Dr Melinda dela Peña Bandalaria

Chancellor and Professor University of the Philippines Open University

Dr Melinda dela Peña Bandalaria is a full professor at the University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU) and has been serving as its Chancellor since 2016. She is also an Ambassador for Open Educational Resources (OERs) (2021-2022) and member of the Executive Board (2022-2025) of the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE).

She served as the President of the Asian Association of Open Universities (AAOU) for the term 2017-2019 and continues to be an active member of the Association’s Executive Committee to date. She has been teaching and doing research and development works on technology-enabled education for more than 25 years and has assumed a leadership role in the articulation and implementation of open, flexible and distance elearning (OFDeL) in the Philippines for the last 10 years.

She spearheaded the development of the model where OERs and MOOCs correspond to the content of credit courses offered by various higher education institutions (HEIs) in the Philippines and the “MOOCs as OERs Model” to contribute to the continuous improvement of the quality of education in the country. She started working on the integration of the basic features of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in 2017 in open online courses to make them more inclusive.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, she developed the “Open Online Training Model” which provided an inclusive training opportunity to help the education sector immediately shift to remote instruction and continuously improve the practice from thereon. The model consists of Webinar+MOOC+Capstone Requirement. The webinar, which is open to all, provides the synchronous lecture session, the recording of which is uploaded in the MOOC site for those who want to review the discussions and those who were not able to listen to the actual webinar. The MOOC is where the participants do the learning activities and interact with fellow training participants; and the capstone requirement, usually in the form of Re-Entry Action Project (ReAPro) is for the assessment-driven certification of training completion to ensure the quality of the training program.