Kenya's Inoorero University has unveiled a digital centre meant to train teachers on ICT across the country, as it seeks to bolster government's effort to increase ICT literacy in the education sector.
This follows a successful pilot early this year that the government says has increased efficiency in teaching by up to 40%, saving learning institutions money and time.
The first fully fledged centres will train teachers on ways of integrating ICT in teaching through ICT Based Teaching and Information Management (IBTM), a professional course that has been crafted by the Ministry of Education, Kenya Institute of Education (KIE) and the Teachers Service Commission (TSC).
This comes as government build capacity for teachers to deliver the digitised curriculum developed by the Kenya Institute of Education.
The digitised curriculum is meant to assist that students access learning materials in digital formats through devices as computers and phones, among others, transforming the way teaching and learning is conducted.
The course is now being hailed as transformatory by industry players who argue that it will ease the strain that has been experienced with lack of enough books and other teaching resources.
The shortfall has been caused by an unprecedented intake of children in primary and secondary schools since the introduction of the free primary and secondary education in 2003.
Kenya now has 6.8 million pupils in primary schools and 3.1 in secondary against 19,360 primary school teachers and 6,178 post primary ones.
“That strain on resources especially lack of books has seen even over four children sharing a single textbook. But with the digitized curriculum and teacher's knowledge of ICT the shift now moves to quality education as more IT companies show interest in providing the computers to school,”said Ms. Milkah Wahome from the Ministry of Education.
The success of the pilot is now seeing the university position itself to roll out satellite training centres across the country to reach as many teachers as possible.
The training which takes three month is divided into four modules starting with the fundamentals of information processing. Upon completion teachers are then taken through the use of ICT in Information Management in Schools.
The third level covers ICT Based Pedagogy which is later followed by a project on an ICT related area of the teacher's choice.
“Majority of our teachers are not equipped with any ICT skills. They are however teaching a generation that knows how to operate computers and mobile phones. And as we seek to make schools digital, we felt teachers had to be much ahead in ICT,”said Dorothy Ndunga one of the IT lecturers involved in training the teachers.
Government's blueprint Vision 2030 has identified ICT as a key area that will propel the economy to the middle level economy.
“This digitisation of the curriculum together with training of teachers in ICT is a huge leap for government and the education sector as we try to make learning fast, easy and broad. This will play a vital role in producing a knowledge based economy, because this young generation is what will drive the economy to mid level status in the next 15 years,” said Mwangi Kimenju from Kenya's Vision 2030 secretariat.
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