Background

Forty senior officials from 21 developing countries attended the first Open Learning Campus (OLC) blended learning workshop held in Seoul from May 30 to June 2. Co-organized by the Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements (KRIHS) and the World Bank Group’s Open Learning Campus and the Urban Global Practice, participants heard first-hand experiences and saw through site visit how Korea has approached urbanization. They also discussed the most critical issues faced in their cities, and presented ideas and action plans to address issues related to land use planning, management and finance.

This was the first OLC blended learning workshop to extend learning of OLC e-learning courses on Sustainable Urban Land Use Planning, Land Market Assessment, Land Readjustment, and Land-based Financing. As such, the workshop gave participants an excellent opportunity to reflect and share more deeply what they have learnt in the e-learning course they took before the workshop, and they were able to better relate international and Korean experiences to their ongoing initiatives.

Many participants working on World Bank projects said the workshop would directly help their project implementation. For example, the Chairman of Tra Vinh city in Vietnam said the international and Korean experiences on land readjustment has greatly increased his confidence in successfully implementing the land readjust pilot project in Vietnam. The Municipal Commissioner of Jaffna in Sri Lanka said the learning was very relevant for their World Bank funded city development project. The Principal Secretariat of Jharkhand State in India, said that he would initiate land readjustment pilot project to redevelop slum areas in his state. The OLC offers a series of practitioner-oriented e-learning products in the area of urban land use planning and management.

All workshop presentations and videos can be found at our C4D site:

https://collaboration.worldbank.org/docs/DOC-21322?sr=stream view less