Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Sunday, August 21, 2016

OLDaily: New Models of Open and Distance Learning

OLDaily: New Models of Open and Distance Learning: OLDaily: New Models of Open and Distance Learning

Failure to thrive.


This article outline where the world is in terms of eLearning. In the better of Africa, we are still struggling to come to terms with learning management system, few of our educational institutions have embraced open source or proprietary LMS.
The question that I ask-Should we allow institutions who have not taken elearning to evolve slowly , put succinctly should we install LMS for them  and then allow them to grow or should we adopt the disruptive technology, which is cloud-based and allows more academic freedom. Having been in this field for many years, the situation in our academic institutions in Kenya is pathetic, most of the lecturers and faculty members are resistant to change and are not life long learners. Currently, I am consulting for a private organisation which is using some disruptive technology to teach health workers, and I wonder why we have never thought in a similar direction- it is because we are not critical thinkers  or we are locked in the past. Most of our so-called lectures are basking on old glory-How I was taught was the best- we are don't want to try out for fear of failure.


Sunday, April 24, 2016

Innovation in Medical Education.

How innovative medical education in Kenya, in general, or in specific terms what have done?  Has someone measured the impact of innovative medical education on the general population? Innovative medical education is expensive, have we worked with the private, public partnership.

We need more private universities to compete or compliment each other state universities on health care training and provision. The private universities may attract more PPP initiatives. The Aghan university has shown the way, we need Mpshah, Gertrude. A paradigm shift in that direction can help train more competent health workers and naturally the laws of supply and demand will apply, this may translate to lower training costs. currently, the cost of training health workers at paramedic and medical are embarrassingly expensive. In Zambia, the armed forces run a successful medical training college producing all the major health professionals. They have opened the training to the public and the public can borrow some tips on discipline and the soldiers can be reminded of the civilian life.

Back to the basic, way back in 2000, the Belguim Government was magnanimous and funded the establishment of skills lab in Kenya. We did a fantastic job, we reviewed curricula to enable the integration of the skills lab to crowded curricula
. We equipped and train teaching, thanks to the millions of Euro the VVOB provided. This helped to sanitise the training of nurses and clinical officers, at least they didn't practice with living subjects but rather they trained using manikins( specialized dolls) before they were examined and realised to go the clinical area to work with patients under supervision.
The picture depicts a student dressing and wound in an examination setting- called OSCE- objective structured clinical examination.