Teacher Education: the Role of Open and Distance Learning

Abstract

The world still needs more and better teachers. Despite progress made since the Dakar conference on education for all in 2000, some 57 million children may still be out of school in 2015. And “denying children an opportunity to put even a first step on the education ladder puts them on a course for a lifetime of disadvantage” (UNESCO 2010: 54-5). Governments have responded by adopting a variety of strategies of which open and distance learning is one.1 It is relevant to four problems confronting schools, the teaching profession, and ministries of education. First, there remain shortages of teachers. Teacher numbers barely kept pace with rising pupil numbers in the 1990s. Second, in many but not all countries female teachers are in a minority which, in some cultures, holds back the enrolment of girls. While progress has been made since 1990, women made up only 45 per cent of primary school teachers in south and west Asia and only 44 per cent in subsaharan Africa in 2007. Third, even where there are enough teachers too many of them are untrained or undertrained. In 2001 it was reported that “About half of the teachers in developing countries are unqualified in terms of their own country’s formal standards for teachers’ education. Many teachers have little more than secondary education themselves. Teaching methods are often old fashioned, with too much focus on rote learning” (DfID 2001: 9). Fourth, many countries want to change teachers’ jobs as their host societies are changing: inclusive education, education for democracy, education for the information age, political transformation, all make new demands on the teaching force.