COVID-19: WIPO Academy Activities
May 6, 2020
Despite the very difficult circumstances arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, the WIPO Academy continues to provide high quality intellectual property (IP) education and training opportunities to government officials, inventors and creators, business managers and IP professionals, students and teachers of IP, civil society and the public. Together with our partners we continue to monitor the COVID-19 situation. Our main priority is the health and well-being of participants and lecturers across all of the Academy’s programs.
In recent months, we have seen a significant increase in registrations for the Academy’s distance learning courses. At the same time, most of our face-to-face training has successfully transitioned to an online environment through virtual classrooms, webinars, live lectures and an increased reliance on the Distance Learning (DL) Program’s eLearning platform.
Distance Learning Program
The DL Program’s training courses are running at a high demand with an increase in participation from IP offices, TISCs and other government offices in particular. There has also been a marked increase of participants from legal fields (by 24%) and research and science fields (by 23%) compared to 2019.
To accommodate the increased requests from participants worldwide for access to online courses on IP, registration dates for the DL courses were extended to World IP Day, an increased flexibility with scholarship requests from developing countries, least developed countries (LDCs) and countries in transition was applied, and an additional 38 courses were added to the DL catalogue. Participants are able to access the course material globally despite different technological capacities, given the availability of the content in downloadable PDFs alongside audio-visually enhanced formats.
Collaborations with partners on course customizations and offerings are still ongoing through virtual meetings, and additional support is being provided to IP offices, government officials, and other WIPO divisions via tailor-made DL courses, including live lectures. The DL Program has amplified its language, administrative and IP expert scalability in an effort to support the delivery of postponed and cancelled capacity-building programs in developing countries, LDCs and countries in transition. Special sessions of DL courses are also being run for the IP Training Institutions.
Joint Master’s Programs
The WIPO Academy’s Joint Master's Programs continue to run as planned. All face-to-face lectures have successfully transitioned to virtual classrooms providing online live lectures, webinars and other interactions between students and their respective programs. Registration for up-coming programs for 2020 and 2021 are scheduled to run as planned and can be accessed via the WIPO eLearning Center.
WIPO Summer School Program
A number of the planned summer schools for the first half of 2020 have been postponed to 2021. However, with our partners in the United States, Switzerland, Mexico and the Republic of Korea, we are proud to announce that we will organize in partnership with them four online summer schools. Those Summer Schools scheduled for the second half of 2020 remain open for registration, subject to developments.
National IP Training Institution Projects
We are currently implementing a number of projects to support Member States to establish their own national IP training institutions (IPTI). The face-to-face training modules are currently suspended. However, there are still a wide range of project activities being implemented in 2020, including plans for online training and webinars.
Professional Development Program
The Professional Development Program (PDP) has postponed most of the training courses scheduled to take place before July 2020, and a number of training courses have been cancelled. New dates and information on registration for the PDP training courses can be found at the WIPO eLearning Center. The PDP is also redesigning the format of its training courses in 2021.