RDTC Regional Seminar 2016

23‐25 November 2016 | Bangkok, Thailand

Since its inception in 2002, the ICT in Education Programme at UNESCO Bangkok has created various tools and resources for teachers and teacher educators to support effective ICT‐pedagogy integration. These include a teachers’ portal on useful online resources, as well as repositories of curated teaching and learning resources. To facilitate more systematic and wider dissemination of such resources and provide corresponding training on the pedagogical use of the resources, UNESCO Bangkok established the UNESCO Resource Distribution and Training Centres (RDTC) network in 2013 with 24 teacher education institutions (TEIs) in 12 countries across the region in order to strengthen the network of TEIs in the Asia‐Pacific region with a special focus on ICT in supporting teachers. In 2014‐15, the RDTC network distributed a total of 38,720 original and reproduced CD ROMs, and provided 204 corresponding trainings to some 12,300 participants who are pre‐dominantly in‐service and pre‐service teachers. The network also annually gathers to exchange achievements, views and expertise to disseminate and strengthen each other’s capacity.

Throughout the past RDTCs, the strongest and most effective asset of the network has undoubtedly been the partnership aspect. It has been the main driving force of achievements, research, exchanges, and sharing among RDTC members as well as external partners across the Asia‐Pacific region, notably vast and diverse. The network has achieved commendable progress, and partnered in numerous ways: from developing and implementing a training guidebook on UNESCO digital educational resources, sharing research findings on the impact of the work the RDTC network has done, and/or simply updating each other on best practices, and quality resources.

In this regard, UNESCO Bangkok, in collaboration with Digital Learning for Development (DL4D), organized the annual Regional Seminar for UNESCO RDTCs in Bangkok, Thailand, 23‐25 November 2016, focusing on strengthening and harnessing on the partnerships and collaboration that have been the preexisting stepping stones of the network, while rethinking new pathways to harness this asset toward achieving realistic and measurable goals related to transforming teacher education and teaching with technology.

The Regional Seminar intended to support dialogue, discussion and research to promote diverse partnerships locally and globally in order to further strengthen the integration of ICT in teacher education. In particular, the Seminar aimed to provide the member TEIs with a venue for: 1) sharing experiences and building capacity in strengthening and sustaining global and local partnerships, 2) supporting cross country research to evaluate the impacts of UNESCO digital resources, and 3) introducing the preliminary training modules on pedagogical use of the UNESCO repositories for members to adapt in their contexts.

Objectives

The objectives of the Seminar were to:

provide the member TEIs with an avenue to actively exchange practical information (e.g. funding and partnership opportunities), perspectives and first‐hand experiences on global partnership for ICT‐integrated teacher education;
set up a research framework to evaluate the impact of the UNESCO educational resources and the corresponding trainings;
introduce training modules for the new directories of free educational resource;
update each other on the RDTC activities of the past year and discuss future plans to continue the activities of RDTC network in 2017.

Contact information:

ict.bgk@unesco.org

Presentations

Opening Ceremony

Overview of the seminar (Jonghwi Park, Programme Specialist, UNESCO Bangkok)

Session 1: Exploring partnership opportunities

DL4D presentation on learning-at-scale through partnerships to enhance quality and improve equity in teacher education (Cher Ping Lim, DL4D Network Lead)
Partnership opportunities with Microsoft (Felicia Brown, Senior Teacher Engagement Manager, Asia Pacific Education Group, Microsoft Operations Pte Ltd)

Session 2: Promising cases on transforming teacher education through partnership

FIT-ED experiences and partnership opportunities (Liezl Formilleza-Dunuan, Evaluation and Communication Director, DL4D Network)

Case from the RDTC member TEI - Use of ICT in Online and Distance (ODL) Mode of Teacher Education Program (Binod Prasad Pant, Lecturer, Kathmandu University, Nepal)

Case from the RDTC member TEI - Networking is “Knotworking” at the University of the East (Eva Aurora Callueng, Department Chair, Professional Education, University of the East, Philippines)

Session 3: Developing a winning proposal for learning-at-scale through partnerships

Developing a winning proposal for learning-at-scale through partnerships (Cher Ping Lim, Lead, DL4D Network

Session 4: Developing and finalizing research framework for a cross country impact study of UNESCO resources and corresponding trainings

Developing and finalizing research framework for a cross-countryimpact study of UNESCO Educational Resources and Correspondence Trainings (Pek Hoon Er, Senior Lecturer, University Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia)

Session 5: Learn to Engage, Engage to Learn in a Digital Environment

Learn to Engage, Engage to Learn in a Digital Environment (Anna Cherylle Ramos, Director, UST Educational Technology Centre; Maria Mercedes Buendia, Associate Professor, Educational Technology, College of Education; Maria Pri-Ann Tinipunan, Assistant Professor, Library and Information Science, College of Education, University of Santo Tomas, Philippines)

Session 6: Activities delivered in 2016

ICT Capacity-building: Integrating UNESCO Open Resources into National ICB Project (Jianhua Zhao, Deputy Director, Southern University of Science and Technology, PR China) - pdf, 2.1mb

Sustainable Partnerships for Transformative Teaching (Nitai Charan Ojha, Assistant Professor, Regional Insti tute of Education, NCERT, India) - pdf, 4mb

Session 7: “Open space”