News: Chemonics to Present at USAID Innovation Meeting in San Francisco

Staff from USAID’s Higher Education Leadership and Management (HELM) project in Indonesia, implemented by Chemonics, will be presenting at the Higher Education Solutions Network Technical Convening (HESN TechCon) 2014, which takes place in San Francisco November 8-10, 2014. HESN is a multidisciplinary partnership between the U.S. Global Development Lab and seven universities around the world, including Duke University, Texas A&M University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Makerere University in Uganda, with the purpose of creating innovative and scalable solutions to development challenges. At TechCon 2014, researchers, entrepreneurs, and private sector professionals will gather to share some of the innovations from HESN’s eight development labs.

As part of the TechCon 2014 Innovation Marketplace, HELM project staff will present a virtual blended learning strategy for university administrators, a collaboration between HELM and the Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The initiative, called the HELM/UGM Blended Learning Program, features three-month online courses for each of four core areas for higher education management professionals and uses a combination of online course modules, webinars, video presentations, and mobile phone technology to provide hands-on learning and real-time interaction.

Portions of the professional development sessions are recorded so that the course may be re-broadcast in different locations. These videos, as well as other permanent online resources, also help management professionals access and deliver the information in the way that is most convenient to them. And despite the varying levels of Internet access at higher education institutions in Indonesia, the HELM/UGM site has received more than 300,000 hits in a little more than two months.

“This program offers HELM and Chemonics the opportunity to test and refine a distance learning model to supplement face-to-face learning opportunities at a comparatively low cost,” says Mystelle Ruble, director of the HELM project at Chemonics’ Washington, D.C., office. “I am excited to share this innovation with USAID and our peers in the higher education field and to learn about the new ideas coming out of the HESN development labs.”