E-delivery of Education Services as Enabling Factor for Worldwide Network of Academic Partners in Land Administration

The UNU School for Land Administration Studies aims to promote the role of land administration worldwide for good governance in developing countries. A key component of the mandate of the School is to develop a worldwide network of academic partners. Each partner in this network contributes with complementary knowledge and experience, yet distribution of this knowledge to local capacity building institutes and curricula requires a mechanism to deliver content, skills, methods and approaches in a sustainable and student-centric way. To address this challenge, this paper discusses the design and the first experiences with e-learning courseware and activities within the network. The testbed of e-learning design concerned a module on land information infrastructure. Developing the teaching material and teaching approach with the other partners in the network was operationalized through a project, whereby the module was incrementally developed to an e-learning shared module with an e-learning environment. The results so far show that the incremental approach (in contrast to a radical change) meant that certain components migrated immediately to e-learning units, while other components remained initially conventional. This incremental approach not only had pragmatic advantages in terms of the resources needed for courseware development, but also allowed more time for interaction, testing and customization with partners in the network. We conclude therefore that developing e-learning courseware has enabled the network building among partners who build capacity in land administration. This network further enables combining and complementing both global and local knowledge and thus promotes the role of land administration worldwide for socio-economic development in developing countries.