Transforming Curriculums For An Age Of Multi-Modal Education: A 5-Phase Approach

The pandemic has accelerated the trend towards online and hybrid learning with many educational institutes pivoting their education to online learning environments and has subsequently transformed societal expectations. There have been many benefits associated with these changes (e.g., multi-dimensional interactions, flexibility and deep learning). As we move into more online education due to changing needs and demands from students, how best to adapt our education for multi-modal learning environments can be a challenge. Getting our education ready for a multi-modal age is bringing about disruptive changes forcing us to rethink what we teach and how we teach it. Thus, the objective of this paper is to present a framework that will allow for the evaluation of curriculums and enable educators to create sustainable, flexible educational environments relevant for multimodal learning environments while remaining at the forefront of educational needs. In this paper, we present the 5-phase approach that we used to assess our programme and redesign our curriculum. The five phases include: Inventory, Analysis, Evaluation, Design and Implementation. We will present the highlights from our experience and the challenges we have had to overcome. The framework that we present is applicable to different computer science, spatial and data engineering programmes that require a mix of theoretical and hands-on practicals

Mobile GIS and local knowledge in monitoring carbon stocks

Jeroen Verplanke describes the development of a mobile GIS unit that can be used by local communities to record and monitor the carbon stored in natural forests

Monitoring Rural Water Points in Tanzania with Mobile Phones:The Evolution of the SEMA App

Development professionals have deployed several mobile phone-based ICT (Information and Communications Technology) platforms in the global South for improving water, health, and education services. In this paper, we focus on a mobile phone-based ICT platform for water services, called Sensors, Empowerment and Accountability in Tanzania (SEMA), developed by our team in the context of an action research project in Tanzania. Water users in villages and district water engineers in local governments may use it to monitor the functionality status of rural water points in the country. We describe the current architecture of the platform’s front-end (the SEMA app) and back-end and elaborate on its deployment in four districts in Tanzania. To conceptualize the evolution of the SEMA app, we use three concepts: transaction-intensiveness, discretion and crowdsourcing. The SEMA app effectively digitized only transaction-intensive tasks in the information flow between water users in villages and district water engineers. Further, it resolved two tensions over time: the tension over what to report (by decreasing the discretion of reporters) and over who should report (by constraining the reporting “crowd”)