Designing Open and Distance Learning for Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: A toolkit for educators and planners

Everyone remembers a good teacher. Good teachers are the key to educational expansion and improvement. In many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, there is an urgent need to expand the number of primary and secondary teachers. In all African countries, there is an equally important need to improve the quality of teaching. To achieve this, it is clear that new approaches to teacher education are essential. Existing institutions of teacher education will continue to play an important role, but, alone, they will not meet the goals of Education for All (EFA) by 2015. It is fortunate that, just as the twin needs to improve the quantity and quality of teachers become imperative, so new forms of education and training are becoming available. The world is witnessing a revolution in information and communication technologies (ICTs), which can offer training and support of a type and at a cost hitherto impossible to consider, and thus, must be fully explored given the scale and urgency of demand. In doing so, however, it will be necessary to build on existing and well-tested strategies, including the best models of open and distance learning. This toolkit is the third in a series of recent publications by the Africa Region Human Development Department of the World Bank to share knowledge and experience on how distance education and ICTs can support education in Sub-Saharan Africa. It emphasizes the rigorous process by which new forms of distance-education programs for teacher education can be planned and implemented. The best models of established programs are considered along with the potential for incorporating, as the means become available, new modes of communication. Most forms of teacher education, particularly those concerned with qualification upgrading and ongoing professional development, will have to be based in schools. The authors demonstrate how school-based programs, appropriately resourced and supported, have the potential not only to raise significantly the number and quality of teachers, but also to improve classroom practice and school organization, generally. The guidance and advice, which is drawn from many years of experience in design and implementation, and embraces a range of case studies from across the region, will be of considerable value to those preparing new policies and programs of teacher education and to those seeking to improve existing programs

Using ODL and ICT to develop the skills of the unreached: a contribution to the ADEA triennial of the Working Group on Distance Education and Open Learning

Innovation in technology is occurring at rapid pace thus shrinking the distances and making information and knowledge more than ever accessible to everyone irrespective of where the person resides. This paper consists of four main articles. The first one deals with technological trends. The second one focuses on the deployment and use of open and distance education mode in rural areas by documenting initiatives that embrace information and communication technologies (ICTs). Due to challenges faced in rural areas only a few success stories/cases currently exist and some of these are cited in this article. The challenges faced in the deployment of ICT enhanced ODL have been highlighted as well as the potential of developing and delivering effective and relevant ODL programmes in rural areas in order to ensure that issues of educational equity and social exclusion rural communities are adequately addressed. ICTs in ODL are perhaps the greatest tool to date for self-education and value addition to any community’s development efforts, yet poor rural communities particularly in Africa do not have the necessary awareness, skills or facilities to enable themselves to develop using ICTs. Inadequate ICT infrastructures in rural areas remain a major source for the digital divide in Africa and for under-performance of distance learners. The third one analyses the support provided to ODL learners who often encounter difficulties in completing their studies through the distance education mode due to loneliness, uncertainties and de-motivation. ICT has not been able to sufficiently support distance learners in overcoming those obstacles efficiently. An investigation regarding those learning supports has been conducted in ten distance learning institutions, along with an intensive literature review with the aim of understanding the high percentage of dropout rates of distant learners. The learners’ interactions have been scrutinized through content analysis of their synchronous exchanges, during a completely online course. After taking into account the limited technical and human resources in Africa, a technological virtual environment along with a pedagogical framework has been proposed with the aim of giving adequate educational support to them. The fourth article has explored The Open University (UK) and its efforts to use new technologies to deliver online courses to difficult-to- reach learners in prison environments. The case study analysed here is an international course (called, B201- Business Organisations and their environments) which also touches an African cohort of learners. The implications for designing and delivering online ODL to the complex unreachable environments of prisons anywhere, and particularly in Africa, have been discussed

ELearning and the Lisbon strategy: an analysis of policy streams and policy-making

Under the Lisbon strategy, education and training form an essential element of the social pillar which aims to modernise the European social model through investment in human resources and combating social exclusion. Up to 2004, elearning was promoted as a key element in achieving the strategy especially through the Elearning Action Plan (2004-2006). This paper will analyse the process through which elearning emerged as a policy measure in implementing the Lisbon strategy. Using Kingdon’s policy streams metaphor (Kingdon, 1995), this paper will outline the policy and problem streams which coalesced in the late 1980s, opening a ‘policy window’, and which pushed distance learning onto the EU political agenda in the early 1990s. These included the accretion of ‘soft law’ around the area of vocational education and training since the Treaty of Rome in 1957; the challenges offered by the emerging new information technologies, declining industries and changing demands for skills; the adoption of distance learning systems at national level to redress disadvantage, and to provide flexible, high-quality and cost-effective access to higher education to adults who were unable to attend on-campus; and the role of the Commission, policy entrepreneurs and networks in promoting distance education as a solution to the major social and economic problems facing Europe. The Treaty of Maastricht committed the EU to supporting education and training in the community, and in particular, to ‘encouraging the development of distance education’ (Art 126 changed to Art 149 in Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon Treaties). A series of implementation programmes in the 1990s, including Socrates, Tempus and Phare, funded distance learning initiatives in the EU and accession countries. With the development of the Internet and web technologies, elearning came to replace distance education in the EU discourse. The paper will conclude with some observations on the current role of elearning policy within the Lisbon strategy

Universities as Living Labs for sustainable development : a global perspective

Walter Leal Filho, Baltazar Andrade Guerra, Mark Mifsud and Rudi Pretorius use case studies from Brazil, Malta and South Africa to reflect on how the Living Labs approach can contribute towards a more sustainable futurepeer-reviewe

Open and distance learning for basic education in South Asia: its potential for hard to reach children and children in conflict and disaster areas

This is the main report in a UNICEF funded project which explores the ways in which, across South Asia, various forms of open and distance learning could be developed to better meet the needs of marginalised children and those affected by natural disaster and by conflic

Visual mapping approaches for considering the strategic rationale for the implementation of OER in higher education institutions

Open educational resources (OER) have become a significant part of the general discourse around higher education and a number of institutions and governments have implemented initiatives to develop and use OER on the basis that they will help transform educational practice within and between higher educational institutions (HEIs). Nevertheless there has also been considerable comment and concern by many involved in higher education that OER are not sustainable financially and unlikely to be truly transformative of policy and practices in higher education. This paper reviews the existing published evidence and argues that all institutions need to properly consider whether and how OER fit in to their strategic plans and that this can usefully be done through the help of visual methods. Visual methods such as paper or computer based mapping techniques enable users to capture as much information as possible through a mediated conversation around the holistic representation of their collective views. This need for undertaking strategic reviews is mainly illustrated through the work of the EADTU led Multilingual Open Resources for Independent Learning (MORIL) project where workshop participants from HEIs used Kurt Lewin’s Force Field Framework to examine both intra institutional and inter institutional factors that were driving or restraining them in the implementation of OER. A major outcome of this work is that OER are another valued factor in the evolution of higher education policy and practice and that progress will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary

The Future We Want”: Teacher development for the transformation of education in diverse African contexts

The sixth DETA conference, with the theme “The future we want”: teacher development for the transformation of education in diverse African contexts, was held in Mauritius in July 2015. It had the ambitious agenda of bringing together more than 200 delegates from more than 15 African countries to reflect on the future of education in Africa. This target was largely met with 115 paper presentations by delegates from Botswana, Burundi, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. The presentations considered the following subthemes: 1. Teaching children in diverse African contexts 2. Pedagogies that will achieve “the future we want” for education in Africa 3. The role and impact of technology on teacher development 4. Quality in education as a prerequisite to establish “the future we want” for education in AfricaProceedings of the 6th biennial International Conference on Distance Education and Teachers’ Training in Africa (DETA) held at the Mauritius Institute of Education, Réduit, Mauritius, 20-24 July 2015

Human Capital and Value Adding in Public Sector: A Performative Case Study in a Higher Education Institution

Nature/significance: Most Intellectual Capital Accounting Research (ICAR) is primarily quantitative (ostensive) which have not addressed sufficiently the issue of the recognition of human capital (HC) in accounting. This thesis investigates HC practice in the Open University Indonesia (OUI) in developing HC, creating value of HC for OUI and delivering values for OUI’s stakeholders. Design/methodology: The existing theory of HC in ICAR and the practice of HC in public sector motivate this thesis and raise three research questions: 1) What are the elements of HC embedded in HC practice in OUI? 2) How does HC create value for OUI regarding the contribution of HC to the strategic direction and the management of OUI? 3) How does HC contribute to delivering OUI’s proposed set of values for its students? To answer the research questions the analysis of the thesis is divided into three main streams of performative approach to HC: 1) the conceptualisation of HC, 2) the value creation of HC, and 3) the proposition of HC. Findings: The thesis generates three major findings. First, HC is conceptualised by the introduction of personal value (ODL capabilities), social value (teamwork and leadership) and organisational value (flexibility, access and organisational culture) that integrated into HC. Second, the value creation process of HC is a continuous process whereby OUI’s stakeholders add value to each other and keep these values (personal value, social value and organisational value) in equilibrium. Thirdly, HC delivers the proposed set of values to students by aggregating activities-resources-capabilities of HC in value-adding processes. Research limitations/contributions: The thesis has limitations related to performative case study and data collection, however, the thesis has provided strong evidence about the practices of public sector organisations such as universities and can provide reliable information to a broader field of research. The contribution of this thesis for OUI is reconceptualisation of HC as transformation agent related to its processes (open university business model), control (monitoring and evaluation system) and performance (performance and rewards system). Originality/value: This thesis is the first performative case study of HC in ICAR in the public sector using the theoretical frameworks of strategic management. This thesis enhances the extant literature on methodology in HC research and derives practical implications for practitioners in universities, especially in ODL context. Keywords: Performative approach; performative case study; intellectual capital accounting research; public sector; open and distance learning; university