ICT-enabled teacher professional development at scale for quality access to education

Teachers have a pivotal role in the learning environment to engage all students in their learning, support them to monitor and manage their own learning, and provide opportunities for them to enhance their learning outcomes. For teachers to provide students with such quality access to learning and develop students’ lifelong learning skills, they have to possess the competencies to carry out such a role. Continuous professional development of teachers ensures that teachers develop this set of competencies and are kept current with curriculum and assessment reforms; when such professional development opportunities are provided for teachers, Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 (quality education for all) is more likely to be realized. However, there is a “massive global teacher shortage” that acts as a critical bottleneck to achieving SDG 4. The 2016 Global Education Monitoring report found that nearly one quarter of secondary school teachers in sub-Saharan Africa had no formal training. Furthermore, continuous teacher professional development for all teachers across the entire school system poses a challenge for many countries, especially developing ones with significant rural-urban and regional gaps, and limited resources.
From the equity, quality and efficiency perspectives, Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have the potential to provide all teachers with cost-effective and quality access to continuous professional development. This presentation discusses the different models of ICTenabled teacher professional development at scale (TPD@Scale) that have been developed and implemented in China, Colombia, India and the Philippines. It shows how ICT-enabled courses and resources are implemented to ensure consistency of quality and access for all teachers, irrespective of their location and circumstances. It also shows how ICT enables professional learning communities of teachers to network, share and collaborate across schools and regions, and hence, supporting one another as they apply what they have learnt to their practices and reflect on these practices to enhance the quality of their student learning. Therefore, ICT-enabled TPD@Scale is more likely to support school systems to realize SDG4. Copyright © 2018 ICCE.