Bangkok Meeting and Training Week (13-20 November 2017) hosted by Chulalongkorn University

The first biannual meeting for the ENeA SEA project took place in Bangkok, Thailand. The meeting began with a symposium titled "Nutrition in the 1000 days of life in Southeast Asia" . In between the kick-off meeting in Munich and Bangkok, the writers from the four partner universities (Chulalongkorn University, Mahidol University, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, University of Malaya) had done a lot of work adapting the content of their respective modules from the ENeA Global syllabus. It was now time to marry the content with instructional design. A/P Sunhea Choi (Uni of Southampton) introduced concepts of instructional design and a hands-on session was done to adapt the content for online learners in the region so that it would be effective and engaging. Ideas like cultural confinement practices, Southeast Asian characters and local breastfeeding policies were brought to the table for discussion and incorporation into the instructional design. 

Another key activity was annotation of the lessons, which was a crucial step in developing the mass customization element. Writers worked under the guidance of Rebecca Spoerl (LMU) to produce keywords and text descriptions of all the lessons. As explained by Dr Mihai Dascalu (University Politechnica of Bucharest), these descriptive texts would be essential ingredients for putting together a customized curriculum based on learner needs. 

At the end of the meeting, everyone had a clear idea of what design steps were needed for their content. Prof. Ng Chirk Jenn (University of Malaya) gave further momentum to the consortium by welcomng everyone to attend the next meeting which would be held in Kuala Lumpur in March 2018.