As part of its ongoing efforts to advance inclusive, high-quality teacher education, the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is scaling up the use of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in resource-constrained settings. A recent workshop in Ghana, conducted under COL’s Teacher-in-the-Loop AI (TiL AI) project, demonstrated how AI-powered tools can support educators in co-creating curriculum-aligned Open Educational Resources (OER) while mentoring the next generation of teachers. Twenty-two educators at Wesley College of Education, Ghana, recently participated in a training workshop exploring the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in teacher education. The workshop aimed to empower participants to use generative AI for co-creating inclusive and curriculum-aligned educational resources while mentoring pre-service teachers of Biology.

Organised in collaboration with the Centre for National Distance Learning and Open Schooling (CENDLOS), the workshop marked a significant step toward scaling AI integration in Colleges of Education across Ghana. The activity brought together lecturers as mentors and pre-service teachers committed to improving teacher capacity and classroom innovation.

In his opening remarks, the Principal of Wesley College of Education, Mr Kennedy Ameyaw Baah, highlighted the value of ethical and strategic AI integration, calling on COL and the Government of Ghana to extend similar capacity-building programmes nationwide. He said, “Such a national rollout would ensure a broader cascading impact and accelerate the modernisation of teacher education.”

The workshop introduced participants to practical AI applications using COL’s AI-powered OER platform. This system supports participants in generating lesson plans, activities, and teaching materials tailored to the national curriculum. Peer review, contextual adaptation, and pedagogical alignment are central to the process, reinforcing COL’s Teacher-in-the-Loop approach.

A total of 22 OER for the subject Biology were developed during the workshop, with more resources to be developed subsequently through a co-creative mentoring process involving teacher educators and 100 pre-service teachers. About 80 of these teachers have completed COL’s short course on “Understanding OER”.

COL’s Education Specialist for Teacher Education, Dr Betty Ogange, observed, “Generative AI should be viewed as a valuable teaching and research partner that enhances educators’ capacity to design locally relevant, contextualised learning experiences that meet the real needs of their students and communities.”

COL’s TiL AI project continues to support teachers and TVET trainers in Ghana, India, Jamaica, Kenya and Nigeria.

Image caption: Participants at a workshop on OER and Generative AI at the Wesley College of Education, Ghana.