By Nick Raistrick, acting iLearn editor

 

2009 has been a busy and exciting year for iLearn (online media skills training) at the World Service Trust.

iLearn modules have been successfully used in a number of countries for the first time – from Tanzania to Peru; we’ve developed training material on a number of new topics including climate change and reporting gender issues; and most importantly feedback from trainees has been excellent whilst research continues to show that iLearn continues to have an impact in the countries where we work.

 

Since iLearn’s inception in 2002 it has been used by trainees in more than 20 countries, and 2009 saw iLearn in use for the first time in several more.

 

For example in Palestine trainees covered modules in core journalism topics such as fairness and straight dealing, impartiality, accuracy and interview skills. 176 media practitioners took part in at least one of the iLearn modules.  As we have found in the past, the ratio of female to male trainees, when taken as a proportion, is markedly higher for online training than the overall participation of women in the work force* although there’s still a very long way to go in terms of reaching gender parity.

 

In Latin America trainees covered modules on climate change: trainees were based in Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela. Of course journalists can’t learn about climate change in isolation: they also complete iLearn training material on reporting science, numbers and statistics, interviewing academics and reporting health and the environment.

 

In Afghanistan trainees looked at core journalism material, whilst in Sierra Leone and Uganda iLearn was used as part of the recruitment process. By getting applicants to complete online exercises which closely mirrored the work they were being hired for, we turned a long list of CVs into a much shorter list of suitable candidates and saved hours of interview time.

 

In Uganda we trained the trainers we eventually hired – embedded mentors in rural Ugandan stations as part of an FCO governance project – who went on to become online iLearn mentors themselves. Online training in topics like editorial values and interview skills meant that the work of mentors onsite was practical and specific to the needs of individual stations.

Feedback was overwhelmingly positive:

“It was an enriching, challenging and refreshing in many aspects. I enjoyed it!” said one trainee. Another said that she “…found that it is possible to get two different sides to come together and talk about something that happened in the past without much noise or hate using all the guidelines given,” following her online training, which is encouraging given the aims of the project.

 

In Tanzania, Kenya and (again) Uganda sports journalists who are called on to report development issues, and community leaders who need to use the media to meet their development aims, came together for face to face training around the East Africa Cup : workshops which were much improved by participants having completed iLearn courses in advance.

 

Using online gave trainees a sense of what to expect, whilst from a training point of view it was very useful in terms of getting an understanding of the skills, backgrounds and training needs of participants.

 

The project outputs included using Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook to gain interest in the tournament – vital if the tournament is to attract new sponsors.

 

But it wasn’t all about working in new countries: in 2009 iLearn modules continued to be used by several hundred trainees in existing projects in Turkey, Iran, Romania – and because the iLearn content management system records when and where people access their training material we know that trainees of projects which have formally ended were accessing their material in places like Burundi, Somalia, the Caribbean and a number of former Soviet Union countries.

 

Looking to the future, iLearn in 2010 will continue to develop: firstly as a new improved open source version, provisionally called iLearn Academy, which will incorporate social networking tools such as blogging and peer review: initially this will be used in Syria and hopefully other Arabic speaking countries…  and beyond.

 

We’ll be working with the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association to deliver training on journalism topics, including sports reporting in the run up to the first African football world cup whilst project proposals featuring iLearn include work in Vietnam, Kenya and Belarus.

 

So this new year looks like being just as busy …

 

* which stood at 14% in 2006, according to the Palestinian Women’s Research and Documentation Centre: female iLearners made up 34% of the total