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The 2013 Communication on Opening Up Education identified the expansion of online delivery as a priority for education within the EU. Provision of online higher education within Europe is under-developed and this is particularly so within postgraduate global health education. The development of high quality online education has been slow within European universities. This may be due to lack of expertise among teaching faculty, concerns about the effectiveness of technology or reluctance to invest the time required to produce learning materials. The project aimed to address potential barriers through:• Promoting and developing the pedagogical and technological skills amongst HE staff to enable them to develop innovative eLearning materials• Facilitating digital literacy skills amongst students in order to enable them to reach optimal capacity as innovative learners• Establishing a framework for the future accreditation of eLearning and a handbook and guidelines for ELearning and dissertation supervision in global health education. .The three partner organisations (in Scotland, Norway and the Netherlands) have all been involved in the delivery of postgraduate teaching in global health through engagement with the TropEd network. The partners aim to make blended and distance learning options available in order to meet the growing demand for higher education from partner countries within and outside of Europe. As many students face economic or geographical challenges such as high fees, high living costs, visa restrictions and the difficulty of being away from home for a full year blended learning and eLearning offer an obvious solution to many of these challenges. This project was thus undertaken to address some of these concerns.Key activities and outputs of the project included:• Staff training in developing eLearning & Teaching, and how to develop and deliver online teaching materials• Sharing of practice between the 3 partner institutions and in the TropEd network.• Development of guidance on supervision of global health dissertations from a distance.• Development of 9 eLearning modules, clustered into 3 coherent pathways. These gave students access to a blended learning experience that combined the expertise of the three different partners and allowed students to engage in virtual mobility across the 3 partner institutions. Learning materials have been made available as an open learning resource.• Delivery of the first 6 modules and evaluation thereof. 23 students (8 per institution) were recruited for each cohort, the first in 2016-17 (pilot phase) and the second in 2017-18. Students were registered at each partner organisation and studied the first semester in classroom. Students then undertook the remaining modules online. Completion of a dissertation, supervised remotely, enabled successful students to qualify for the award of an MSc International/Global Health• Development of accreditation guidelines for eLearning within the TropEd network. • The experience of the full three-year project was used to develop a Handbook for eLearning that can be used by all academics working in a similar field. The main result was to establish a foundation on which future eLearning developments can be built, both within the partner institutions and across European networks, especially TropEd. The promotion of an accreditation framework for eLearning within TropEd opened up the possibility for further virtual mobility and partnership working on furthering digital competencies amongst the 29 higher education institutions who are members of the network. The project contributed to the expansion of online higher education provision within the EU, enabling European universities to maintain a competitive edge in the ever-growing field of online global health education, currently dominated by the US.The project increased digital literacy amongst teachers and learners of global health education. The three participating organisations benefitted from acquiring pedagogical and technological skills to develop innovative eLearning and teaching materials and this knowledge has been shared through the Handbook on eLearning. Creation of a critical mass of digitally literate practitioners has contributed to the planning of further modules and continued collaboration to develop more coherent pathways.As a high proportion of students interested in global health education come from economically or geographically disadvantaged backgrounds, particular attention was paid to their support needs. It is hoped that through this project more potential students, currently working as managers or policy-makers in governmental and non-governmental organisations in Europe and beyond, have been able to access higher education that is directly relevant to their roles.
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