Project Proposal Submitted to the CGIAR ICT/KM Programme[1]
1. Title
CGIAR Learning Resources Centre (CG-LRC)
2. Abstract
CGIAR Centres active in capacity building/strengthening and the development of supporting learning and teaching resources often work in isolation leading to the duplication of efforts in a number of areas. Benefiting partner institutions and clients find it difficult to access a large amount of dispersed information and learning resources on agriculture and natural resource management produced by individual Centres that may help them in improving the quality and relevance of their teaching and learning.
An inter-Centre collaborative pilot project on the development of a CGIAR Learning Resources Centre (CG-LRC) will allow a global capacity building Community of Practice (COP) to easily access and adapt CG-Centres’ produced resources in electronic format. The proposed project will allow the development of this CG-LRC and will provide some training to a selected number of national partners in the use and adaptation of these resources. The subsequent evaluation and impact assessment of the pilot project will allow its up-scaling as to reach larger audiences interested in the use of CGIAR generated learning resources in agriculture and natural resources management.
This will be a 2-year pilot project coordinated by the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), through their training and education departments. It consists of 2 phases; an initial one that will focus on the development of the CG-LRC and its use by CG Centres and their partners, and a second phase that will focus on the regional training of selected key partner institutions. The cost of the first phase is estimated at 230,000 US$ and that of the follow-up regional training phase at 49,500 US$.
The project’s main outcome will be the development of a ‘one-stop’ CGIAR Learning Resources Centre (CG-LRC), on an easy to access and navigate worldwide web site that avails all CGIAR learning resources to a global training and education community of practice in a standardized, electronic format. It will allow Centres to work more closely together in the development of future learning and teaching resources in close partnership with a selected number of national institutions. Through training on the subject, it is expected that these national institutions will be able to use and adapt these resources to suit their own needs and requirements for the development of high quality capacity building and strengthening activities in agriculture and natural resources management.
3. Background Context
CGIAR Centres play an important role in addressing the capacity building and institution strengthening needs of their national collaborating partners and clients in agricultural and natural resources management research, development, training and education. This is mostly achieved through short, in-service group training courses, the development of supporting learning and teaching materials, the strengthening of national training and education systems, the provision of individual training and education opportunities, and information and documentation support in general. More recently, some Centres have also started to explore various distance learning approaches and opportunities that address an ever increasing demand for training and education which cannot be met by the more ‘traditional’ approaches.
CGIAR Centres often implement their capacity building activities in isolation and this leads to the duplication of efforts and materials. Several attempts have been made to enhance collaboration between Centres in training and education. One such example is the IARCs/NARS Training Group (INTG) that brings together CG Centre training and education representatives, and their partners in the Africa region, to discuss collaborative capacity building and strengthening activities of mutual interest. However, increased and more efficient collaboration between the Centres and their partners is needed if the CGIAR as a system is to effectively and efficiently address the training and education needs of its targeted partners and audiences. Several donors also urge the Centres to work more closely in capacity building and strengthening. During the 2002 CGIAR AGM in Manila, the Philippines, Centre training representatives and some of their partners were invited to address a parallel session on capacity building and strengthening in order to present innovative approaches to training and education. The session, chaired by the Netherlands’ Government concluded that, among other innovations, distance learning approaches, such as e-learning, that make use of advances in information and communication technology will allow the CGIAR to reach larger audiences but that this is best done as a collaborative effort between the Centres and their partner institutions.
Electronic or e-learning, however, ranges in formats that can be as varied as credit courses delivered and assessed entirely over the worldwide web, to internet elements (chatrooms or bulletin boards, for instance) of mixed-mode distance learning courses, and often to print materials that have simply been digitized ‘as-is’ into HTML or PDF formats. Most western learning institutions offer e-learning according to the first definition – self-contained credit courses delivered over the web. However, the majority of such institutions in developing countries, especially in Africa, experience serious problems related to computing and communication technology that limits this advanced mode of e-learning. This situation is changing rapidly but for the foreseeable future, it is expected that other modes of facilitating e-learning need to be explored to make short-term gains in reaching larger learning audiences.
Whatever the future of e-learning will be in the context of CGIAR capacity building, there will always be a need to develop supporting learning and teaching resources and this can be achieved through the development of a pilot CGIAR Learning Resources Centre (CG-LRC) that will help an international training and education community of practice to access all CGIAR learning resources from a single location and that assists such a community in the adaptation of these to suit local learning and teaching conditions.
At present, national institutions address individual Centres in their quest for training and education support, especially when it comes to the provision of Centre produced learning and teaching materials, as well as other publications and resources, which can help them improve the quality and relevance of their own capacity building activities. The dispersal and amount of information available on agriculture and natural resources management can be quite overwhelming. It is also often presented in a multitude of formats and media that may make finding what is needed an arduous task.
In the past, the INTG project on the collaborative development of a CD-ROM with available CGIAR Centres’ training materials, led by ICRISAT, has made a first attempt to produce a common platform and electronic resource for use by partners in training and education. However, such a resource needs to be updated on a regular basis and advances in ICT/KM now need to be considered to share Centre training resources more widely, using the internet, and to allow users to adapt these to suit their specific capacity building needs. A pilot CGIAR Learning Resources Centre will achieve this through the development of a single-stop, easily navigated repository of learning resources combined with the training of its intended users in accessing these and adapting them to address their own needs, opportunities and constraints. Such a Learning Resources Centre will also increase the return on investment in training and education by the Centres since the investment made in preparing training and education events and developing supporting learning resources will now reach a much larger audience as compared to more traditional approaches.
A pilot project allowing the development of a CGIAR Learning Resources Centre will enhance collaboration between most Centres active in the areas of capacity building and institution strengthening. It also allows the CGIAR to become a leading provider of educational content that addresses the needs and expectations of its collaborating partners and beneficiaries. The project further promotes a novel approach to learning and teaching that makes use of advances in ICT and KM which improves the effectiveness, efficiency and scope of capacity building and strengthening as a CGIAR core activity. It can thus be fairly stated that the project is guided by the principles of the CGIAR ICT/KM Programme.
A pilot project on a CGIAR Learning Resources Centre falls under the ‘Content for Development’ thrust of the CGIAR ICT/KM Strategy and has great potential for synergy with the projects on ‘Content Management’ and the ‘Virtual Library’ under this thrust as well as with projects related to open or virtual university approaches under the ‘ICT for Tomorrow’s Science’ thrust. Its added value will be the provision of learning and teaching components to available resources as to make these more relevant, user-friendly and adaptable for their intended audiences.
A pilot CGIAR Learning Resources Centre project is clearly in demand by national partner institutions since these often indicate that there is a dearth of high quality learning resources that reflect advances in agriculture and natural resources management. Such a project can thus be expected to make a significant contribution to the quality and relevance of learning and teaching in these areas.
As illustrated in Figure 1, the CG-LRC can provide a conduit through which relevant content within the CG’s Knowledge and Information Management systems is synthesized and packaged using instructional design techniques, then made available to any CG capacity building initiative that requires training materials.
4. Objectives
General Objective
To develop a pilot CGIAR Learning Resources Centre (CG-LRC) that will allow national learning institutions in developing countries of the tropics to enhance the quality and relevance of their teaching and learning in agriculture and natural resources management in collaboration with their CGIAR training and education partners.
Specific Objectives
· To conduct an audit of all available learning and teaching materials and resources produced by individual CGIAR Centres in order to develop their presence under a CGIAR Learning Resources Centre.
· To suggest future formats and standards for the production of electronic learning resources to be used at individual CGIAR Centres as to obtain a consistent look and feel of these resources and facilitate their use and adaptation by end users.
· To train a selected number of national institutions in the use and adaptation of the learning resources available through the CGLRC and to upload these contextualized materials to a broader, common CGLRC that includes such locally relevant materials.
· To assess the impact and evaluate the usefulness of a pilot CGIAR Learning Resources Centre and its activities to determine the potential for up-scaling.
5. Methodology
In order to achieve these objectives, the pilot project uses a scalable methodology that includes four activities: 1) Conceptualizing, 2) Initializing, 3) Creating, and 4) Evaluating.
1. Conceptualizing - Since early 2003, Centre training and education representatives have organized themselves as a Community of Practice (COP). This was formalized through a request by the Centre Directors Committee (CDC) to nominate a representative for each Centre. To date, the majority of Centres have done so (IRRI, ICRAF, WARDA, CIAT, CIMMYT, ILRI, IWMI, IPGRI, ICARDA, ISNAR), and more are expected to follow later this year.
In addition to the formalized CGIAR COP, several external COPs also exist, including the Commonwealth of Learning’s Life–long Learning for Farmers group (L3) and the IARCs/NARS training Group (INTG). Given that most Centres work with partners and networks in research, development, training, and education, this pilot project will expand the formalized CGIAR COP to include relevant COPs and selected national partners where appropriate.
As a first step, an on-line CG Learning Resources Center (CGLRC) was created (http://www.knowledgebank.irri.org/cglrc) to:
· provide a working model of the concept,
· support and manage discussions within the CGIAR COP, and
· provide a centralized collection point where CGIAR learning resources can be uploaded, searched, and retrieved.
The site currently includes e-Learning courses, lesson plans, reference materials, and individual learning objects from contributions by CIAT, IITA, ICRAF, ICARDA, IRRI, ILRI, and IWMI.
2. Initializing – A common CGLRC will include two sections; CG generated learning resources (international public goods) and national partners generated resources based on the former but adapted to suit regional and national needs. To build awareness of the concept and to formalize the CG Centres’ and partners’ understanding of this common CGLRC, a workshop will be organized that brings together Centre representatives and a selected number of national partners from Latin America, Africa, South and Southeast Asia. By the end of this workshop, the participants will have:
· Conducted an audit of available CGIAR learning and teaching resources, in whatever format they exist, to determine their usefulness in the context of the CG-LRC.
· Practised the procedure for uploading and retrieving content from the CG-LRC.
· Formed an appreciation of an instructional design process that synthesizes the audited CG-LRC content to create value-added learning resources that follow an established, consistent, and replicable set of instructional guidelines.
· An understanding of the potential to produce the value-added learning resources in a way that supports simultaneous output as Internet-ready, on CD-ROM, or as print on paper; hereafter referred to as single-source publishing.
· Identified one or several priority learning opportunities based on the content of the CG-LRC to use in activity 3 – Creating.
3. Creating[2] – As a next step, using the learning opportunity identified during the Initializing activity, participants will attend one of three regional training events leading to the creation of a priority training resource based on the content of the CGLRC that applies the use of:
· A consistent instructional design process.
· Single-source publishing.
· Uploading the training content to the common CGLRC.
4. Evaluating – This activity will determine if the project has contributed to:
· Greater collaboration between CG Centres and their national partners.
· Less duplication of effort on the part of individual CG Centres and partners.
· A more consistent look and feel of CG learning resources that contributes to increased usability.
· The generation of useful models and templates that support future learning resource development by CG Centres and national partners.
· The ease of maintaining different versions that exist on the Internet, CD-ROM, and print on paper by using a single-source publishing methodology and software.