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Few countries are likely to report that they will have met the goals set for Education for All by 2015 and they will be unlikely to do so even beyond this date using traditional methods. Many countries therefore now use distance education methods to train and upgrade teachers while in-service. In recognition of the growing use of distance education for this purpose, the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) has initiated a project aimed at developing courseware to support teacher trainers in quality open, distance and online provision in Africa. Saide and the Foundation for the Open University of Catalonia (FUOC) won the bid put out by the ICDE and have commenced the process of development. Tony Mays describes the project.
The agreed objectives of the project are as follows:
- Collate a set of OER organised into a course format that will enable teacher trainers in African higher education institutions to learn about the potential of distance and eLearning to support teacher development and empower them to adapt existing OER to suit their own contexts of practice. The set or collection of themed resources will be in a form that promotes flexible delivery options of the full set or a selection thereof by the target audience.
- Offer teachers the possibility to participate in a pilot of the HANDSON ICT project. The resource and its constituent parts will be developed in consultation with the target stakeholder community but the final version will be published under a Creative Commons CC BY licence and hence will become available to anybody with an interest in using distance and eLearning provision to support expanded quality teacher development.
The proposed course has been conceptualised as a set of four modules that can be used separately but which will also make sense when considered together. The following areas will be explored:
- Programme design and development
- Assessment
- Student support; and
- ICT integration.
The project is fairly small in scope so the initial outcome will be a foundation on which additional ideas and content can be built.
The first phase of the project has involved searching for useful OER to support teacher education at a distance and exploring ways in which these OER might inform the design of distance teacher education programmes. We have sought to source OER from within Africa or developed in partnership with African providers (e.g. from Saide's OER Africa Initiative, AVU, TESSA, Oer4schools), as well as more widely.
Active engagement with the teacher education community is an important part of the process. Members ofOER Africa’s Africa Teacher Education Network have been invited to comment on the emerging ideas and the project will also host two webinars – in May and August – to solicit constructive feedback and to identify additional OER that might be useful. The first webinar will focus primarily on feedback from African stakeholders while the second webinar will involve a more global audience.
If you are reading this article, are involved in teacher education through distance education and have a favourite OER that you have found very useful, please tell us about it and send us a link so that we can help to share the resource more widely. Please send your ideas to: Tony Mays at tonym@saide.org.za.
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