Although school enrolments and teacher supply have expanded significantly since the Dakar Forum on Education for All in 2000, many challenges remain. One of the primary challenges is improving teacher education to meet rapidly growing demand for education.
Net enrolment ratios in primary school are still in the range of 60-90 percent in developing Commonwealth countries. Except in the Pacific, where school-age population is declining, many more teachers will be required to provide basic education to the millions of children not yet enrolled. The situation is particularly critical in Sub-Saharan Africa, which projects a requirement of four million teachers in 2015, up from 2.4 million in 2004.
Moreover, a significant proportion of teachers in many countries are untrained or unqualified; for example, Uganda (63 percent), Nigeria (44 percent) and The Gambia (42 percent). Since existing teacher training institutions do not have the capacity to address these major shortfalls in supply, it is urgent to expand the contribution of open and distance learning (ODL) in teacher education.
COL’s Focus
COL works in partnership with teacher training institutions, government ministries and development partners that are active in this field in the developing countries of the Commonwealth. COL’s activities in teacher education include:
• Advocating the use of ODL in teacher education by supporting policies for professional development,
• Working with selected teacher education institutions to ensure the design and delivery of quality teacher education programmes,
• Emphasising the development of pedagogic content knowledge and skills among ODL practitioners,
• Supporting conventional teacher education institutions to make the transition to dual-mode,
• Facilitating the development and use of open educational resources, and
• Developing the capacity of teachers to implement the concept of Child Friendly Schools.
Powerful Partnerships
COL is involved with a number of international partnerships committed to improving teacher education, including:
• Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA)
COL has been working with the TESSA consortium since it was formed in 2005. They have formed a partnership for the dissemination and use of TESSA resources by primary school teachers and teacher educators in Uganda and Zambia. This initiative, which will be jointly funded by COL and the TESSA Secretariat in Milton Keynes, UK, will help primary schools and teacher training institutions in Uganda and Zambia make effective use of the teacher training resources provided by TESSA.
TESSA is a consortium of 18 organisations, universities and teacher training institutions in Africa including the Open University UK, the BBC World Service Trust and COL that are collaborating to improve the quality of teaching in primary schools and teacher education in Africa. The consortium has developed an extensive range of multilingual open educational resources (OERs) that are appropriate for all primary school teachers, including those with little or no formal training. Over 100 teacher educators and 1,000 teachers have been involved in the creation of the TESSA resources. It’s estimated that half a million teachers are working with these materials.
• Task Force on Teachers for EFA
The International Task Force on Teachers for Education for All is co-ordinating international action to meet the challenge of providing sufficient quality teachers to meet rapidly growing demand for education worldwide. The Task Force is focussing on three gaps in teacher provision: policy, capacity and funding. The Task Force will be led by a 15-member Steering Committee and supported by a Secretariat located at UNESCO.
• West African Consortium for Teacher Education Development (WACTED)
In early 2009, COL brought together teacher educators from The Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone to reactive WACTED. Participants at the meeting in Abuja, Nigeria agreed to focus on projects aimed at improving quality assurance in teacher education, and building capacity of teacher education institutions in information and communications technologies (ICTs) and material development.
Capacity Building
COL is helping to build capacity in teacher education through initiatives in several countries. Recent workshops include:
• Learner support in Nigeria. In partnership with Nigeria’s National Teachers’ Institute (NTI), COL hosted a “train the trainers” workshop to build capacity in tutoring in ODL. The one-week workshop at NTI in Kaduna in December 2008 developed the skills of trainers who will subsequently train NTI’s course tutors across the country. This workshop follows up on recommendations from a study of NTI’s learner support services commissioned by COL in 2004.
• Quality assurance in Nigeria. COL and Nigeria’s National Commission for Colleges of Education (NCCE) held a quality assurance workshop for teacher educators in Abuja in December 2008. Delegates from four teacher training institutes focussed on adapting COL’s Quality Assurance Toolkit for their specific needs. The institutes will use the Toolkit to assess the quality of their teacher education programmes.
• Instructional design in Sierra Leone and The Gambia. COL hosted one-week workshops in Sierra Leone and The Gambia in December 2008. The main objective of the workshops was to disseminate practical skills on instructional design and development in ODL. Workshop participants reviewed best practices in creating effective learning materials for ODL.
• Constructivist pedagogy in India. In collaboration with the Regional Institute of Education (National Council of Educational Research and Training, NCERT), Mysore, India, COL held three-day workshop in October 2008 to introduce teacher educators to constructivist pedagogy. This approach highlights the centrality of the learner as a constructor of knowledge rather than a receiver or reproducer of information. COL brought together international and national experts in constructivist teacher education who shared their knowledge about how to re-orient teacher education programmes.
October 2009