Teachers in Burkina Faso develop their own educational materials

Therefore, in 2004, four Burkinabe secondary schools decided to address the issue by developing a project that would provide teachers with the right ICT skills to produce their own educational materials using internet and various multimedia tools. In this way, they hoped to improve both the quality of educational materials and their accessibility by placing them online. After what seemed to be an endless time of preparations the project –called TICE-Burkina (Technologie de l'Information et de la Communication pour l'Enseignement au Burkina Faso) - finally started in 12 secondary schools in Burkina Faso. So far, the results are promising.

Training teachers to develop, create and share their own content

By concentrating on developing the ICT skills of the teachers, the project aimed to teach them how to:

• Access information;
• Make this information accessible for pupils;
• Create their own content for educational purposes; and
• Make this newly created content available for other teachers outside the project.

It was decided that all materials developed by teachers participating in the project would be shared through a website www.tice-burkina.bf with other teachers.

The hard work paid off. By developing the ICT skills of a small group of teachers so that they could manage a school computer lab and use multimedia skills to enhance their teaching methods, the quality of and access to teaching material for other teachers and students improved considerably. Teachers who where not able to develop online educational materials themselves now benefit from the materials prepared by others as it is all shared through a website with other teachers at www.tice-burkina.bf . It is not just the pupils of the teachers who were trained that benefit from the new materials, pupils from other teachers benefit too. Placing the educational materials online not only provides students with easy access to the most recent learning materials, it also stimulates them to acquire ICT skills.

The TICE project's achievements so far

In June 2006, the TICE-Burkina website won second price in a national competition for the best website. Teachers involved in the project developed the website themselves to create a pool of teaching materials available online. By the end of 2007:

• More than one hundred teachers and pupils had attended workshops on website development;
• Local Area Networks (LANs) had been installed by the project owner, Zongo Consultancy Projects (ZCP), in schools in Dedougou, Po, Ouahigouya, Fada n'Gourma, Banfora and Ougadougou;
• Computers had been donated and installed in schools in Ouahigouya, Dori and Ougadougou; and
• Basic computer training had been provided to teachers and pupils in all twelve schools.

Working on ownership

The biggest challenge of the project was not so much finding resources to make the necessary investments in the infrastructure, but achieving real ownership and finding other schools outside of the four that were already involved in another IICD-supported project, the Global Teenager Project (GTP), to actually participate in the project. One of the reasons for extending the number of schools in the project was that it had to be feasible to set up a small network between the schools. The criteria set for participating in the TICE-Burkina project were quite high. The Global Teenager project had learned from experience that in order to be successful, school management had to be prepared to make time and resources available to train the teachers. Also, in order to set up a small network, the schools needed to have electricity and potential access to a telephone and the internet. It took quite some time for the project owner, Zongo Consultancy Projects (ZCP) and IICD to find schools outside the four schools that initiated the project that could meet these criteria, but the schools that are currently involved in the project are quite determined to make a success out of the project and that means that the project in itself is likely to be more sustainable.

Meeting other teachers online

The extent to which the schools are determined to make a success out of the project is clearly demonstrated by the activities generated by the fact that teachers have started to organise themselves and continue to develop themselves. For example, two teachers have set up a special Dgroup; a closed communication environment where members can share their ideas and experiences online, discuss their project - Tic-Educ BF Dgroup – and moderate lively discussions on various topics related to the project. The same group also formed a thematic group within the National ICT for Development network. With over 170 members, this group is one of the most active thematic groups within the network and regularly organises workshops, awareness raising sessions and training courses. Lately, they have also started to address the gender issue by organising a special training workshop for female teachers in June 2007.

Moving towards an eStrategy for education

The results of the TICE project have not gone unnoticed. In 2006, the TICE project leader was asked to become a resource person for the Ministry of Secondary Education to help formulate a policy on eEducation. This policy was presented in April 2007 and validated by a group of 60 education experts who all participated in a roundtable workshop on education in 2006. All that is needed now is an eStrategy for education to be developed so that more people, besides the teachers and pupils of the 12 schools currently participating in the project, can benefit from high quality educational materials. The government is now taking steps in this direction.