Abu Dhabi, January 2006 - (by Umme Salma Mujtaba) The eMerging eLearning Conference series began in September 2002 and has been held on an annual basis ever since. The latest three-day event was held in the United Arab Emirates, where it was organised by the Higher Colleges of Technology (HCT) under the patronage of His Excellency Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan, the UAE's Minister of Education and Chancellor of the Higher Colleges of Technology. It took place in Abu Dhabi, the national capital.
The over-arching theme theme for 2005 was 'Technology-Enhanced Learning', and the conference aimed at bringing together world-class experts from academia, industry, and government to focus on the theme of enhancing quality in education through the use of technology. The focus of the conference was on current trends in eLearning and, its goal was the establishment of a dialogue on the use of technology within schools and Higher Education Institutions.
The role and effectiveness of appropriate technology use and implementation from Primary - Intermediate - Secondary - Undergraduate - Graduate studies right up to Professional Development Training was examined.
Under the theme, 'Technology Advanced Learning', speakers and session leaders explored a range of topics from 'Trends and technologies that will change the way we work, play and learn', 'Learning design for mobile devices', and 'Connected schools, connected communities', to 'elearning and the emerging of great global universities', 'Building a solid foundation for the schools of the 21st Century', and 'The Crisis of K-12 and what to do about it'.
This year's eMerging eLearning Conference also featured the inventor of the phrase 'elearning' and a guru of computer-based education, Jay Cross, who chaired the Conference steering committee and oversaw the program and selection of speakers. Mr Cross, with a broad-based background in corporate elearning and internet online training, delivered a talk on day 1 entitled 'Natural learning: it never stops'.
Top executives from IBM's corporate headquarters spoke at the Conference to brief the region's education sector on new technology developments that are set to transform learning in primary, intermediate, and secondary school systems.
"The role of technology in the K-12 sector across the region needs to be enhanced and spending rationalised to ensure that technology investments make sense and bring better learning and efficiencies in the administration of these extremely important and costly educational systems," said Dr. Tayeb A. Kamali, Chair of the eMerging eLearning Conference 2005.
The speakers at the conference had profound experience in working with some of the leading schools, universities, and government institutions across the world, helping them adopt new technologies, introduce new teaching methods and radically improve the way students interact and learn.
Sean Rush, General Manager of IBM's Global Education Industry was the keynote speaker at the opening session on the first day of the conference. He talked about transformation programs in various countries and provided examples of the different approaches taken, with particular focus on the situation in the US. He demonstrated emerging patterns of lessons learned and good practices and showed how Middle East governments can implement a holistic change process, such as strong supporting policies, continuous development programs for teachers, and phased deployment processes. He also explained how ICT can be effectively leveraged as a powerful enabler to support the transformation.
Other IBM speakers included Dr. Richard Straub, director of learning solutions for IBM Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), who has been a regular visitor to the Middle East, Celia Moore, manager of corporate community relations, IBM EMEA and Dr Diem Ho, manager of university relations for IBM EMEA. They addressed a number of topics, including building foundations for the schools of the 21st century, delivering impact to education through corporate philanthropy partnership programmes, and current challenges in higher education in Europe and other parts of the world that have highly advanced education systems.
"Schools today need solid and robust ICT implementations to be effective, yet if not well implemented, ICT may not be an enabler but rather an obstacle in the transformation journey. IBM has seen this in many countries across the world and we are currently witnessing a second wave of technology deployment, a movement from rather tentative and lowest cost oriented implementation towards highly professional, industry strength deployments," said Takreem El-Tohamy, general manager of IBM Middle East, Egypt and Pakistan.
"We believe the region has achieved some significant milestones with regard to elearning and will continue doing so by capitalising on its unique opportunity to be able to get it right from the very beginning by learning from the experiences and difficulties that the 'early adopters' had in various countries in the West."
