Nalin Abeysekera

I am Nalin Abeysekera,Sri Lankan and lecturer at open university of Sri Lanka. We are still in the introductory stage in online learning. But professional development-online is new to us .I think there is a potential in our country as our literacy rate is more than 90%.But face to face, we are having some professional development programs at private institutes as well as government institutes. For online we need some country to benchmark because I think that it is much needed for a developing country.

It is great to have  VPD. I am Nalin Abeysekera, Lecturer attached to Open University of Sri Lanka. I am involving in marketing and online learning there.

I received my professional development through sharing knowledge with others. Team work should be there and I believe networking will help you out…

I like to thanks to the conference organizers. Specially  Sylvia for her work. I learned many things  from this.What I like to see from SOF2008 is it will add value to the subject of e-learnihg.no matter what country we are from. As people who are working with e-learning that should be our hope. This world is huge. we should try to contribute something rather than merely dragging. As I suggested I want to use Canada as benchmark for sri lanka. Because e-learning is quite new to our country and we hope to get much exposure we need some conference like this in future.

Basically I like to see,

1. Create AIDA among public(awareness, interest, desire and action) –because some people just say only computer and internet  as e-learning..But the concept is broad..(instructional radio, televisions etc)we have to promote e-learning among educators, private sector….

2. Elearning research-this we can start from Canada and at least 40 cities(virtual?)We can have some research centers (virtual?)

3.To have good strategic plan in e—learning-we can cascade down towards to tactical plan

To share our knowledge we need to use this. What we are doing is add new knowledge to exciting knowledge.

Thanks Terry for your thoughts and comments..I plan to do one presentation on “how to use forums to induce e-learners” for my faculty and I will use Scope and this discussion to share my knowledge with my members. What you have to see and do is share your knowledge with others.In Managment it is an investment..you will get the interest in the future!

What I can finally say is Keep it up!!!

Hello Nellie,

Yes, we have to research on other countries too...i read one article yesterday how south Africa doing well with e-learning…they are using instructional radio..as defined in e-learning we can use that also. this is cost effective for countries like sri lanka too. Because of our law computer penetration. In sri lanka our literacy rate is more than 90%..one of the best in developing countries. .But compute literacy rate is 10-12%(that also high in capital (Colombo)very law in rural) ..Hence research can be done in many aspects and I see there is a need of separate research center for e-learning with branches(virtual?) in at least 40 capitals in the  world. Continuous research will update the situation and will add new knowledge to world too.

What I really want to see is to benchmark one country .Still e-learning is a fairly new concept to Sri lanka. We want to learn ..i want to share my knowledge and I want to do some research on this area.(.known to unknown in research)..for that I learned many from this forum.. on my side I tried to share my knowledge..

I think I want  to benchmark Canada and use it as a model in Sri Lanka in the future..This is what management is all about.