No dumping allowed: how teachers can be trained to boost quality learning through ICT

By Alicia Mitchell. In January this year the eLearning Africa news service reported on the progress being made towards the impending Millennium Development Goal (MGD) deadline and highlighted the worrying trend of prioritising quantity over quality in efforts to reach the target of universal primary education by 2015. New eLearning technologies offer the tantalising potential to spread high-quality education across the developing world. This could be an answer to the problem, but it is never a simple case of ‘just add ICT’.
In his keynote speech at ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN 2012, Michael Trucano, Senior ICT and Education Policy Specialist at the World Bank, noted the dangerous tendency of policy makers to “dump hardware in schools [and] hope for magic to happen”. Projects that just ‘dump and walk’ are not only wasters of time, money and resources, but are also disillusioning, leading to less inclination to further experiment with ICTs in education. Read more...