The webinar program that the Department of Information and Communication Technology (DICT) and the University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU) co-organized was named Champion in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Prizes 2021 . The project titled “Enabling Teachers on Remote Teaching and Learning in the Time of Pandemic” is one of the 90 Champions for the summit, and one of the 20 projects nominated under the Capacity-building category. Over 1,270 projects from around the world were submitted for the year and three hundred sixty of these projects were nominated for the voting phase of the contest.
“Enabling Teachers on Remote Teaching and Learning in the Time of Pandemic” is a 9-session webinar program conducted for the rapid and massive training of educators. This was held over a period of three months — from June 2020 to August 2020 — in preparation for the new normal in education caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Certificates of training completion were given to participants who passed the learning assessment for each of the nine topics, with one topic, Course Materials Preparation for Remote Teaching and Learning, offered as a Massive Open Online Course to provide an online guided workshop for the participants. The entire program was made available for free to all participants and it benefitted 84,632 teachers all over the country. Videos of these webinars are available to the public through this DICT Playlist.
World Summit on Information Society Prizes 2021 is a contest hosted by the International Telecommunications Union. WSIS is a platform to honor projects and activities that harness ICTs to advance sustainable development. The awarding ceremony for the contest will be held on 17-21 May 2021 where 18 winners from the list of 90 champions will be announced. Visit wsis.org/prizes to explore other projects that were chosen as champions.
UPOU and DICT have been collaborating to equip the nation’s teachers and education professionals in remote teaching and learning and technology-assisted learning. One other project they co-organized was the seventh episode of Edu-Hack, UPOU’s online podcast aimed to discuss how Philippine universities are responding and adapting to disruptions in higher education brought about by the pandemic. This episode tackled “Offline Technologies for Remote Teaching and Learning” and was streamed live in July 2020 via the UPOU Networks and the DICT Facebook Page, where it is still available for viewing to the public.
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