InWEnt publishes an article by APPLICATIO on its Global Campus 21 Blog on E-Learning development in Mongolia. Read the full article in the GC21-Blog or here...

Mongolia is building a solid bridge

Many Inwent programmes are dealing with the difficulty of the so called "Digital Divide". They intend to build a bridge to overcome the gap between industrialised countries and Southern countries concerning the development of the IT sector and its use. Although not situated in the South, Mongolia is well on its way not only to build such a bridge but also to cross it.

Although this is not one of the countries the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development is primarily cooperating with, Federal Minister Dirk Niebel visited Mongolia on one of his first trips abroad. The home country of Genghis Khan must have something special... Surely one important reason for the Minister's visit was the upcoming boom in the sector of coal mining and the intention to introduce Germany's economy as a reliable partner for development. However, he may also have recognised that Mongolia is much more advanced concerning e-learning than one would think.

Make knowledge accessible

Inwent and its e-learning centre in particular are paving the way by realising numerous projects with the help of experts of Applicatio Training & Management GmbH in a country that is as vast in size and sparsely populated as Mongolia e-learning is the ideal way to make knowledge accessible all over the place.

Ten experts from Mongolia have taken part at InWEnt's eLDI-programme to this day. Meanwhile, the then newly founded NGO Mongolia e-Knowledge (MeK) is now running its own e-learning platform based on acquired knowledge. Furthermore, this platform has been very successful offering trainings based both on InWEnt's courses and on MeK's own developments.

This year the organisation hosted an opening workshop for InWEnt's eLDI-Asia Programme in Ulaanbaatar. And on behalf of some private companies in Mongolia, MeK created portals and learning platforms in Mongolian language.

Clear goal

Today MeK and InWEnt are taking a further step together. They initiated a process with the objective of developing a national e-learning strategy, which would attract wide interests. At the beginning of 2011 a round table discussion will take place in order to develop the first nationwide e-learning strategy managed by MeK with the participation of many ministries, agencies and NGOs.

Here, different aspects of quality management in the field of e-learning will play an important role. It has been planned, therefore, to moderate the ECBCheck, in this development InWEnt was significantly involved in, and launched it in Mongolia. It seems that - in this field - another bridge has been built that is not founded on sand but on solid foundations consisting of clearly defined quality criteria and keeping a clear goal in sight.

By Gerelchimeg Chuluunbaatar-Trede and Thorsten Trede
Applicatio Training & Management GmbH