With a view to improve and build awareness towards digital transformation, the University of Belize has partnered with the BDF to facilitate a digital literacy program, teaching soldiers and other participants how to navigate an online learning management system. Jomarie Lanza stopped by the session at Price Barracks this morning and has this report:
Today's data literacy training is described as a prelude to a forged partnership between the BDF and the University of Belize, building awareness towards digital transformation. Training Directorate for the BDF, Lt Col Jermaine Burns, explained the purpose of today's session:
Lt Col Jermaine Burns - Training Directorate, BDF
"And the training is specifically important to our soldiers because we have only just launched our in-house learning management system on Moodle that the government has invested in and we are very much interested in our soldiers understanding how to use the system and capitalizing on the system for training and also for receiving policy documents and knowledge about the BDF on a whole in the aspect of training and so as a training directorate it is very important that we project this sort of platform for the future as well as we are building towards digital transformation in our organization."
And among the 70 soldiers in attendance, we also saw some customs, immigration and coast guard officers who saw this training as an opportunity to learn how to navigate the BDF's learning management system on their personal devices. And that's what UB hopes to accomplish today in teaching these individuals: that they will be able to teach others as well how to use the system.
Egbert Irving - Director, Institutional Advancement UB
"So as part of having the various platforms the applications for services that can be accessed through the government of Belize this is supporting the citizens so that citizens can be little bit more comfortable in their ability to be able to access whatever it might be, your police records or your social security application forms or your passports right or your vital statistics. As these different services are rolled out we expect that our people should remain component and be a little bit more comfortable in their ability to adapt to those various services so what in terms of some of the takeaways we expect that because we are a little bit more sensitized or have a little bit more knowledge of our ability to be able to use these services we can always pass on that knowledge to members of our family to people in our communities to people at job sites to people who might need it and might not have the ability to attend or might not attend for some reason or the other apart from the training of the citizens we have also trained digital buddies and these are younger persons who are digital natives so they already have some propensity towards using devices, their phones their tablets and things of that sort so we provide them with some soft skills, communication skills, leadership skills and the ability to work with people with diverse abilities and things of that sort so that they can also act as ambassadors in their various communities to be able to pass on and to help to support persons who might have challenges accessing these portals."
Lt Col Burns says today's session is merely one out of the many that they hope to continue to engage in as they move towards signing of an MOU between the Force and UB. He explained what that MOU will entail:
Lt Col Jermaine Burns - Training Directorate, BDF
"We hope that beyond just understanding our learning management system the soldiers are able to take their platforms and understand that as opposed to only playing games on them and that sort of thing and scrolling on Facebook these platforms can actually be used to do self paced courses, academic courses, they can bridge the gap between their understanding of policies that we write and how they transform that into actual work on the ground and so we are loading up our LMS just for that and we have a contractor that is helping with it but me myself don't know much about it as I would want to know and so these sessions are very important for us to capitalize on and we are very very happy that UB has pitched this to us today, a one of many to come and im sure they will be spreading their wings in this area for us to get more from in respect to knowledge on digital transformation."
