In Focus

Of all the Millennium Development Goals, achieving universal primary education is the most fundamental. Having most people complete a good quality education is the platform for sustained and sustainable development. COL is working with Commonwealth Governments to maximise the contribution that open and distance learning (ODL) can make to basic education. Teacher education and school development are the cornerstones.

"As school enrolments rise dramatically and the demands placed on teachers increase, the need for quality teacher development is growing dramatically," said Dr. Mohan Menon, COL Education Specialist, School Development. "Increasingly, ODL is being recognised as a solution to the crisis in teacher education. COL is leading efforts to apply ODL to teacher and school development in developing Commonwealth countries."

Across the Commonwealth and throughout the world, millions of children do not have access to basic education. An estimated 100 million children are still out of school worldwide. COL is addressing this crisis by identifying two focus areas for its work: teacher education and school development.

The aim is to use ODL and information and communications technologies (ICTs) to provide broader access to teacher training, including in-service training and professional development.

"Increasing the supply of trained teachers should, in turn, increase access to schooling and enhance the quality of teaching-learning processes in the school system," Dr. Menon explains.

COL is involved in facilitating the use of ODL and ICTs for teacher development in six major areas:

• Advocacy and awareness building: This has been done through dialogues, consultations and meetings among policy makers and top administrators at country, regional and institutional levels about the potential and role of ODL and ICT in creating more opportunities for teacher training. Examples include:

  • a Pan-African Policy Dialogue in Namibia in July 2001,

  • national forums in Cameroon, Kenya (2004) and Sierra Leone (2005), and

  • national consultancy meetings in Nigeria and India in 2004.

• This includes strengthening institutions that offer ODL-based teacher training courses and transforming traditional training institutions to dual-mode institutions that also offer distance education options. COL has organised several training workshops in areas such as instructional design, audio and video script writing, video production, designing content for eLearning, editing of ODL materials, and scenario and case-based learning in distance education. The STAMP2000+ teacher training programme has built capacity in eight Southern African countries.

• COL is encouraging partnerships among intergovernmental agencies, government bodies, NGOs and other organisations within countries, within and across regions, with a focus on South-South co-operation. Some examples are:

  • networking among teacher education institutions and organisations in Nigeria,

  • initiation of regional consortia of teacher education institutions in West Africa, East Africa and South Asia, and

  • I-CONSENT (consortium) in India for school transformation.

• Networking of schools and teacher education institutions is a way to provide interactive forums for teachers for professional development. COL supports the creation of electronic forums through expert support and training and has supported the establishment of an Electronic Forum for Delhi Schools, a CollegeNet among teacher education institutions in Africa and an eLearning material development consortium in Bangalore, India.

• COL has joined with organisations in Singapore, India and Sri Lanka to provide professional development courses and institutes. This includes the Joint Management Development Institutes in Singapore and New Delhi for teacher education administrators from Sub-Saharan Africa and the post-graduate courses in Teacher Education (MATE-International) at the Open University of Sri Lanka.

• Quality assurance in teacher education systems and materials is critical when countries are training large numbers of teachers through ODL. COL is helping to ensure that the quality of materials and learner support is not compromised through initiatives such as:

  • organising two Roundtables on Quality Assurance on different aspects of quality assurance in teacher education,

  • co-publishing Quality Assurance-Best Practices with the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) in India, and

  • working with NAAC to develop a pan-Commonwealth Framework of Quality Indicators and materials with a focus on teacher education.

The task of training a large new generation of teachers is enormous and urgent. COL's efforts are focused on enabling developing countries to effectively use ICTs and ODL to develop quality teachers who can help deliver on the goal of universal primary education.

A study of performance of teacher-learners in the conventional and distance programmes showed the two groups were comparable in terms of quality. Total enrolment in SSTEP now numbers 1,200, and studies show that the project is having a positive impact on student performance.