The government, in partnership with some leading multi-national technology companies and non-governmental organisations, will in the next two years role out a computer-based teaching programme in public schools to help bridge the shortfall of 85,000 teachers.

Titled Tanzania Beyond Tomorrow, the initiative is intended to supplement the long-term government recruitment of teachers to curb the huge shortage of the personnel in primary and secondary schools.

The partners to work on the project with the Tanzanian Government through the Ministry of Education are the world’s leading high technology companies, Accenture, Intel, Microsoft and Cisco.
Other partners include the NGOs NetHope, Plan International, Amref, and World Vision.In the past five years alone, the government has put up 34 new teacher training colleges, adding to the previous 22, while the private sector has established another 44 colleges in the past four years.

Speaking to The Citizen during a tour by the World Economic Forum (WEF) delegates of Mbezi e-learning demonstration centre, on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam, project coordinator Jessica Long said the programme would cover over 4,000 secondary schools with over 1.5 million students.

The Tanzania Beyond Tomorrow project aims at using ICT to enable a single teacher to simultaneously run several classes by relaying a lesson by computer.

“A teacher can be based in Dar es Salaam but be able to reach several classrooms, which are connected to the national electricity grid and the Internet across the country,” said Ms Long.

The connectivity would enable remote learning and increased collaboration among students and teachers.

Schools, which are off the electricity grid and not connected to the Internet, she said, would first have to be provided with a local source of power such as solar or wind, to be able to become part of and fully benefit from the initiative.

Ms Long said that by June, the project would involve six schools in a pilot study that would last for three months.

Explaining the current situation in secondary schools, Mr Trey Long, also of the Tanzania Beyond Tomorrow project management team, said though over 300 secondary schools had been built by communities to supplement government efforts, a shortfall of over 25,000 teachers had been created.

Mr Long said that as a consequence of this shortcoming, only 30 per cent of the students enrolled in secondary schools managed to pass their exams.

The high failure rate was also attributed to a shortage of learning materials, which limited students’ opportunities.

“Up to 20 students share a textbook and reference books in some schools. Labs, teaching and learning aids are extremely in short supply, while the curriculum was last updated in 2005,” a document issued by the Ministry of Education on Tanzania Beyond Tomorrow initiative says in part.

Another factor that leads to massive failure is overcrowded classrooms, which create a challenging teaching environment.

“The average student to classroom ratio is 60, but ratios of up to 100 students per classroom are common in the country. In this kind of situation interactive learning and individual attention from teachers is impossible due to class sizes,” the document adds.

Speaking to The Citizen after the tour, a Zanzibari politician, Dr Gharib Bilal, said the initiative was the best way to ensure that secondary school students have teachers at all times.

“This technology will also enable students of a similar grade in the rural areas to have similar competitiveness with those from the towns, as a teacher can be based in Dar es Salaam but be able to deliver the same lecture to students in Dodoma and elsewhere,” said Dr Bilal.

The programme is intended to transform the current traditional model where teachers use limited or outdated materials to the use of digitised content and interactive and self-paced learning through information technology.

The project will also eliminate the situation where teachers must cover multiple courses in overcrowded classrooms.

The Minister for Education, Prof Jumanne Maghembe, said the project was aimed at improving learning to eventually create more employment opportunities for the youth of Tanzania.

“It also aims at complementing teacher training with innovative use of technology to improve access to quality education,” the minister added.

Meanwhile, Africa has been advised to embrace and increase the use of information and communication technology “because that is where the continent’s bright future lies”.

Speaking during the second day of the WEF at the Mlimani City Conference Centre, five panelists said the use of ICT would help to transform a number of sectors in Africa.

Stressing the importance of ICT in development, one of the panelists, Mr Dietlof Mare, who is the Vodacom Tanzania Limited managing director, called for the prices of mobile communication gadgets to be lowered.

“The challenge in scaling up the use of mobile devices does not lie in the tariffs, as many people might think. The challenge lies in the cost of the devices,” Mr Mare said.

For his part, Mr Ajai Chowdhry, the founder, CEO and chairman of India’s HCL Infosystems, said ICT, in terms of Internet broadband, was directly linked to a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

“The poor are still poor because they pack information, which can be distributed easily through ICT, which has the potential to transform virtually all sectors,” he added.

“Why don’t we make access to information a fundamental right of everybody? France has done it. Give people information and they can do he rest themselves,” he concluded.
Source: THE CITIZEN

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