The Potential of Mobile Phones to Transform Teacher Professional Development to Build Sustainable Educational Futures in Bangladesh

Christopher S Walsh (Torrens University Australia, Australia)
Clare Woodward (Faculty of Education Studies, The Open University, UK)
Mike Solly (Faculty of Education Studies, The Open University, UK)
Prithvi Shrestha (Faculty of Education Studies, The Open University, UK)

Asian Association of Open Universities Journal

ISSN: 2414-6994

Article publication date: 1 June 2015

1915
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Abstract

Futures thinking is used by governments to consider long-term strategic approaches and develop policies and practices that are potentially resilient to future uncertainty. English in Action (EIA), arguably the world's largest English language teacher professional development (TPD) project, used futures thinking to author possible, probable and preferable future scenarios to solve the project's greatest technological challenge: how to deliver audio-visual TPD materials and hundreds of classroom audio resources to 75,000 teachers by 2017. Authoring future scenarios and engaging in possibility thinking (PT) provided us with a taxonomy of question-posing and question-responding that assisted the project team in being creative. This process informed the successful pilot testing of a mobile-phone-based technology kit to deliver TPD resources within an open distance learning (ODL) platform. Taking the risk and having the foresight to trial mobile phones in remote rural areas with teachers and students led to unforeseen innovation. As a result, EIA is currently using a mobile-phone-based technology kit with 12,500 teachers to improve the English language proficiency of 700,000 students. As the project scales up in its third and final phase, we are using the new technology kit — known as the 'trainer in your pocket' — to foster a 'quiet revolution' in the provision of professional development for teachers at scale to an additional 67,500 teachers and nearly 10 million students.

Keywords

Citation

Walsh, C.S., Woodward, C., Solly, M. and Shrestha, P. (2015), "The Potential of Mobile Phones to Transform Teacher Professional Development to Build Sustainable Educational Futures in Bangladesh", Asian Association of Open Universities Journal, Vol. 10 No. 1, pp. 37-52. https://doi.org/10.1108/AAOUJ-10-01-2015-B005

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2015 Emerald Group Publishing Limited

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License


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