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Abdikadir Abikar is a Somali refugee pursuing his Master of Education (MEd) from York University in Toronto, Canada, more than 12,000km away from the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya where Abdikadir studies along with 6 other refugees.  Every day, Abdikadir walks for almost two hours to the computer lab in Dadaab, where he connects to online learning platforms like Moodle and Coursera that allow him to study and also to speak to his classmates and professors and feel part of the campus life. “Education changes a person. It has transformed me” Besides studying for his ME, Abdikadir is a teaching assistant for the new cohort of students at the camp and wants to use his education to make a difference in communities with difficult access to education. “One day, I will be a changemaker and go back to my homeland, Somalia. I want to apply new ideas and help bring education to communities outside cities” he explains. Abdikadir and many other refugee students are pursuing their higher education through a program for distance learning by the Consortium for Connected Learning, promoted by the UN Refugee Agency. In this Consortium, higher education institutions worldwide collaborate to deliver technology-supported connected learning in…

The Nepal Open University (NOU) is a public University funded by the Government of Nepal with the goal of making higher education accessible to all people, including those who live in distant areas and cannot attend university regularly Using the Moodle LMS, NOU have created a virtual environment that includes the possibility to attend live lectures, to submit assignments and take assessments, offering quality education to both in-class and remote learners. Through this learning environment, NOU delivers around 40 on-line classes daily, which represents more than 80% of all teaching in the University. They offer over 200 blended undergraduate and graduate courses and enable over 1,600 students to continue their Higher Education path, no matter where in the country they are based. Do you want to know more? Click here to download the full case study.  

INTRODUCTION The Waal Foundation (DWF) is a Dutch non-profit, non-religious and non-political organisation, with head offices in the USA and a regional office for Latin America in Ecuador. The organisation was established in 1985 through a personal grant, and today the focus is on educational strategy to promote the prevention of birth defects. DWF does this through their PreNatal program. The program is delivered online through an educational platform (Moodle) throughout DWF’s main working areas of Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia in the Andean Region and Honduras and El Salvador in Central America. The PreNatal program is also endorsed by universities in the five countries where the foundation is established. PROBLEM To deliver the PreNatal program in the most cost-effective and best practice manner throughout the five countries that DWF operates in, the organisation required a space that would allow for: the integration and use of their work methodology (mediation and popular education); various resources such as videos, discussion forums, evaluations, surveys and other tools that serve for the strengthening and construction of knowledge; offering blended courses that would allow professionals and practitioners to combine work and the study of their program. After doing research on different LMS (Learning Management System),…