Dr John Baggaley addressing the WOU staff.

Athabasca University’s Director and Head of Educational Technology, Prof Dr Jon Baggaley, gave a seminar on the PANdora (PAN Asia Networking Distance and Open Resource Access) Network to WOU's Academic and Operations staff.

The PANdora is a series of distance education research projects in 12 Asian countries sponsored by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) from 2005 to 2008. The countries are Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Laos, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Baggaley, of Athabasca University, Alberta, is responsible for the development of new media technologies and policy for the distance-based delivery of the university's programmes.

As academic advisor for the project, Baggaley has been visiting each of the Asian project sites and supervising the publication of their reports in academic outlets over the past 15 months. Since he was spending the last few months of his extended leave in Malaysia, he graciously stopped over at WOU to give a short seminar on the project.

WOU staff at the seminar.

During the seminar at WOU’s headquarters, Baggaley presented a summary of the findings of nine projects. He shared the merits and problems of the transnational and collaborative approaches they have adopted.

In the ensuing discussion, interesting suggestions were put forward by the WOU staff. Baggaley will follow up on these suggestions to turn them into future collaborative projects involving WOU staff during the 2^nd round of the PANdora project funding allocations.

Details of the PANdora projects are available at: www.pandora-asia.org