Mauritius

COL’S work in Mauritius is primarily in the areas of higher education, Lifelong Learning for Farmers, teacher education, technology-enabled learning and the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth. Agreed priorities are open educational resources (OER) and OER policy development.

Higher Education

• COL is working with the Open University of Mauritius (OUM) to offer the Commonwealth Executive Masters in Business Administration and Public Administration (CEMBA/CEMPA) programme. OUM holds a seat on the programme’s Executive Governing Board and Academic Board. The biennial meetings for both boards were held in Botswana in October 2015, with representatives from OUM in attendance. OUM renewed its CEMBA/CEMPA licence for 2017–2022.
• A learner support and assessment workshop was successfully conducted for 22 academics at OUM.
• Four delegates from the Mauritian tertiary education sector visited OUM, Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia and Asia e University, also in Malaysia, in May 2017 to discuss higher education strategies and online higher educa­tion models, including teacher training.
• A mock internal quality assurance (QA) audit of OUM was conducted in October 2017 with 39 participants. Subsequently, a QA policy and implementation plan development workshop was conducted.
• In December 2017, a QA policy validation workshop and a monitor­ing and evaluation workshop were held with OUM.

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Lifelong Learning for Farmers

• Representatives from the Ministry of Gender Equality, Child Development and Family Welfare joined fellow L3F partners to consolidate their activities for the previous three years and plan their activities for 2015–2017.
• COL is working with the Department of Extension and Training at the Food and Agricultural Research and Extension Institute (FAREI) in Mauritius to build capacity among extension staff to employ interactive information and communications technologies (ICT) and ODL materials in farmer extension. This support has enabled FAREI to develop its strategy for extending its outreach with respect to training and information dissemination.
• FAREI has established information kiosks with multi-access points at five strategic locations within the country.
• A business/technical ODL course on hydro­ponics is being developed whereby interested farmers/agro-entrepreneurs may access both agro-economic and technical information on hydroponic technology.

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Teacher Education

• COL provided support to the Distance Education and Teachers’ Training in Africa Conference held at the Mauritius Institute of Education in July 2015.
• In December 2016, UoM’s Centre for Innovative Lifelong Learning trained 13 staff from the Seychelles Institute of Teacher Education in the design, develop­ment and implementation of blended learning. UoM supported the development of four courses for the Diploma in Education.
• Seventy-eight lecturers from UoM, the University of Seychelles and the University of Swaziland completed an eight-week online course on Developing and Teaching Online and Blended Courses, which was offered by the Centre for Innovative Lifelong Learning.
• A staff of the Mauritius Institute of Education participated in COL’s annual teacher development workshop organised with the National Institute of Education, Singapore with support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2017.

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Technology-Enabled Learning

• COL organised a strategy meeting in Mauritius in January 2016 to develop advanced ICT skills courses collaboratively. Experts from Commonwealth open universities participated in a two-day strategy meeting to discuss the development of ICT skills courses.
• With the support of COL, UoM organised a workshop on advanced ICT skills course development in November 2017.
• UoM is developing four advanced skills courses to be offered to youths in Mauritius for employment and entrepreneurship. The courses under development are: i) Digital Market­ing, ii) Internet of Things and Cloud Computing, iii) Computer Security, Forensic and Ethical Hacking and iv) R Programming and Big Data Analytics.
• 116 teachers from Mauritius participated in the two cohorts of the Introduction to Technology-Enabled Learning (TEL) MOOC offered in 2017.

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Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth

• Thirty-seven senior officials from nine countries enrolled in a VUSSC-developed online Postgraduate Diploma in Quality Assurance, which is being offered in partnership with UoM.
• UoM has agreed to offer a new VUSSC programme, Environmental Management for Sustainable Development, and will partner with the University of Seychelles to expand access to the programme.

Learn more about the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth.