Year by year the number of disasters in the Asia Pacific region continues to increase. Extreme weather events related to climate change are one reason for this increase. However, the region has also been struck by several major earthquakes affecting highly populated areas.

The United Nations University is planning to offer an advanced seminar series on Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance. The series will be implemented in collaboration with the University of Hawaii and a network of partners in the region.

The first lecture will begin on 25 September and will continue each week until 11 December 2008. This course is designed for graduate students and professionals interested in disaster management and relief.

The lectures are delivered by experts from across the region and each class lasts one and a half hours. The classes take place through video conference with online support via a learning management system. All lectures are conducted in English.

The courses are integrated into existing teaching programmes at the partner universities. In Tokyo, students taking the course must attend classes in the Media Studio on the ground floor of the UNU building.

If you live in or around Tokyo and you are interested in applying for the course, please send an email and one page curriculum vitae to the following email address by Monday 22 September (onlinelearning@unu.edu). Pleases are limited.

Photo Source: Lakerae

Today, the UNU Media Studio participated in an online seminar with the Pan-Pacific Distance Learning Association. We were talking about Open Content, Open Software and Open Learning. The presenters were Paul McKimmy from the University of Hawaii, Scott Belford from the Hawaii Open Source Education Foundation and myself from the UNU.

We used Elluminate to connect everybody and as a presented it was a really interesting experience. I am pretty comfortable now making presentations over video conferencing. However, with Elluminate you really need to multi-task since there is are plenty of options for audience interaction.

They can raise their hands for questions, give you a smiley face or thumbs down, or you can poll their opinions. It is all pretty seamless, but takes some getting used to.

We were looking to have excellent moderators from the UH College of Education - Peter Leong and Adam Tanners - who basically kept an eye on things. Thanks so much fro this valuable experience!

It is really exciting to see that David Wiley has been experimenting with Wordpress to re-publish his course on “blogs, wikis and new media.” Here at the UNU we have been building courses in Wordpress for some time now and we have published three so far. In fact most of our websites at the UNU Media Studio are built in Wordpress. So it is good to see others exploring this impressive tool!

Oh yes, we have been customizing existing plug-ins like polyglot (for multi-lingual blogs) and building new ones to handling quizzes and slideshows. We are going to post them soon as a contribution back to the Wordpress community. We have also made it possible for people to download the entire course, upload it to their own Wordpress site or just run it locally. This allows them to totally customize the course.

I like the related comment regarding the use of Wordpress for course development from
Brian Lamb in his posting “Ridiculously easy and inexpensive course hosting will never fly.” He writes “This approach is fatally flawed in a number of respects and it will never catch on. For one thing, it is far too cheap, and can never justify escalating technology infrastructure budgets. Worse, instructors and students could adopt this technology with minimal assistance or oversight from instructional technology specialists. In this profoundly unserious framework, there is nothing to prevent students from previewing courses before they take them, or reviewing courses later on. Indeed, some “learner” might benefit from this content without being an enrolled student at all!.”

All very good reasons to continue with this approach to course development.

Last year, with support from the Joint Activity Fund, three UN University research institutes and the Media Studio worked together to develop the UN University Opencourseware portal, officially launched today, 4 February 2008. The aim of this pilot project was to publish at least ten courses as required in order to remain a member of the Global Opencourseware Consortium.
This initial collaboration brought together specialists from Macau (UNU-IIST), Canada (UNU-INWEH), the Netherlands (UNU-MERIT) and Japan (UNU-MEDIA), to publish courses on e-Governance, Innovation, Economic Development and Environmental Conservation (mangroves and watersheds).
As the platform, we selected eduCommons developed by the Centre of Open and Sustainable Learning at the Utah State University, because it is both free and open source (well, semi open source to be more precise). We managed to customize eduCommons so that it would have the same look and feel as the main UNU website.
We hope that our current suite of opencourseware will prove useful to students and educators all over the world. In the future, we plan to expand the portal with the inclusion of courses from the remaining UNU institutes and programmes.

The Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC) at the American Museum of Natural History have just launched a new online journal, Lessons in Conservation (LinC).

Teaching modules contained in LinC cover the following topics:
An Introduction to Marine Conservation Biology
Assessing Threats in Conservation Planning and Management
Ecosystem Loss and Fragmentation.
Forest Fragmentation and Its Effects on Biological Diversity: A Mapping Exercise
Biodiversity Conservation and Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs)

The modules include synthesis documents summarizing a conservation-related topic, field or laboratory exercises with accompanying solutions, and relevant short case studies with teaching notes. These course materials are highly relevant to both the Saving the Ayuquila River and the Voices of the Chichinautzin products developed by the UNU Media Studio. We had the chance to meet up with representatives from the American Museum of Natural History at the workshop we co-organized with the University of Guadalajara in Mexico in November 2006.

The deadline for applications for two new online courses is fast approaching. If you are seeking to enhance your skills as an e-tutor, you may be interested to take the course on the Pedagogy of Online Learning.

You may also be interested about the whole process of course development and implementation. In which case, the programme on E-Course Development and Online Course Leadership may be well suited to your needs. The deadline for applications for both of the above is 18 January 2008 and the courses begin on 22 January 2008. Both courses are for credit and require around 240-300 hours of study.

Past students have made very positive comments on the courses. For instance a student from Somaliland stated “I thought that it was like other classes where you have to compete for higher marks and grades, instead I found myself more of a collaborator and a contributor than a receiver.”

The UNU Media Studio has been supporting a course on disaster management and humanitarian assistance for the past ten weeks. Recently, we cam across Stopdisastersgame.org - an online disaster simulation game created by the UN/ISDR (UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction).

The game teaches students how to build safer villages and cities to prevent disasters. The game (available in English, French, Russian, Chinese and Spanish) challenges the players by simulating various types of disasters such as forest fires, earthquakes, tsunamis and floods.

All in all, a cool online initiative that combines technology and education to prepare the young generations for a better future.
Click to play the game
Or visit UN/ISDR

“Climate Change is unequivocal.” Those are the words of Dr. Rajendra Pachuari, Chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
On 2 November, as part of the Asia Pacific Initiative, the UNU Media Studio worked with our network of partners to organize a special lecture from Dr. Pachuari via video conference. The title of his presentation was “The IPCC Fourth Assessment and Beyond.”
This lecture was very timely since on 12 October, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the former US vice-president Al Gore for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.
Students and professors participated from classrooms at the UNU, the Energy Research Institute (TERI - India), Keio University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, the University of the Ryukyus, the National University of Samoa, the Asian Institute of Technology and the University of Hawaii. FASID provided extensive support for the lecture in Tokyo and the University of Hawaii facilitated the video conference component.
The lecture was brilliant and provided deep insights on the work of the IPCC’s, their assessment findings and particularly the impact on the Asia and Pacific region.

Last week on 27 and 28 September 2007, two courses were hosted at the UNU Media Studio as part of the Asia Pacific Initiative. These courses are organized over video conference in collaboration with a network of universities in the region.
The first course deals with disaster management and humanitarian assistance and is coordinated by the University of Hawaii. The second course deals with environmental issues (mainly climate change and sustainable energy) and is coordinated by Keio University, with support from FASID.
We use Moodle as the course management system and you can visit the site (hosted by the University of Hawaii) and log-on as a guest if you are interested to follow the course online. Classes will run until mid-December.

Twenty four students from eight countries recently graduated from the M.Sc. Development Management run in collaboration between the University of Agder in Norway and United Nations University-Global Virtual University.
In the latest issue of E-learner, graduates from the very first cohort share their views on what have been the critical success factors of the programme as well as their experiences of being online students.
In addition, professors accustomed to ‘traditional classroom teaching’ reveal how their involvement in the programme has inspired them in their work. Last but not least, a new group of international students is now embarking on the second M.Sc. Development Programme, and their expectations are high.