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Enhancing access and use of the Guatemala national basic curriculum through online resources

Thu, March 12, 3:00 to 4:30pm, Washington Hilton, Floor: Concourse Level, Georgetown West

Session Submission Type: Group Panel

Description of Session

This panel will discuss issues, challenges and lessons learnt from the implementation of the Guatemala online National Basic Curriculum (www.cnbGuatemala.org), an innovative, independently-led initiative that makes the national curriculum broadly available online.

The adoption of a National Curriculum has been promoted as a means to reduce educational inequities, providing stable and standardized guidelines for instruction based on desired universal competences. A National Curriculum has also been seen as means to ensure improved student formative and summative assessment through the definition of standards that specify desired competences.

As part of its education reform efforts, Guatemala adopted a Basic National Curriculum (known as the CNB) in 2002. In the wake of the signing of the Peace Accords that put end to a 36-year long civil war in 1996, the country committed to a curriculum that would embody values of reconciliation and an intercultural and multilingual perspective. This was seen as critical in a country speaking 25 national languages (including Spanish, 22 Mayan languages, Garifuna and Xinca), a large indigenous population (estimated at the time between 45% and 55%) and considerable poverty and inequity affecting mainly the indigenous peoples. The CNB was seen as a critical tool to translate education policy into improved classroom practices and results. Over the last decade the Guatemalan Ministry of Education (MOE) has developed the curriculum for most grades and areas, including early and pre-school education, the 6-year primary, 3-year lower secondary (Básico) and 2- or 3-year upper secondary areas. The CNB has also been developed for accelerated primary and lower secondary, as well as a variety of upper secondary specialty tracks including (until 2012) the basic teaching degree and (since 2013) a pre-teacher education track.

The development of the CNB is a monumental effort, spanning almost 50 volumes in hard copy. However, the intention embodied in this work frequently has difficulty travelling the “last mile” to teachers’ hands in schools and classrooms. The MOE has no direct control over teacher educators and universities, so it cannot ensure adequate teacher pre-service training in use of the curriculum. Lack of resources also hampers teacher in-service training in the public sector, and training is voluntary for private schools despite their formal obligation to apply the CNB. The MOE also lacks funds to ensure hard copies of the CNB are available in all schools and for all teachers. The MOE has made the CNB available online on PDF format, but the large and ungainly nature of such files makes downloading and use difficult.

Starting in 2012, Vitruvian Consulting, LLC began transferring the CNB online in Wiki format. This task that is now complete for all key levels, grades and areas of the curriculum. The tool has filled a significant niche of demand: visits to the website have increased gradually since its inception, now averaging over 60,000 visits from over 40,000 individual visitors each month. Most of these are Guatemalan teachers in service, teachers in training and teacher educators. One of the main advantages of an online version of the curriculum has proved to be the possibility of linking directly to complementary teaching and learning resources, a task that the wiki format makes especially easy to perform. In addition to the curriculum, the website now holds a growing range of complementary materials prepared by the MOE and others, and some links to a variety of teaching resources available on the Internet. With USAID support, in 2014 Vitruvian Consulting, LLC began experimenting with ways to expand the usability of the online curriculum, including user surveys and focus groups, developing and testing online help resources, and developing collaboration with teacher training institutions and other education stakeholders.

The experience of the Guatemala online National Basic Curriculum illustrates the potential for relatively low-cost, open source software used in voluntary initiatives to dramatically expand access to key tools in education reform and link the curriculum to improved classroom practices. It also shows how public sector, private voluntary initiatives and international aid to education can collaborate fluidly and effectively to improve resources in education.

The panel proposed will discuss lessons learned from the online National Basic Curriculum, and engage the audience in thinking about future development from the educational, technical and technological, institutional and evaluative perspectives. The first presentation will address the technical, technological and management issues in making the national curriculum available online. The second presentation will address issues from the perspective of the national government as source and regulator of the curriculum, and its links to the online curriculum as an independent initiative. A third presentation will focus on the role of international aid to education in fostering the initiative. A fourth and final presentation will discuss preliminary research findings and plans to further examine the role of the online curriculum on teaching and learning at the classroom level.

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