment.

Among
the groups participating in the training are community college
academic staff, primary and secondary school teachers, principals and
education and curriculum officers from ministries of education.

Dr
Denise Gaspard-Richards, Director of the Academic Programming and
Delivery Division (APAD) at the Open Campus said the objective of the
training is to assist staff in educational institutions to quickly
move to online modes for continuity of teaching and learning
activities in the current school year.

The
Open Campus response followed a joint meeting among regional
education stakeholders, including the Open Campus and the Eastern
Caribbean Joint Board of Teacher Education (ECJBTE) last week.

Professor
Joel Warrican, Director
of the School of Education at The UWI Cave Hill Campus, and Chair of
the ECJBTE, said it was a strategic decision to call on the Open
Campus to provide the training. “It is the only entity in the
Anglophone Caribbean space with its core business being that of
online education,” Professor Warrican explained. “The UWI Open
Campus is equipped with a cadre of experts in online education and
has the capacity to respond rapidly and with agility to this emerging
need.”

“It
is expected that approximately 600 participants will benefit from
this professional development opportunity that the Open Campus has
collaborated on with the ECJBTE to offer the East Caribbean region,
at no cost to our stakeholders,” Dr Gaspard-Richards stated.

Professor
Warrican expressed that “the alliance formed between the ECJBTE and
The UWI Open Campus is an excellent demonstration of rapid response
in a time of international crisis that is having an impact on
education in the region.”

Hear from some of the Open Campus staff involved in delivering the training programme for regional educators by viewing this video: https://youtu.be/Swkiv5Lnds8