Executive Summary

”This study was commissioned by SchoolNet Africa (SNA) in partnership with the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), the International Institute for Communication and Development (IICD) and the Open Society Initiative of Southern Africa (OSISA). It is the most extensive examination to date of teacher training in information and communication technology (ICT) in African countries at both the pre-service and inservice levels. Through documentary review, interviews and discussions with a broad range of stakeholders and service providers involved in the field of ICT training for African teachers, this report has identified and listed as many of the ICT courses and programmes available to African teachers as possible. A broad range of these courses and programmes has been evaluated in more detail in order to highlight the obstacles and challenges to ICT integration in teacher training in Africa. This has informed some recommendations for strategic interventions at a national level to aid in moving forward with ICT integration by and for African teachers.

The literature review identified several debates currently taking place with respect to the development of African teacher capabilities in ICT.

These include:

• Whether to focus on developing teachers’ theme-based capabilities (ICT integration) or decontextualised ICT skills. There are arguments in favour of both, but the international preference is for ICT skills to be integrated into teaching practice. Several countries, however, have identified the requirement to start with developing teachers’ basic ICT literacy prior to integration.
• Whether to focus capacity-building on pre-service or in-service teachers. The preference here is obviously to do both, but the shortage of resources available for teacher training suggests that pre-service interventions should be the higher priority (retraining later means additional costs and “old dogs” don’t like “new tricks”). However, the literature review highlighted the current ICT gap in
  African pre-service teacher training and the need to transform teacher training colleges if pre-service ICT training is to become a reality. Current barriers to transformation in these teacher training institutions include a lack of ICT infrastructure and a lack of ICT-trained teacher educators.
• The importance of sufficient access to ICT if teachers are to be able to truly
  realise the potential transformative benefits of ICT integration in education.
• The importance of matching the mode of delivery and types of training to the audience in order to ensure cost effectiveness and successful integration after the training. It is a waste of money to teach teachers skills that require complex ICT infrastructure if the tools at their disposal are so basic that they cannot put what they learn into practice.
• The critical importance of contextual relevance in African teachers’ ICT training in order for training to be truly worthwhile. This includes cultural, language and curriculum relevance.
• The issue of whether and how to accredit ICT skills and whether these skills should entitle African educators to better pay.

Sixty-one separate teacher training initiatives were identified for this research. These initiatives range from courses targeting several thousand teachers and spread across several countries to those targeting fewer than 100 teachers and confined to a specific region within a country. There are courses that are delivered entirely through distance learning online, and there are those that are delivered entirely through face-to-face instruction. Twenty-seven of the courses identified are not linked to pedagogy but are designed to teach basic ICT skills to anybody. These courses have been included because they are marketed to teachers and are being used to train teachers throughout Africa.

The most notable fact about this course list is that, while there is evidence of a fair number of initiatives to teach African teachers ICT skills, these are largely fragmented and regional, and very few of them are delivered online. There are currently very few broadly based, online and scaleable ICT courses linked to African pedagogy. The biggest gap identified in the process of this review was at the pre-service teacher training level. Despite extensive Internet searches and enquiries, very few African teacher training institutions appear to be offering pre-service ICT training. Some international case studies of countries that are undertaking successful pre-service teacher training in ICT have therefore been included in this research in order to provide African countries with examples of how pre-service teacher training in ICT can be done effectively.

The findings of this research highlight several significant challenges to integrating ICT capability into teacher training, including:

• ICT integration into teacher education is complicated by the variety of levels at which ICT capabilities can be taught (pre-service versus in-service, primary versus secondary, simple versus advanced skills) and by the variety of types of capabilities (pedagogically linked or decontextualised ICT skills, subjectspecific ICT skills). These layers of complexity make it very difficult to plan broad-scale and effective strategic interventions in this field.
• Although there is evidence of a number of teacher training initiatives in Africa at both the pre-service and in-service levels, these are mostly small scale, regional and fragmented with little sharing of experience between nations. There is currently no comprehensive pan-African framework that covers the development of local technological models and local teacher training content for building African teachers’ ICT capabilities.
• There is also a lack of coherent individual government policies with respect to developing teachers’ ICT capabilities in Africa. Several African countries have developed national ICT policies, and several more are in the process of finalising their ICT policies. However national ICT policies with respect to teacher training remain fragmented, under-funded and inadequate.
• Many African education ministries are desperately short of funds to allocate to existing education requirements. Therefore, although most view ICT as an important new field for education development, ICT programmes for teachers are low in terms of spending priorities.
• Many of the courses and projects on ICT for teacher education identified in this research have been created with donor funding. Most are funded for specific periods of time, and it is unclear whether they will be able to sustain themselves once their external funding stops.
• Accreditation is one way to create tangible benefits for teachers from ICT training. However, the challenge is how to ensure that accreditation is consistent across a wide variety of very different courses and there is not a proliferation of poor quality courses offering the same accreditation as much better courses.
• There are serious concerns in Africa regarding the shortage of locally developed, contextually relevant course content for both teachers and learners. It is vital that considerably more emphasis be placed on developing contextually relevant African digitised content so that African teachers can
  realise the full potential of ICT to transform their teaching practice.
• There is currently a broad range of course materials of various levels of quality available to African teachers. There is a challenge to ensure that good quality courses get the high-level support that they require to become widely adopted, while poor quality courses are either improved or abandoned in favour of the better courses.
• The majority of African teacher training institutions are too under-resourced even to meet existing expectations. The addition of an ICT curriculum requires extra infrastructure, the development of teacher trainer ICT capabilities and the development of ICT training materials (content).
• There is no point in spending any time and effort equipping teachers with the necessary skills to integrate ICT into their teaching if schools do not have the computer laboratories and other ICT resources necessary to put their skills into practice with their learners.
• Teachers require sufficient time for training and access to information about suitable courses.
• Finally, the prohibitively high cost of training African teachers in ICT is a constant issue and underlies all of the challenges already mentioned. Everything from the development of course materials, to the implementation of training programmes (whether pre-service or in-service), to ICT access for teachers, to monitoring of course quality and consistency is limited by insufficient funds. The shortage of public funds in Africa is the fundamental challenge to be overcome before ICT capacity-building can become a reality in African education.

From the findings of this research, it is obvious that there is a requirement to start to systematise interventions in African teacher capacity-building in ICT in order to ensure greater impact from the time, energy and financial resources that are being spent in this field. Systematisation will best occur through the development of a pan-African strategy on building African teacher capacity in ICT, created in partnership with all relevant stakeholders. This report cannot speak for all stakeholders in terms of what they would require from a pan-African strategy. It can and does aim to outline some of the key elements that should form part of that strategy based on the findings of this research.

A pan-African strategy on developing African teacher capacity in ICT should include:

• A stakeholder participation process
• Inter- and intra-country collaboration and knowledge sharing on the subject
• Development of coherent national policies with respect to teacher capacity building in ICT
• Exploration of options for ensuring ongoing sustainability of specific initiatives
• Capacity-building in the development of local digitised content and curriculum integration (getting teachers to use ICT as a tool)
• Focus on improving ICT integration at the pre-service teacher training level through helping to build ICT capacity at teacher training institutions"