The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in schools shut all across the world. Globally, over 1.2 billion children are out of the classroom. Since the closing of the schools in Uganda in March 2020, the TTE project responded with the project TTE Sandbox to experiment with EdTech to ensure the continuity of learning.

In March 2021 the schools are reopening in Uganda.
But in one years’ time, education has changed dramatically, with the distinctive rise of e-learning, whereby teaching is undertaken remotely and on digital platforms. Research suggests that online learning has been shown to increase retention of information, and take less time, meaning the changes coronavirus have caused might be here to stay.

In Uganda, the Ministry of Education and Sports is currently drafting its Digital Education Agenda (2022-2026):

• To leverage utilization of ICT for continuous education in case of disruption (emergency, disaster) in the education sector  and
• To develop an integrated direction in which ICT shall facilitate teaching, learning, and management of service delivery in the education sector.

Therefore, the TTE project is looking at how it can implement hybrid education as a transition towards a fully Open Distance Learning mode within the National Teachers’ colleges (NTCs). With this in mind, the pedagogy team has developed a General Methods e-learning course that is completely free, open, and accessible to both students and teachers.  This course is self-paced and equips teachers with 21st-century teaching skills.  Click the link to access the course: http://www.bit.ly/GeneralTeachingMethods

Improving teaching skills alone, however, does not guarantee how effectively education institutions operate. This is why the ID team (Institutional Development) has now launched a series of e-learning courses to support the management of educational institutions. These online courses will ensure that new and existing staff in the teacher colleges have the access to information and the required skill set to implement their roles effectively.

To ensure easy accessibility, the online management courses are hosted on one of the best Learning Management Systems in the world. It’s called Moodle.

Why Moodle?

Moodle is quite a popular hosting over 68 million users worldwide (larger than UK’s population!), it is hands-down the most widely used Learning Management System by all organizations. But Moodle is not the world’s best LMS just because it’s so widely used; Moodle is the world’s best LMS because it is user-friendly, highly-configurable (flexible), and feature-rich. Therefore, Enabel has also installed Moodle as Learning Management system for internal users https://learning.enabel.be/ and for external users https://open-learning.enabel.be/

Online Management Courses

Last week the TTE project launched the following ID courses to support 150 management staff in the teacher colleges with the hopes of expanding this to other Teacher/ Instructor Education and Training institutions (TIET) in the Ministry of Education and Sports.

1.       Gender course - 
https://open-learning.enabel.be/course/view.php?id=39

2.       HRM Course - 
https://open-learning.enabel.be/course/view.php?id=35

3.       Leadership and management - 
https://open-learning.enabel.be/course/view.php?id=32

4.       Communication skills - 
https://open-learning.enabel.be/course/view.php?id=31

5.       Finance management, planning and budgeting -https://open-learning.enabel.be/course/view.php?id=44  

On top of this, the infrastructure team also launched its e-learning course on Climate Responsive design. https://open-learning.enabel.be/course/view.php?id=25  

For more information on Moodle or the e-learning courses, contact our digital ninja: elizabeth.nkwasire@enabel.be