Dr. Luz A. Taposok during her keynote speech at the 14th NeLC in Butuan City stressed the importance of the conference in terms of updating participants about eLearning, discussing its strengths and sharing innovations and best practices.
BUTUAN CITY – The 14th National eLearning Conference (NeLC) was successfully hosted by the Agricultural Training Institute (ATI) – Regional Training Center XIII (Caraga Region) from September 11-13, 2018 at the Almont Inland Resort. This is the first time since 2004 that NeLC was held in the island of Mindanao where around 200 hundred eLearning practitioners, educators, trainers, researchers, media specialists and IT specialists share and discuss undertakings related to eLearning. The said event was organized by the Philippine eLearning Society (PeLS) in collaboration with ATI and through the sponsorship of private companies like Panopto, Pearson, Blackboard, Canvas, Eesysoft, Nephila Web, Neo and Tech Factors Inc.
As spelled out in their website, the PeLS was founded in 2003 with the objective of promoting appropriate use of technology for eLearning. Founders of PeLS organized the national elearning conference with the purpose of promoting research on the effective use of eLearning, sharing of eLearning experiences, developing standards of excellence, promoting interoperability of eLearning systems, encouraging collaboration in the development of substantive content, cooperating with international eLearning groups and promoting public awareness and appreciation of the nature and uses of eLearning.
In this year’s NeLC, the society has chosen Mindanao as the venue in order to promote eLearning in the island. The PeLS has observed in the previous conferences that only few participants come from Mindanao. Most of its delegates were usually from state universities and colleges (SUCs) and private education institutions (PEIs) in NCR and Luzon areas.
The three-day event revolved around the theme, “Gaining the Edge: Integrating eLearning in Instruction, Extension and Research.” Dr. Luz A. Taposok, Officer in Charge of ATI served as the keynote speaker.
In her speech, Dr. Taposok highlighted the importance of NeLC. “Our primary thrust why we are here is our commonality as institutions in upholding and incorporating knowledge in various disciplines. Gatherings like this serve as an opportune time to enrich the discourse as means to capacitate people and address literacy gaps. This is a chance to be updated about eLearning, discuss its strengths and share innovations and best practices toward sustainable development.”
The following topics were presented during the plenaries: Adaptive Learning Environment Systems: The Sandiwaan Learning Center Experiences (Fr. Benigno Beltran), Decolonizing the Internet: Making Our Voices Heard through Research, A Demand-Driven Education with Technology-enabled Pedagogy (Goh Lin Inh), Developing Online Courses for Classroom Teachers (Juan Macalde), Integrating Video in Instruction and Extension (Francis Tam), Instructor Competencies for Distance Learning Environments: What the Literature Says and What the Reality Is in the Philippines (Lloyd Espiritu).
Aside from the plenaries, there were also discussions by eLearning practitioners called Icetalks plus parallel research presentations and poster presentations. Prior to the start of the conference, a pre-conference workshop was held at the Caraga State University where private companies offering learning management system (LMS) introduced their state-of-the-art software.