Global Learning Portal Guest

Funded by

USAID

Undertaken in coordination with

EQUIP2 (Education Quality Improvement Program)

The Global Learning Portal (GLP) in Zambia supports the Ministry of Education’s education quality improvement goals by fostering teacher collaboration and stakeholder information sharing. Working with the USAID-funded Education Quality Improvement Program (EQUIP2), GLP is providing:

• Internet access (connectivity and infrastructure) to students and educators in teacher training colleges to use for professional and educational development
• Guidance to colleges on creating technology plans on ICT to sustain their investments
• Online tools, including repository of documents, publications, toolkits and other key information for educators to quickly access and collaborate on.
• Training to education stakeholders on how to access information and use resources available through the GLP

Connectivity and access to ICTs are still major barriers for many Zambian professionals, especially student teachers. Therefore, GLP focused on providing Colleges of Education ( Mansa, Chipata, Mufulira, ZAMISE, Kasama, Kitwe and Malcolm ) connectivity. To make these investments sustainable, education administrators at the colleges are being trained on how to create technology plans to capture the physical and human resource requirements of technology at these schools.

GLP also offers a secure central online repository for key education policy documents and materials for all groups working in education in Zambia. Syllabi of basic, junior secondary and secondary levels, government strategic plans, policies and information on education-related topics are all publicly available in this community. Previously, if a teacher needed a copy of a syllabus, s/he would have to go to a district office to obtain a copy, if the office had one. The project also developed the Zambia Education Project Tracking System database to provide an easily accessible tool that lists education-related projects operating in country.

Voice from the field

“In the past students were not researching, they were dependent heavily on the lecturers. With the installation of the Internet in the college the lecturers have to be alert all the time. If not the students will come with their researched knowledge and challenge the lecturers,” says Chulumanda Mulenga, a lecturer at ZAMISE.

Lessons learned

GLP component in Zambia faced several challenges in implementing its work including structure, management, expectations and coordination of use of GLP.

• Differing Visions of GLP Mission and Expectations for its Results: Before project activities start, there needs to be a transparent and coordinated discussion about the mission and expectations for the technology component. At the commencement of the Zambia project, there were different interpretations of the role of GLP by the Ministry, the Colleges of Education and the EQUIP2 project. Clarifying the role of GLP and its priority areas took more time and effort than originally anticipated and delayed project implementation.

• User Needs-based Project Activities: One of the challenges the GLP group faced was no time in the project to perform a needs assessment and then tailor the activities to the identified needs of the targeted beneficiaries.

  Instead, the technology interventions were identified While many of these interventions have addressed user needs, this method of project development is harder to develop user buy-in and interest.

  Online technology interventions ask users to contribute to the project, by reading materials, joining conversations, or add their experience and knowledge for other people. Often the intervention requires that users do additional tasks or tasks in a new way from before. As a result, users need to see a clear benefit to themselves for their contributions. The intervention needs to make their lives easier in some tangible way.

  GLP, through a program evaluation, was able to identify tools that the Colleges could use immediately, including creating web pages and web sites, sharing contributions online and recognizing and evaluating others contributions.

• Field Level Access and Partners: Just because a technology project is “virtual” in nature does not mean that local field level presence is unnecessary. In fact, in places such as Zambia with low levels of connectivity, low technical literacy, and low technical infrastructure support available from the private sector, field presence and onsite/local support is essential to operational success.

  The EQUIP2 project was designed to focus on Ministry of Education, and therefore did not have a convenient field network through which to implement the project. As a result, EQUIP2 was understaffed to support the intervention, which lead to uneven development and delayed implementation of the GLP component.

  To remedy this challenge, GLP is exploring partnerships with local, field level groups who both have field-level networks combined with identified needs for GLP tools.

• Champions: To maintain interest in the technology initiative among the Ministry, donors and colleges, highly respected champions of the activities are necessary to demonstrate benefits and mobilize support among partners for all its components. It is very challenging for individuals within the project or the target beneficiaries to influence decision making that may directly impact project outcomes. Without senior level support from the Ministry, the project may not be able to garner the buy-in needed from all the parties and may even be seen as competition.

  Champions should be senior enough to have influence among decision-makers and users as well as understand the potential and the needs of ICT interventions (especially the costs and long term investments needed).

• Developing a Physical Platform as a Basis for GLP: Early in the project, GLP recognized that lack of connectivity was a substantial barrier for most of its users. Developing the physical infrastructure and connectivity was necessary to deliver the tools needed to access and use GLP tools.

• Cannot underestimate human support: In addition to the physical infrastructure, improvements in human capacity, such as dedicated technical support staff, training, maintenance, etc is needed to ensure that the physical infrastructure stays viable, staff can and are making use of the resources, coordination among colleges takes place, and the system lives up to its potential as a means for catalyzing educational development.

• Planning for Ongoing Monitoring and Adjustments to the Project: Simple monitoring tools, such as web statistics, user surveys, user interviews and focus groups, can help identify issues as they come up so that they can be addressed and mitigated early. A transparent monitoring system which periodically measures outcomes against expected results would demonstrate achievements and further needs. These tools would give local participant institutions reasonable standards to:

  • Determine if use of the portal and resources were matching expectations
  • Provide structured points for additional training, changes to the user interface, or other structural improvements
  • Allow comparisons across participant groups to find stronger and weaker nodes
  • Help program implementers perform course redirection as needed or alert funders to unanticipated challenges.