Establishment of distance education for secondary school teachers in Malawi

During the summer of 2001, five staff members from Mzuzu University in Malawi, Africa carried out a needs assessment plan that they had developed during their first semester as graduate students in Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University's instructional technology master's degree program. The following article provides details of the grant programme under which the students worked, offers a justification for the importance of the assessment, and reports the results of an extensive, nation-wide needs assessment.

The broad objective of the needs assessment is to establish the existence and nature of the need for distance education for Malawian educators in instructional technology. Specifically, the study is designed to:

•  determine characteristics of prospective learners 
• determine the capacity of service providers 
• explore facilities and resources of Mzuzu University that could facilitate distance education
• determine the communication infrastructure in Malawi 
• determine information that exists in Malawi regarding distance education that would help in designing and implementing IT distance education.
  

The following are recommendations that have been made from the findings and are listed in order of priority:

• design courses to upgrade unqualified teachers to diploma and bachelors level
  
• design courses to upgrade qualified teachers with diplomas to bachelors level 
• design pilot graduate courses in instructional technology for teachers with bachelors using computer-based and/or web-based mode(s).