HEAT: Blended Learning Tutor Guide
Blended Learning Tutor Guide
Introduction
Welcome to your blended learning tutor guide. This guide has been written for you by The Open University HEAT (Health Education and Training) Team.
In this guide, we are going to outline for you the main responsibilities of your important role as a blended learning tutor in the HEAT Programme in Ethiopia. The HEAT programme in Ethiopia is a partnership between the Ethiopian Federal Ministry of Health, the Regional Bureaus, The UK Open University, UNICEF and AMREF. It supports the Ethiopian Federal Ministry of Health’s (FMoH) aim to upgrade the skills of Health Extension Workers (HEWs) to Level-IV and to provide a model of learning that will ensure quality, relevant and up to date training for all HEWs, wherever they are based. The FMoH’s vision is to deliver the theory parts of the Level-IV Health Extension Programme through blended learning in order to ensure that the programme can be delivered with consistent quality nationwide and at scale, with minimum disruption to the delivery of village health services to the population in Ethiopia. The Level-IV programme will eventually be used not only to upgrade existing HEWs, it will also become the standard curriculum for all new Level-IV Health Extension Practitioners (HEPs) joining the profession in the future.
First, therefore, we want to say that you are part of an exciting new health education and training initiative in Ethiopia that will enable HEWs to develop their skills and provide the best possible health services to people in their communities. Your role in this programme as a blended learning tutor, and the relationship that you develop with your students, will be crucial to ensure the effectiveness of their blended learning. Before describing your role as a blended learning tutor, we are going to describe what we mean by ‘blended learning’. The definition that we shall use is that of The UK Open University. The Open University currently has 175,000 students studying part time by blended learning — over 40,000 of these are outside the UK.