Technology Adaptation for Teacher Professional Development

• In Event: South-South partnerships in STEM teacher education - Knowledge creation, adaptation and dissemination

Proposal

As can be imagined, even before the pandemic, the opportunistic use of ICT tools is well documented in the Global South (Leach, 2015). The use of technology as a teaching resource has seen significant interest by educational stakeholders, especially teachers, who employed it actively during the pandemic and as we transition away from the COVID-19 era. Some ministries or bureaus of education in the global south (Nigeria, for instance) have for the first time made efforts to create a platform for eLearning for basic and secondary education (FME, 2022). Government and non-profit organizations have also deployed radio and television programs as alternative instruction modes during the pandemic (FME, 2020). However, except where teachers participate in an online distance learning program, teacher professional development has hitherto been face-to-face. Even the pandemic has not been able to change this because of the unavailability of a platform for continuous teacher capacity development. Similarly, the use of technology for collaboration (virtual collaboration) for learning and cross-regional educational capacity building within the countries in the global south before the pandemic was very limited. These are some of the issues addressed by the Connected Learning for Teacher Capacity for STEM (CL4STEM) project. It aims to collaboratively develop, trial and evaluate a teacher professional development solution that is fit for purpose and is reflective of the emerging nature of teacher capacity building and service delivery in the global south settings. The project employs the use of collaboration tools (such as Google Docs and Zoom), an open educational resource (OER) platform (moodle) and a community of practice (COP) platform (WhatsApp/Telegram) to engage with collaborators, train teachers in their chosen fields, and exchange best practices. The foregoing took place in a region where the infrastructure of e-learning is weak and insufficient, with only 42% of Nigerians having access to the internet and 56% to electricity (Akogun, 2020). This talk is a reflection of this engagement of working directly with collaborators, teachers and their teachers (instructors); and data from the technology platforms employed for collaboration and interactions on the OER and COP platforms. By the end of the talk, using data, insight and anecdotal evidence, we intend to expound on lessons learned from the use of technology for collaboration in the global south-only consortium on how the COP and OER platforms are used by the teachers and instructors; how the collaboration tools/COP/OERs are perceived by instructors and teachers; challenges and opportunities from the use of these technologies, implications for pedagogies.

Author

• Abdullahi Abubakar Kawu, IBB University, Lapai, Nigeria