This was one that I thought would be interesting and it did not dissapoint. Unfortunately I have completly forgotten the name of the other chap who co-presented this session. It started with an interesting lead in statistic that the world needs another 18 million teachers to bring education to rural areas.
The basic premise of this presentation was a programme (English in action) run by the Open University to teach English teachers in Bangladesh. The ultimat outcome being that this trickles down in to the primary and secondary schools. English in Bangladesh being a government priority (they are supporting this project for a fairly epic nine years) in terms of engaging with the global economy. Interesting to note that India is beginning to outsource to it’s neighbours in terms of the language support facilities it offers multinationals i.e. call centres and such.
This project is currently in the pilot phase with 400 teachers across 200 schools (2 teachers per school). The teachers receive an ipod loaded with content but an interesting approach was to limit the ipods to one per school. Essentially coercing (and I do not mean that in a bad way) the two teachers to collaborate with each other. Nice idea methinks. There are 12 modules of teaching which are tought through a ‘communicative language approach’ and there is an emphasis on scenario based learning. All of the content is in English and Bangla. The OU also showed a quick demo of some of the content and it basically uses real teachers in Bangladesh as subjects of good practice. Again nice touch. The English was also Bangla English rather than using the rather dry received pronunication which I was expecting. The content is also contextualised for the local culture as well. Engagement with the wider community across schools was facilitated by Twitter and Facebook (the usual suspects in the social media category). The schools also come together once a month in batches of 10 for a facilitated face to face.
The challenges that the technology represented were interesting to note:
- teachers’ time
- stakeholders’ attitude
- electricity (approximately only 45% of homes have electricity)
- mobile coverage
- 52% of the population is illeterate
- digital literacy
- climate robustness of the technology (oooops ipods seem to be getting a bad rep on this point)
The first two challenges are certainly problem in any country in terms of adoption for new methods of delivering education. The others just make me realise all of the things we constantly take for granted in our day to day lives.
This is obviously a very worthy project focussing more on the pedagogy than the technology. They basically said that the delivery method (the iPod) would probably change but I did get the sense that this would not cause major problems to the actual delivery. I also think that ther e will certainly be outcomes of this project that can be adopted by other Universities in terms of creating more flexible deliveries of our education offerrings to students. One to watch.
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