Summary of Activities and Deliverables
Developed New Training Program in order to drastically improve the quality of the training programs at the vocational school a completely new program was developed following a simplified standardized framework commonly found in western universities. In fact, the new program is a simplified version of the consultant's own master of science in information systems from Athabasca University with a hands on practical angle to it. It consisted in 10 course (training modules) and has since been further developed by trained staff A screenshot from their website showing the programs at the time of this writing is included below.
Senior Instructor the class was taught by the designer of the program for the first two years while working with staff to standardize and improve the other programs of the school. In the photos below you can see the consultant's students for class 2012 most of which now hold positions of vast responsibilities with their organisations.
Computerized Vocational School into a more modern and efficient learning institute. In order to raise the bar and stand up to what the school was teaching to its students it was necessary to further computerize the school. This involved a number of activities listed below.
- the development of a proper website shown below as it was back in 2011;
- the design and development of an information system to manage students and enrollments;
- transformed the school into the first privately owned online learning platform in Vanuatu and the Pacific region;
- the development of improved policies and procedures;
- training of staff;
- recommendations for future work, especially the establishment of a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) framework to effectively follow up graduate students later in their career and further improve the trainings offered
The originally re-designed web presence is shown below but parts of it have been further developed and the theme changed by the current technical staff who were actually trained by the consultant.
A simple MIS was developed to record students, teachers, enrollments among other things. An example illustration of online data entry interface is shown below.,/p>
The MIS had excellent reporting capabilities such as printing out teacher's student for a particular class (course and year), student academic transcripts and more. An example report of a student academic transcript is shown below (without the completed grades).
The Moodle Learning Management System (aka. Course Management System) was deployed and all the courses of the technical schools where organised in the new system. The system is both used for online learning and on-site learning. Example screenshots below include one of the courses offered on computer programming and the other one how to enrol student to the course.
A guide was left with improved policies and procedure which have since then further been developed. Recommendations were given to further improve the monitoring and evaluation framework of the vocational school. Finally, at the end of each year is the graduation, the favorite time of the students. Photos of graduations during those years are shown below. The smiles on the students' faces eventually faded as the heat in the room full of people with a broken air conditioning was unbearable :).
