The Arab States Broadcasting Union (ASBU) Media Training Academy’s Consultative Council has held its fourth annual meeting, using the Zoom application, on Wednesday October 07, 2020, under the chairmanship of Dr. Riyadh Kamal Najm, Head of the Council, and in presence of Eng. Abderrahim Suleiman, ASBU Director General, most of the Council’s members, who are Arab and international experts. The meeting was mostly devoted to discussing the Academy’s implementation of its training plan for the period between the third and fourth Council’s meetings, and the difficult circumstances imposed by the Coronavirus pandemic, in addition to defining the training plan and its mechanisms during next year.
The Council's agenda included several items, mostly:
• Report on the Academy activities during the period between the Council’s third and fourth meetings.
• The evolution of the remote training platform (2017-2021) and its future strategy.
• Features of the 2021 training plan, both in the technical and program fields.
• Dates of the next meetings of the Academy’s Consultative Council, including the semi-annual and the annual ones.
Through this meeting, it became clear that the Media Training Academy completed the organization of the remaining training courses in the 2019 plan, which included seven training sessions on radio and TV, in addition to topics related to new media. At the beginning of 2020, the Academy began implementing the new training plan, which included 27short and medium sessions in various specialties, two of which are decentralized, in addition to remote sessions via the Academy’s platform.
However, the sudden spread of the Corona epidemic, and the necessity to preserve the participants and trainers safety allowed only five sessions to be organized during the months of January and February 2020. Preventive measures imposed the postponement of attendance training activities scheduled to be held in the academic facilities and the decentralized courses to be held at the member corporations headquarters. To ensure the continuity of training in the best available way, the Academy has focused on the use of remote training, in three different ways:
1) The first method, via the remote training platform (asbuacademy.net). In the second half of 2019, the Academy launched its remote training platform with the first content on “mobile journalism” in Arabic and English. Then, it developed six new open and free lessons. Participation in them only requires the creation of an account at http://asbuacademy.net/login/signup.php.
All these new lessons were ensured by Arab experts who were trained by the Academy during July 2019 at the Academy’s headquarters on how to design and implement remote lessons on the Moodle platform, in implementation of the Academy’s strategy to strengthen the pool of competent trainers from the Arab world.
2) The second method: organizing remote courses and seminars for possible technical and program topics. The Academy began at the beginning of June to implement the new experience for remote training by relying mainly on the Zoom application.
3) The third method: free, remote participation in the seminars of our international partners, thanks to the distinguished academic relations with the Academy’s partners, which allowed it to obtain the ability of trainees from member corporations to participate free of charge in the remote seminars organized by international partners.