PDP: Academic programme

Introduction

Welcome to the Transformation by Innovation in Distance Education (TIDE) project, which aims to improve the quality of distance education in Myanmar through collaboration with universities and colleges across the country. We are delighted to welcome you to the project!

As you are probably already aware, the current situation means we are unable to work with you face-to-face as previously planned. However, we have designed a short programme of activities which you can study on your own and at a time that suits you. There are some checkpoints along the way where we ask you to take some short quizzes to reinforce and check your learning. If you successfully complete these quizzes and create a small piece of learning you will be awarded a TIDE Certificate of Satisfactory Completion of the Online Learning Design and Academic Practice Programme to recognise your achievements.

Why should I participate?

Myanmar Higher Education is undergoing rapid transformation, both in terms of recent government initiatives such as 1 campus: 2 systems, but also as we all adapt to the impact of COVID-19. The need for many universities and colleges to move to online teaching means that all staff should have an awareness of good online learning design practices and how to use platforms which host online learning content. Being able to find and reuse learning resources legally is also a key skill, particularly with the enactment of Myanmar’s new Copyright Act. This programme aims to give you invaluable skills to support you and your university in successfully navigating this terrain.

How the programme works

The materials that constitute this programme have been designed to be used over a set period of around eight months requiring approximately 1.5 hours of study each week, or about 36 hours in total. However, as it is a self-study programme you can go faster or slower than this.

The programme is presented as a series of ‘Steps’ which indicate what resources you should engage with. There are also a series of tasks that you will need to complete. At the end of the programme, we hope you will have produced a short piece of teaching that has been developed using online learning design principles and Open Educational Resources (OERs) that you can be proud of. OERs are freely available resources, including text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching and learning. You will also have reflected upon your teaching practice and have a clear plan for your future professional practice.

The programme has been designed so that you can study the resources individually and work through the material at a time and pace that works best for you.

The programme consists of documents, pre-recorded webinars and narrated PowerPoint presentations. The resources we want you to engage with are available on this website and offline by downloading them and saving them onto a USB or to your device.

Strand 1 Online Learning Design (30 study hours).

The programme consists of a series of tasks which will enable you to produce a piece of new teaching by drawing on existing OERs. We will provide you with a selection of OERs, and you will apply the learning design principles we teach you to select and blend bits of these resources to produce your own new course. The OERs we provide you with have an open Creative Commons license which means you can remix, adapt and blend them. The audience or students for your new course will be school leavers and 1^st year undergraduates, so your course will need to be at an introductory level and it should be quite short requiring no more than 6 hours study.

These are the OERs that you will draw on to build your course. You will be asked to select some content from a course in Group A and some content from a course in Group B which you will then blend.

You will notice that Group A courses are designed to help students study better, while Group B courses have an environmental theme. This is to ensure that there is some skills practice in your new course, as well as new knowledge. You will need to create a title for your course. For example, your course might be called:

• Setting out to study ecosystems online
• Improving English skills by studying earthquakes
• Understanding sustainable energy through distance learning

Learning Outcomes

The learning outcomes of the online learning design programme strand are to:

• understand learning design
• develop learning outcomes for a new course
• understand different Creative Commons licenses
• identify content from selected OERs to meet learning outcomes
• blend content to create a coherent new course of study
• create a study guide to orientate and guide learners through your course
• build a quiz to test learners’ achievement of the learning outcomes.

Strand 2 Academic Professional Practice (6 study hours)

The Academic Professional Practice strand will help you to reflect on your teaching, your learning on the TIDE programme and the feedback you have had from colleagues and students. There are two tasks. First, you will be supported to write four teaching diary entries based on your observation of your own practice, student feedback, support and feedback from other teachers, and the scholarship of learning and teaching (SOLT). Second, you will use these entries to identify your future professional learning needs and develop an action plan for your future practice.

The learning outcomes of the academic professional practice strand are to:

• reflect on your teaching practice in a teaching diary using your own observations, student feedback, colleagues' perceptions, and the teaching and learning literature
• understand how to identify your own professional learning needs
• develop a professional practice action plan.

Programme Outline

The following outlines the programme. For each Step there is an overview of activity and a list of resources you need to review. There is also a list of additional resources, should you wish to further explore particular topics.

You must complete each Step and the accompanying quiz before you can move on to the next Step. In order to gain your Certificate, you must gain a pass grade of at least 60% on a minumum of 6 quizzes in this course. There is no limit to the number of times you can attempt each quiz.

When you are ready, you may continue to Step 1.