We were delighted to have Demster Ngauma and Joel Kumwenda visit the Learning Technology Section earlier this month for a week. The focus of this visit was to help develop the COMPASS (virtual learning environment) system and ensure that there were adequate training materials in place to support the staff and students who will be using the site. Additionally we were keen to further develop the Virtual Patient collection process that we have been working on with our College of Medicine partners.
The current delivery plan for COMPASS is on track and we are keen to get staff using the site to start adding their content to their courses. To help support this we have created a number of e-Learning materials to help train users in the various aspects of using a Moodle site for teaching. These materials are now available to staff whenever they need them and will also be used to support face to face training sessions that will be taking place in the College of Medicine.
We have recently purchased some more Articulate licenses for the project and this visit gave us an excellent opportunity to learn about some of the new features. We used Articulate to create our COMPASS training materials as well as developing a number of virtual patients based on data that had been gathered from the Paediatrics department at QECH, Blantyre.
This ICT staff development visit also provided the opportunity for Demster and Joel to see how ICT and e-Learning services are provided within the University and explore some new technological approaches that may be suitable for the College of Medicine in the future.