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Teaching teachers: a role for distance education?

Many countries in sub-Saharan Africa have fewer teachers than they need to achieve the internationally agreed development targets of Education for All (EFA) by 2015. Conventional modes of teacher education via residential teacher training colleges are not producing enough teachers to fill the gap. Can distance teacher education play a viable role in addressing the teacher shortage?

Research by the International Research Foundation for Open Learning examines how distance education can help meet the scale of potential demand for teachers, and identifies the conditions for success.

Sub-Saharan Africa is short of teachers. In many countries, children are in large classes and many teachers untrained. Many children still do not go to school. Ten years ago UNESCO forecast that Africa needed to expand its teaching force at a rate of 5.6 per cent per annum during the 1990s. But over the last 15 years, on average, the teaching force has only grown at 3.4 per cent. Although this rate is slightly ahead of the growth in the number of children in school, it will not provide enough teachers to achieve Education for All by 2015.

Conventional teacher training tends to be relatively expensive. Even where its content is similar to that of secondary education, its unit cost is often several times greater. Meanwhile, many teachers remain untrained and have only limited education themselves. The problems of teacher scarcity, and of raising the competence of existing teachers, are compounded by the HIV/AIDS epidemic which is killing teachers and reducing the life expectancy of trainees. This paper examines what role distance education can play in expanding the number of trained teachers.

Research findings include:

Distance education has been used to provide initial training for inexperienced teachers, initial training for experienced but unqualified teachers, and continuing education for qualified teachers.
Programmes have included some or all of the four elements of teacher education: general education, learning about the subjects that trainees will teach in the classroom, pedagogy and associated subjects, and classroom practice.
Distance teacher education can deliver highly successful completion and examinations pass rates, especially where trainees were guaranteed promotion on completion.
Unit costs have tended to be lower than conventional teachers' courses because of savings in residential costs and economies of scale that can be achieved through distance education. Costs per successful student have often been between one-half and two-thirds of conventional teacher education programmes.
A range of technologies has been used. Print, in the form of correspondence courses, has often dominated. Radio and television, in larger countries with large audiences of students. And recently, experiments in the use of video and computer conferencing, although logistics rule this out for many rural teachers.
Combinations of media have an advantage over any single medium.

The extensive use of distance education for training teachers, across all continents of the world, makes it possible to identify the major conditions for success. These include:

Establishment of effective student support and, in particular, the organisation and supervision of classroom practice.
Variable unit costs of student support in distance education should be lower than that of more conventional methods, unless it is the only way of reaching particular groups of remote and isolated trainees.
In many cases, trainees are motivated to study at a distance because they expect to achieve an improved qualification, higher status, and more pay. Where programmes are without any guarantee of a change in status, other ways of motivating students need to be found.
Good management of distance teacher education needs to ensure that trainees have lessons on time, receive feedback from their tutors, and have appropriate, well-prepared, teaching materials available in a medium, and at a time, that is convenient.
Successful programmes need to be integrated with the regular work of the teaching service if it is to be more than a dispensable add-on.
Ideas about education built into the curriculum needs to be close enough to the day-to-day practice of the schools for trainee teachers to see how the two fit together.

Source(s):
‘Teaching the Teachers' by Hilary Perraton, Imfundo Project Background Paper #5, UK Department for International Development (DFID), 2000
'Open and Distance Learning in the Developing World' by Hilary Perraton (2000), Routledge Studies in Distance Education

Funded by: No. 10 Policy Unit, UK Government, 2000.

id21 Research Highlight: 25 April 2001

Further Information:
Hilary Perraton
International Research Foundation for Open Learning
12 Hills Road
Cambridge
CB2 1PF

Tel: +44 (0)1223 584601
Fax: +44 (0)1223 355207
Contact the contributor: h.d.perraton@open.ac.uk

International Research Foudation for Open Learning, UK

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