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Starting soon (2013?), resources used in universities in Timor Leste (East Timor) must be in Portuguese, Tetun^W (also called Tetum) or English. The language of the classroom must be Portuguese or Tetun.

Indonesian translations can be available, and this will be important as:

• There are few resources in Tetun and many students find English and Portuguese difficult.
• Many young people do understand Indonesian, due to the recent history of Timor Leste and the availability of Indonesian television programs.

Needs

This section needs to be checked and corrected by people from Engineering at DIT, to be sure that it's an accurate description of their needs.

• Process for curriculum development: Engineering at DIT has has a curriculum, but need a process for curriculum development
• Learning resources: Students struggle with many subjects, and language challenges make this much harder. High quality learning, resources in a language the students understand, will help.
• Contextualization: Adaptation of the curriculum to the needs and context of Timor Leste.

Teaching resources are needed to support the curriculum in many subjects including: fluid mechanics, hydrology, water resource engineering, water supply, drainage, irrigation and infrastructure, soil mechanics/geotechnical engineering, road engineering, environmental engineering, sanitation.

While many resources are available (e.g. English textbooks in the library) resources that are structured for a suitable course are more valuable.

Questions and possible solutions

• Could we find suitable OpenCourseWare (OCW) resources in English and have them translated into Indonesian for students who need this?
• Is it possible to translate resources into Tetun?
  • Could this be a collaborative exercise for students, to translate a small part of a key resource, from the English/Portguese/Indonesian versions? The process would help the students, and it would create Tetun resources for future classes. This raises some issues:
    • Many technical terms do not exist in Tetun. Foreign terms may be used in italics in these cases.
    • Internet is very slow in Dili, so using a web platform for collaborative translation may be hard. How about using a server in Dili, or even setting up the website/platform at the university?
• Many resources exist in Indonesian. How are these for quality and effective learning? How do students find them?

Steps

Use an OpenCourseWare search engine, e.g. OpenCourseWare Finder, OCW Consortium or OCW Search