ICT in Primary and Secondary Education - Bolivia

The project supports primary and secondary schools in the use of computer labs by teachers and students. Educatic will provide assistance in the strengthening of school committees managing the computer labs, capacity development of teachers in the development of interactive support materials.  

Bolivia has an education system with high levels of participation of children in primary and secondary level in both urban and rural areas (90%) and high levels of literacy. Yet, the quality of education is very low, resulting in high levels of dropouts and low levels of exam results at the end of the school period. Since years, there is no well-developed curricula, due to long term discussions on modernisation of the curricula. In this context, the integration of ICT facilitates access to better learning materials and more motivated teachers, particulalry in rural areas.  

The project is assisting 28 primay-secondary schools in the integration of ICT in the teaching and learning process. The schools are situated in very remote and poor rural areas in the department of Oruro. These einclude 16 schools that have benefitted from the installation of computer labs through the national educational telecentre program of the Ministry plus 12 schools with donations of computer labs under the programme of the President Evo Cumple.

Specific results:

• Set up of Management Committees with participation of head masters, teachers, parents and local government officials in each of the schools to enhance the sustainability of ICT;
• Capacity development of 28 informatics teachers in basic and advanced ICT;
• Capacity development of 403 subject-based teachers in basic ICT;
• Pedagogical training of 403 teachers in ICT culture and content development;
• Training in ICT of regional educational authorities and local government officials;
• Set up of social networks among teachers and students;
• Development of interactive digital learning games for Mathematics and Languages for the lower primary school classes;
• Introduction of an off-line and on-line e-learning system facilitating development of more structured lesson plans and digital content using open source platform Moodle;

Contributing to the educational quality in primary and secondary schools in the Department of Oruro participating in the National ICT for Education program of the Ministry of Education, focusing on the use and benefits of the aplication of ICT in the teaching and learning processes.

This video is part of a series that inform about the experience and challenges of applying new ICT for Development in Bolivia.

• With perseverance and patience, successful local project experiences can be used to interest governments to adopt the experiences and integrate these in national ICT for education programmes. In this case it has taken 5 years to finally formalise collaboration with the Ministry of Education;
• While many ICT for education projects use external or develop local educational support materials, often these materials are not integrated in a structured e-learning system. Hitherto, ICT based systems were expensive and complicated to apply. With the spread of Moodle, there is now a free, standardized and easy to use platform available.

The project is managed by the Fundacion Multidisciplinaria Educatic based in Oruro and set up in 2008. The project team of 5 persons is made up of ICT experts and teachers with experience in ICT for education projects.