A road show goes to Egypt

Continuing Studies developing international partnerships

By Susan Williams and Rose McIlveen

H. Mubarak

Egypt’s minister of education is interested in implementing distance education programs, which would require the kind of expertise in program planning and design that IU has shared with institutions in Malaysia and Hong Kong.

Using the experiences gained while creating Indiana University’s online distance education courses, Jeremy Dunning, dean of the IU School of Continuing Studies, Andrea McRobbie, director of Internet and multimedia research and development at the school, and Larry Vandermolen, an instructional consultant/designer, will conduct hands-on workshops in distance education planning and program design in interactive multi-media.

But there will be an encore in Cairo, one not seen in Hong Kong or Malaysia. During a visit with Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak and his wife Suzanne, the IU crew will debut a special presentation.

“As a gesture of good will,” said McRobbie, “and in honor of the president’s wife, we’ve developed a demonstration CD, which really is inspired by the work she’s done in children’s literacy. She started a program in Egypt called ‘Reading for All,’ which has spread through most of Africa and some other areas as well.” The program features bookmobiles that visit rural areas with books for children. Ideally, the IU designed program on CD could eventually go along for the ride, helping children not only to strengthen reading skills, but learn technology while getting to know other children from around the world.

“The CD is built around children from different parts of the world who describe their countries to other children. It includes virtual reality panoramas, short stories, facts about the countries’ flags, demographics, animals of the countries and things like that,” said Dunning. The idea is to have an organization like UNESCO fund global expansion of the entire project, as the Egyptian demonstration CD features only four countries. Because this program is not currently a funded initiative, the IU team didn’t worry about new software, but stayed with available tools, said Dunning. Further development on the project will continue to be a sideline to regular work.

And the regular work was what Dunning originally was invited to Cairo last June to discuss. Egypt’s minister of education was interested in the possibility of implementing distance education programs, which would require the kind of expertise in program planning and design similar to that shared by IU in Malaysia and Hong Kong. Explaining that the project is part of a larger effort of establishing international partnerships with universities from other countries, Dunning said that the beneficiaries in Egypt will be the University of Cairo and the International Academy of Media Science.

McRobbie said that the programs they will present are not specifically designed for testing or illustrative purposes. Instead, they are interactive learning exercises or learning modules, in which the user is presented with choices in the first part of the exercise, and choosing one leads to a second round of choices.

“One particular exercise is related to comparing the climates of Egypt and Malaysia with scenario-based problems about choosing which country to build a factory in, for example,” said McRobbie. “It demonstrates a quite sophisticated decision-type of exercise, where every step along the way the student makes a choice which is reflected in the response that they’re given back.

“We’re not just showing them examples of what the Web is capable of but what they, as educators, can do,” McRobbie continued. “The main thing we want to show them is that it can be fairly simple to be your own instructional designer. You don’t have to rely on having someone else outside to do it. It enables you to create exercises in a meaningful way, rather than having the technology dictate what the exercises or pursuit should be.”