Julian Bbuye

Biography

Julian Bbuye works as a consultant in the Department of Distance Learning at Uganda Management Institute (UMI). She is involved in Materials development for the converted programmes of the institute in the area of project planning and management, Monitoring and Evaluation, Post graduate diploma in Public Administration and Management and Post Graduate Diploma in Financial Management. She is also in course manager 2016/2017 distance learning cohort and is involved in monitoring and supporting them on the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) platform. She began her career in distance learning in the Department of Open and Distance Learning, College of Education and External Studies of Makerere University. Her area of specialisation is distance learning and she holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Distance Education from the Extension College London and a PhD in Management of Higher Education, Distance Learning of Makerere University, whereby she looked at the development of learner support systems of private and public universities in Uganda. She has held a number of administrative roles, foremost as a head of distance learning department, Makerere University, head of Materials development section and head support systems for distance learners in the same department. She has actively engaged in research in distance learning and adult education. She was part of a working group on a World Bank project that sought to establish the impact of Non-Governmental Organisations in adult learning in Uganda. She also participated in the research carried out by the Commonwealth of Learning on Distance Education in non-formal organisations. She was among the Teacher Education in Sub Saharan Africa (TESSA) fellows that worked with Open University of UK in relation to the use of open educational resources (OER) TESSA. She continues to work with OER initiatives as she guides the writing and review of distance learning modules at UMI, where the use of emerging technologies in Education is emphasised. This linkage inspired her to present a paper on the promotion of active learning within module writing, the role of emerging technologies in the E-Learning Africa conference of 2017 to be held in Mauritius.