Building Teacher Skills in Emerging Economies-1

There is a worrisome perception among parents and other stakeholders about the declining quality of school education in emerging economies.  This is attributable to numerous factors but the more serious among faculty is a lack of adequate and contemporary post-entry training or continuous professional updating  for teachers.

Poor quality of  teachers means children are provided with weak inputs. Student learning is sub-optimal. Teachers may have the basic skills, but not much more. The cost of this failure to meet student needs on monetary and development and psychological angles could be substantial.  Thus investing in teachers'human resource development is the single most important challenge. 

There is a learning crisis at hand unless the teachers are adequately trained. There is need for focused attention on updating professional competences through technological intervention among teachers so that quality delivery of education is possible. 

Steps may include:

• Establish an IT based information system  to inventory skills of teachers. 
• Estimate demand and supply of skilled workforce in relation to education needs at a macro level and at the granular level.    
• Match supply with demand at granular level. Identify deficits and work towards rebuilding teacher competences. 
• Leverage modern technology to ensure  reaching out to teachers, particularly those needing scaling up in course content. 
• Technology to be leveraged for designing  and developing tech driven pedagogical techniques.
• An open platform for e-content on skill development of teachers to be aimed at. 
• Crowd source content for this platform from among the practitioners and experienced to keep costs low. Affordability has to be ensured. 
• High quality content aggregation by an expert team essential prior to release of content. 
• Teachers must utilize the contents of this platform through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) and virtual classrooms . 
• Have teacher innovation hubs at  regional and administrative unit levels. Learning has to be simultaneously decentralized. 
• The Internet of Things (IoT)—the networked connection of people, process, data, and things—must be exploited to become the Internet of Learning Things. 
• The target should be improvements in infrastructure / device availability which make  24/7 connectivity possible  for teachers to benefit and for the teachers to use techniques ranging from Cloud Computing to Big Data integration with the IoT 
• Ease of delivering content to be ensured. 

Note: This is the first of a series on Teacher Skill Building in Emerging Economies by the author.