E-Learning to be debated on in Informática 2018

As part of the second day of the International Convention and Fair Informatica 2018, e-learning was discussed today, which is an educational model based on the teaching-learning relationship mediated by the internet.

Regarding this topic, Maurice McNaughton, director of the Center of Excellence at the Mona Business School, at the University of the West Indies (Jamaica), presented the conference titled Pedagogical approaches for the delivery of quality e-learning in resource environments limited using Adapt Open Source Framework.

The scholar commented that informatization advances have made possible the appearance of new methods of education, teaching and learning. This has led to the emergence of massive and open online courses (MOOCS), "which have made possible the training and have also appeared as a competence for educational institutions already established and traditional teaching methods" .

McNaughton insisted on the subject of the context, an element that directly affects the availability of this method. In the case of Haiti (the central theme of the research, which focuses on the "sustainable delivery of online digital skills training in an environment with limited bandwidth and intermittently available infrastructure"), it was necessary to take into account the evolution of social and cultural habits, and elements of a technological nature.

The AYITIC Goes Global project (under the slogan "empowering women through digital markets") is fundamental in the topic presented in this study process.

According to the official website, it is "an initiative that seeks to improve the conditions of employment acces for women in Haiti through the creation of capacities related to information technologies. The project is carried out in collaboration with the School of Infotronics (ESIH) and Transversal, as local partners, and the Caribbean Open Institute as a regional reference for the development of digital capabilities. "

The website of Informatica 2018 publishes that, "through this project, we explore the merits of connectivism, an emerging theoretical learning framework, to contemplate new pedagogical mechanisms of instruction that allow us to test the limits of pedagogical innovations with technology enabled in environments with limited resources.

As disclosed by the official page of the contest, the Open Source Framework adapted platform was selected, in order to "develop attractive, receptive, multilingual and student-centered eLearning objects, and allows the creation of a social learning experience".

Maurice McNaughton said that the advantages of this framework are given by the presence of a responsive content, which adapts to any device; the ability to create content that does not necessarily require an internet connection; presence of accessible tools for non-expert developers, amongst others.