AFRICA: TESSA - Using technology for teacher training

Innovative use of technology is providing simple solutions to the most daunting challenges in education, as is evidenced by a project called Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa, run by the Open University in the United Kingdom. TESSA, a consortium of 18 universities across Africa focused on improving how they train elementary school teachers, won an award at the World Innovation Summit for Education in Doha, Qatar, earlier this month.

Although the concept behind TESSA appears simple - developing and sharing flexible, adaptable resources for teacher training - it boasts a significant impact, having reached an estimated 400,000 teachers in 12 countries.

The Open University's motivation for launching the project in 2005 was rooted in its longstanding research partnerships with universities in Africa.

In order for Africa to provide universal education to all children, universities need to graduate more teachers and better prepare them to engage students. One of their major barriers, they confessed to colleagues in the UK, was a lack of resources for teacher training.

"Our solution was not to build more colleges for teacher training," said Freda Wolfenden, TESSA programme director at the Open University. "We could ship a bunch of textbooks from Europe or North America, but that's not a solution at all because those materials are for teaching pupils in a totally different cultural context."

Instead, TESSA developed materials, broken down into 75 units, designed to help teachers engage students in the classroom.

Each unit is related to a specific lesson drawn from the elementary school curriculum, but the real goal is to impart techniques the teacher can apply to other lessons, such as how to use questions in a classroom setting, organise group work or spark class discussion.

Many teachers in Africa have nothing but a single textbook to guide their lessons. "You'll ask a teacher: 'What are you doing tomorrow?' and they'll answer: 'Page 65'," Wolfenden explained. "That often means they will write page 65 on the blackboard and have the children copy it then recite it three times, and that is the lesson."

Adaptability is a key element of TESSA materials, since African learning environments are by no means homogeneous; the templates allow educators to include regionally relevant examples, names, geographical features and so on. So far, they have been adapted for 12 different contexts and have been translated into French, Arabic and Swahili.

Among many partners using the materials, a university in Tanzania has launched a teacher training diploma that now graduates 300 to 400 teachers annually. The University of Education Winneba in Ghana has adapted the materials for use in an early childhood education programme, a rarity in Africa.

The materials are published under Creative Commons copyright licensing, making them available to anyone with an internet connection. What makes TESSA different to other projects making educational content available through open sources, according to Wolfenden, is its collaboration with partner universities in Africa.

"One of the key issues with many open content projects is that they make beautiful content and then they put it up there in their shop window and they wait to see who is going to use it," she explained.

"We didn't want to be like that. At the same time we were developing these we were talking to the partners about how they were going to use them."

The success of TESSA is testament to how technology − in this case, increasing access to the internet at African universities − can provide simple solutions to huge educational hurdles.

"Technology can be about inclusion," said Wolfenden, citing an example of delivering teacher training in rural Malawi where a shortage of female teachers contributed to high dropout rates among girls. "If we take women out of the village to train them in the city, they don't return. But we can't parachute someone into every village to train teachers."

Yet, despite decades of distance learning in Western universities, the use of technology in education continues to be controversial.

"Someone asked me: 'When people are starving in Africa, should we be spending money on technology?'" Wolfenden recalled. "But that's not the point. The question is that we think everybody's entitled to education and if using bits of technology means that we can take education opportunities to everybody, shouldn't we do that?"

As a pioneer of distance learning founded in 1969, the Open University is a natural fit to lead a project like TESSA.

The university, which has 220,000 students, is entirely online. Its mandate is to increase participation rates among non-traditional university students by providing flexible programmes that can be tailored for individuals with family and employment commitments and by offering access to anyone regardless of their academic qualifications.

With this unique mission, the Open University has been forced to find innovative ways to support students regardless of their location.

TESSA, said Wolfenden, "is an extension of what we've always been doing. We already have resources we've developed for our own teacher training, so why not use those elsewhere?"

The project is now focused on adding new resources for secondary science teaching. Wolfenden also hopes to build on Open University colleagues' work in Bangladesh, where they've utilised technology that allows short video clips to be played on mobile phones.

"So a teacher on a bus could watch a two-minute video demonstrating a technique," said Wolfenden. "Those are very powerful because in two minutes of video, we can show what takes us paragraphs to write and we can show them that this is a classroom just like their classroom."

Wolfenden insisted that the use of technology is not the point. "It's only a tool to do something faster and more efficiently," she said. "To do things that you wouldn't have dreamed possible without the technology, like reaching people in rural areas on a sophisticated level. To engage people in an experience that they couldn't otherwise have had."