CYPHER LEARNING, DepEd Philippines, Solar Entertainment, and Sandiwaan Center for Learning, announce the launch of the ALS Convergence Learning Project

    SAN FRANCISCO, CA, July 10, 2020 /24-7PressRelease/ -- CYPHER LEARNING, provider of best-in-class learning platforms for schools, universities, and businesses around the world, recently announced the launch of the ALS Convergence Learning Project, a program in partnership with DepEd Philippines.

The ALS Convergence Learning Project was designed to build a blended virtual learning environment for 15,000 out-of-school youth in the 16 divisions of the Philippines Department of Education Alternative Learning Systems (ALS) program, in the National Capital Region (Metropolitan Manila).

ALS is a parallel learning system in the Philippines that provides a practical option to the existing formal instruction. When one does not have or cannot access formal education in schools, ALS is an alternate or substitute. ALS includes both non-formal and informal sources of knowledge and skills.

The program is a collaboration between DepEd Philippines, CYPHER LEARNING, Sandiwaan Center for Learning, Solar Entertainment, State University of New York, National Teachers College, National Digital Educators Society, and Philippine Normal University.

A crucial component of this project is the training of 200 ALS teachers of DepEd NCR, who will be teaching more than 15,000 ALS learners this coming school year.

DepEd has selected NEO, a product of CYPHER LEARNING, as the learning management system (LMS) that will be used in this project.

NEO is an award-winning learning platform that delivers a great user experience, while incorporating all the essential tools schools need to support efficient teaching and learning. NEO provides an indispensable set of features for schools such as content authoring, competency-based learning, gamification, automation, learning paths, adaptive learning, and integration with most popular third-party systems for education.

The training of the teachers will be done by the CYPHER LEARNING EdTech Center, together with Dr. Lilia Juele, Director for eLearning and Academic Technology of the Rockland Community College, State University of New York, and also selected faculty mentors from the Philippine Normal University headed by Dr. Bert Tuga.

The goal of the project is to train 200 ALS teachers through a series of sessions the following concepts and techniques:

1. How to use NEO LMS in creating and delivering online content for a Model Content/Sample Session.
2. The basics of instructional design as essential competencies to develop online course content for a Model Content/Sample Session.
3. How to design online content applying the Convergence Theory of Learning (CTL) to add value to education and include social and emotional learning in the online courses that will be created for the ALS learners.

The first day of the ALS Convergence Learning Project training was on July 7, 2020, and it started with a Virtual Training Orientation session for the 200 teachers. This was one of the largest teacher training ever conducted through web-conferencing.

In the next 4 weeks, teachers will be using NEO as their virtual learning environment and accessing training sessions either via the Internet through web-conferencing tools, digital broadcast (TV), or through their mobile devices.

About CYPHER LEARNING
CYPHER LEARNING is a company based in San Francisco that specializes in providing learning platforms to organizations around the world. CYPHER LEARNING has three products: NEO LMS for Schools and Universities, MATRIX LMS for Businesses, and INDIE LMS for Entrepreneurs. All products are used by over 20,000 organizations, support 40+ languages, and have won several awards.

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