By December 2011, the Philippines shall be the base for development and transmission of training programs via videoconferencing of policymakers in the Asia-Pacific involved in their countries’ technical and vocational educational training programs. This was according to Dr. Shyamal Hajundar, director general of the Colombo Plan Staff College (CPSC) for Technician Education, who spoke with The Manila Times following the launch recently of their school’s blended wireless learning center in its campus at the Department of Education (DepEd) Complex along Meralco Avenue in Pasig City.
CPSC is a regional training center to improve technical education and training in the member countries of the Colombo Plan. Since 1986, its campus has been in this complex after having transferred from Singapore where it was established in December 1973.
On the other hand, the Colombo Plan is an international organization founded in 1951 to promote economic and social cooperation in the Asia-Pacific. It has its headquarters in Colombo, Sri Lanka with 26 member countries today, including the Philippines.
In an exclusive interview, Dr. Hajundar told The Times that the videoconference training programs would be the evolutionary consequence of the path their regional training center has taken since its introduction in 2006 of online courses for policymakers and other students coming from the Colombo Plan’s 26-member countries.
This videoconference training capability will use Open Source as its operating system to minimize installation costs. It will also integrate into its content management system Wiki-type TVETipedia learning modules developed by the Unesco-UNEVOC based in Bonn.
Dr. Hajundar added that their blended wireless learning center was also part of this evolutionary development that would make their campus computing environment completely wireless from the connectivity to the computers, headsets, and mice. In the blended learning center , classroom lectures would be conducted with faculty members using interactive electronic boards instead of traditional blackboards.
The wireless blended learning center was inaugurated with Korean Ambassador to the Philippines Joong-Kyung Choi as special guest of honor. He is also Chairman of the CPSC Governing Board.
Dr. Hajundar further said the online courses and the blended wireless learning center would be integrated into the videoconferencing system. Accredited contributors from the Colombo Plan countries as well as the other contributors accredited by Unesco-UNEVOC would have authorization to add modules or modify and edit existing ones.
He said that the CPSC online contents developed since 2006 have been a mix of asynchronous and real time modules. He added that the online learning system had been configured to take into account connectivity challenges faced by Colombo Plan member countries whose bandwidth problems denied them access to multimedia modules.
He explained that this had been done using mobile servers in these countries for the online contents relevant to their training needs. In effect, access there was through WLAN with the contents uploaded into these servers.
He identified these countries as Afghanistan, Myanmar, Bhutan, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Mongolia.
According to him, the videoconferencing system would cost an estimated $3 million to install with funding to come from voluntary contributions by governments of Colombo Plan countries as well as private donors.
CPSC is an institution of the Colombo Plan with its faculty coming from member countries. –Ike Suarez, Correspondent, Manila Times
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