‘Now I
understand how it works’
Interview with Olaf Erz on ICT and Education
The Education sector is IICD’s second largest in terms of the number of projects. Those numbers also reflect the many levels at which ICT is currently being used in an educational context for example to strengthen teacher capacity, improve study materials and their accessibility, and streamline the information flows within and between schools. Based on his considerable experience in working in Education in Africa, IICD’s Country Manager for Zambia and Ghana, Olaf Erz, is familiar with the challenges that IICD faces in working with ICT in the Education sector. He discusses several of those challenges, ranging raising awareness at the ministerial level to encouraging more dialogue between teachers and students in the classroom.
When trying to bring about lasting changes in schools and colleges, it is vital to have the support of a country’s Ministry of Education. In dealing with the Ministry, Erz explains, so much depends on whether or not that country already has the National ICT policy in place. If that is the case, as in Zambia, the Minister of Education will be able point to that national policy and build his sector policy on the basis of that. Erz: “In Zambia, they were able to develop an ICT sector policy for Education in just one year, whereas before the national policy was there, the ICT committee had spent almost five years trying to convince the Ministry of the need for ICT in Education. Now the Ministry of Education is actually a kind of forerunner in Zambia, and the other ministries are beginning to follow suit. In a lot of other countries, the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Agriculture tend to be rather conservative and lacking in innovation.”
Potetnially conflicting interests within the sector form other obstacles that IICD needs to deal with. Erz describes one such challenge: "The development partners are focused on primary education to reach the Millennium Development Goals, and the focus of many Ministries and IICD is in the field of secondary education and teacher-training. Thanks to the investment in primary education, we see now that the number of schools and students in Zambia has dramatically increased but there is a lack of qualified teachers, and secondary schools for students willing to continue. This calls for continuous discussions between all stakeholders to ensure that the different education areas are not forgotten."
Getting schools connected is another major challenge, but that, too, depends largely on the current state of affairs in the country in question. Erz explains: “Thanks to the developments in mobile telephony, many things that would have been impossible even one year ago are possible now. But a country like Bolivia is significantly further advanced in terms of connectivity than most African countries, for example. What had been a challenge for Bolivia maybe two years ago is now showing up as a problem in African countries. You could say that the main differences between countries have to do with whatever stage a particular country is in.”
Another problem that IICD faces is the fact that people in Education tend to work in isolation. “We try to encourage groups of teachers and schools to work together in teams,” says Erz. “We arrange for individual teachers’ notes to be collected, incorporated in a master version of the content and then distributed to other teachers, for example. But many teachers do not see why they should share their knowledge with other teachers from other schools. Through workshops and face-to-face meetings, teachers start interacting with each other, and that builds up a sense of trust.”
Helping teachers improve the quality of teaching support materials using up-to-date information from the Internet and developing these in digital format is a first and very important goal to increase the quality of teachers and the teaching process in education. Eventually the students themselves should start learning through the Internet and find other resources there. ICT in the classroom is the ultimate goal. The real problem, as Erz explains, is that this process will take a lot of time. “It boils down to a sort transformation,” he says, “from the traditional chalk-and-talk model, in which the teacher is merely focusing on writing something on the wall, to a situation in which – using a LCD projector and PowerPoint presentations – the teacher actually has to interact with the students. The ICT enables a kind of conversation within the classroom. And that requires more preparation on the part of the teacher.”
Potentially conflicting interests within the sector form other obstacles that IICD needs to deal with. Erz describes one such challenge: “The Ministry of Education in one country is quite focused on tertiary education, while the focus and experience of IICD is in the field of secondary education and teacher-training. In order to serve the needs of that Ministry, IICD is placing more emphasis on the teacher-training aspects, since that is at least similar to tertiary education. We are also assisting the Ministry in developing sector-specific ICT strategies that are in line with the policies and that will contribute towards fulfilling their needs”
The mobility of the teaching staff can be another issue in the Education sector. That is a problem that affects both public and private schools, although the reasons for it are different. “Aside from the fact that they are more apt to face funding problems, the main challenge we face in government schools is a policy that calls for the automatic transfer of teachers from one government school to another after four or five years, regardless of how well they have performed. And that inevitably entails a loss for a school that has finally managed to build up a good core team,” Erz says. “With the private schools, on the other hand, there is more and more competition in terms of the salaries they are offering to teachers, and that leads teachers to leave one school for another. The teachers we train in our projects may also leave for other, better-paying schools. And while those schools will benefit from the training those teachers have received within the projects we support, it nevertheless means a loss of staff for the schools we are working with and it makes it harder for the school to achieve the goals that have been set.”
As Erz sees it, the problems confronting the Education sector can only be tackled effectively if the Ministry of Education in a country has a real sense of the specific challenges that its schools are facing. And that is the benefit of IICD’s approach. During policy and strategy development, the different stakeholders are invited to join in the discussion. “When we are assisting a Ministry, we often encourage our contacts there to invite our project partners to take part in the discussion. After all, they are the ones with the experience with ICT in Education. They know what is needed, how long it takes and what kinds of constraints are in store for a school or college,” Erz says. “You could even say that IICD plays a facilitating role between the schools, the colleges and the ministry, since the different parties get to know each other at the meeting and basically become friends.”
If IICD really wants to leverage its experience and replicate successful projects, Erz is convinced that it will need to focus on policy reform to bring about changes in the Ministry’s strategy. “You can’t have the one without the other,” he says. “If a country has 10 or 20 teacher-training colleges and IICD is only supporting one of them, then obviously you are going to want the Ministry to include that one in their strategy and to replicate it. In IICD’s approach, the projects eventually become the cases that used in advising on the policy. You can’t separate the policy and the strategy from the projects.”
Alongside the challenges, Erz also notices an enormous amount of creativity and innovative thinking within the Education sector in the countries he works in. The local people are masters at making the most out of what they have at their disposal. He explains: “One of the really creative approaches I see in the South is self-made learning content. In the North you can go into a shop and buy the same completely standardised education software in several different languages, with images filmed in a super studio laboratory. But in a country like Zambia, they make videos in their actual labs, showing the environment that the kids can actually identify with. Those videos are made with Zambians for Zambians, which makes the content seem more real. The more standardised software from the North will show them things that they will never have access to. But this way, the Zambian users can think, ‘If we’d get these ingredients, we could do the same thing.’ So the challenge is to make a video that will make the students say, ‘Now I understand how it works’ or ‘Now I know how to work with a Bunsen burner’.”
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