Quality Products for Education Projects

By Anne Sparrowhawk

Until 2007 I had not had the privilege of visiting Africa at all, but then visited it twice in six months. In February, I visited Cape Town, South Africa, to work with the Ministry of Education and the provinces about the process of software evaluation that we have developed in the UK over the past 10 years. Then in September, I visited Mankoadze, a coastal village in Ghana which a friend of mine has been supporting through his charity, TEABAG. Both experiences were informative and very stimulating in different ways.

TEEM has been operating in the UK for nine years now. It was started with my business partner Ysanne Heald and myself, as a result of the realisation that teachers needed more information about what a piece of software did and how it would work in the classroom. We worked with Angela McFarlane, then at Cambridge University and now a Professor of Education at Bristol University, and developed a framework of evaluation. We trained about 500 teachers over time and across the country to use this framework. Teachers then evaluate the software against our curriculum in the classroom before we publish their evaluations online at www.teem.org.uk . Anyone may use this site – and many UK teachers do!

The Ministry of Education in South Africa was interested in the model of evaluation because currently each province makes its own evaluations of materials and then makes these recommendations available to schools within their province. As schools start to use computer-based resources, this evaluation process becomes expensive, and is duplicated across the different provinces. If agreement can be reached on the type of evaluation process to be followed, then this information could be shared throughout the country. Our visit to Cape Town explored some of these issues. We hope that we might be able to take this project forward in time.

I am also interested in how I can personally help the school in Mankoadze, Ghana, to develop its use of resources. When we were setting up TEEM, one of the benefits of the TEEM process was finding out that training teachers to be evaluators helped them to understand how software resources could be used in their teaching. I am hopeful that one day this might have that impact in Ghana, too, and would also help develop the curriculum.

While the school at Mankoadze has very few resources at the moment, through TEABAG there is a new initiative to help the village. This project has resulted in the refurbishment of a building to become a Vocational Training Centre for students who are not able to leave the village to continue their education. Here, TEABAG plans to provide training in catering, sewing, carpentry and also computing. The building can also act as a community centre where videos can be shared, both for enjoyment and also for education. The project is in its early days, but there is a lot of enthusiasm for it from the community and also from those of us involved in fund-raising and helping to support its development.

Common to both of these projects is the need to help local people become experts. I would like to get involved in training them to understand how to evaluate resources so that they can make decisions about what will work well for them. Through working together, they can learn from our experiences – the good as well as the bad – and together we can develop a process that will best suit their needs. They can then pass this training on to others, and in doing so share their experiences of using resources.

I am attending the eLearning conference in Accra at the end of May and am hoping to meet other people within the eLearning community with whom I can share my experience, and from whom I can learn about making such projects sustainable in the African context.

April 1, 2008

Anne Sparrowhawk

Anne has been involved in the TEEM service since its inception in 1998. She is the Director responsible for the frameworks at the core of the evaluation process.

Newsportal: eLearning in the School System