A Social Partnership Model to promote Educators' Development in Mauritius through Formal and Informal Capacity-building Initiatives

International audienceThe organization Helping Our People has been setup in 2011 by a team of education professionals working at the Virtual Centre for Innovative Technologies (VCILT) at the University of Mauritius. In 2009, the VCILT embarked on the SIDECAP project, funded by the EU-ACP in a consortium regrouping the Open University of the UK, the University of the West Indies, the University of the South Pacific and the University of the Highlands and Islands. The work of the VCILT in the context of the SIDECAP project was essentially focused on the repurposing of Open Educational Resources to fit in the local Mauritian Context. At the same time, the VCILT received an internal grant to work on the development of interactive learning materials using the integration of text-to-speech technology in instructionally designed PowerPoint presentations. In this paper we report how the research activities of the two projects led to a series of development and applications in the real-world context for the continuous professional development of educators, the establishment of a social entity, an NGO called Helping Our People, a partnership with Microsoft Indian Ocean and French Pacific under the Partners in Learning Program and the Youth Empowerment Program to alleviate the suffering of those living in vulnerable conditions in the country

Enabling disruptive technologies for higher education

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the UK have invested significantly in technologies for learning and teaching, especially technologies designed to support learning and teaching such as Virtual Learning Environments, which are more or less universal. However, technologies provided by HEIs have not been universally successful in terms of adoption and usage. Meanwhile, academic community members use non-institutional technologies, or “disruptive technologies,” to support their learning and teaching. A number of researchers anticipated that the use of technology in learning and teaching would transform higher education. However, and to date, this has not happened. There is therefore a need to understand how non-institutional, disruptive technologies can be effectively incorporated into formal structures for supporting learning and teaching. In order to address this issue, this thesis set out to understand how HEIs in the UK can engage constructively with non-institutional technologies, using the concept of disruptive technologies as the primary analytical framework. The underlying aim was to establish whether non-institutional technologies can be effectively incorporated into HEIs systems for supporting learning and teaching. The thesis investigates these issues by carrying out a detailed analysis of practices of academic community members with non-institutional technologies used to support learning and teaching, over a period of two years. Data is gathered via surveys, interviews and observations. Study findings indicate that non-institutional technologies are used frequently to support learning and teaching in higher education, often in preference to institutional technologies. Study findings also indicate that non-institutional technologies can be effectively incorporated into learning and teaching if social and cultural practices around usage are clearly understood prior to incorporation

Supporting a learner community with software agents

This paper describes a multi- agent approach that aims at supporting learners involved in a collective activity. We consider pedagogical situations where students have to explicitly define the articulation of their collective work and then achieve the different tasks they have defined. Our objective is to support these students by taking some of these tasks in charge whilst making them work out such organisation features. For this purpose, we propose to consider that the group of students forms a multi- agent system and to introduce software agents that can achieve some of the tasks within this group. This conducts students to tackle the problem in terms of human and software agent coordination. We present how this approach can be conceptualized and modelled using Engeström’s triangle, how task delegation can be used as a means to enable students to define the software agents ’ behaviour and the multi-agent implementation we propose