The University of the West Indies (UWI) and the United Nations Environmental Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Caribbean Universities Project for Integrated Distance Education (CUPIDE) recently engaged the services of consultant, Mr. Ken Sylvester, for a period of four months to recommend a framework and detailed implementation plan for electronically enhanced distance teaching, administration and materials distribution among the five participating universities: University of Technology, Jamaica, University of Guyana, University of Surinam, University Quisqueya (Haiti) and UWI. The consultant’s scope of work includes recommendations for technical staff requirements, hardware and software needs, and capital and recurrent budget estimates.
CUPIDE is funded through the Japanese Funds-in-Trust and managed by the UWI, in recognition of the need to increase access to the services offered by universities in the Caribbean region. The project is intended to enhance and develop the human resource and technical capacity at each of the universities to enable the use of information communication technologies (ICTs) for training in the region through the development of quality distance education programmes. In this way, the competitiveness of the region in general and the institutions in particular will be enhanced.