Design and e-Learning Development Workshop for One Health Professionals
One Health Professional Development for Faculty
E-learning has been identified as an effective way to train students and professionals with the advantage of flexibility in terms of time, content, and the pace and manner of delivery. This type of learning also helps with continued development and improved academic offerings for both the future and current workforce. The workshop aimed to give participants the ability to develop e-learning equivalents of existing courses. At the end of the workshop, 21 university personnel (IT, lecturers, or project members) would learn how to utilize current technologies to develop innovative course content delivery.
The five-day workshop (January 16–20, 2017 at Mahidol University, Salaya campus) was organized for lecturers, e-learning support staff and IT personnel from Thailand One Health University Network (THOHUN) member universities to strengthen the e-Learning development capacity of their respective universities. E-Learning experts from the University of Minnesota, Dr. Gregory Sales and Dr. Solen Feyissa, served as instructors in the workshop.
The workshop covered several content topics in e-Learning development, such as the 9 events of the instructional design model, 14-step instructional design model, education product lifecycle, LodeStar — a software package used to create learning objects, learning management systems (LMS), and rubric scoring. The participants received individual assignments to build a lesson (object) from the design tool and develop them in LodeStar to present on the last day of the workshop. The top four presented their work to the whole class and the best lesson/learning objectives received an award. Some of the participants have already planned to create e-Learning courses in various topics in the near future. THOHUN will provide financial support to develop courses from selected learning objects that are One Health or Global Health Security Agenda-related for pilot testing and scaling up.
The majority of the participants found the workshop extremely productive and useful. The participants felt that they have attained sufficient knowledge and skills to create lessons or learning objectives for an e-Learning course. They also appreciated the teaching approach of the workshop, which gave them enough opportunity to practice and apply their skills in every section of the workshop.
About the Author
Jitlada Vasuvat is the Networking and Communication Manager for the Thailand One Health University Network (THOHUN), a network supported by the USAID One Health Workforce project.
