Need for Education Ministry to review ICT policy on education – Report
The Pan-African Research Team on the Pedagogical Integration of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Ghanaian educational institutions, has urged the Ministry of Education to review its ICT policy, to assure pedagogical integration of ICT.
The Ministry was to terminate the teaching of ICT as just a core subject in schools and rather focus on resourcing schools with at least a computer with internet connectivity, as well as build capacity of teachers in academic integration of ICTs to ensure that the technology could be used as a means of learning and not what to learn.
Professor Kofi Mereku, Lecturer at University of Education, Winneba, and Ghana’s Team Leader for Pan-African Research Agenda on the Pedagogical Integration of ICT, made the call when presenting research findings on academic integration of ICT in Ghana, at a National Validation Workshop in Accra on Wednesday.
The research objective was to examine the Ghanaian educational institutions’ capacity for and approach to, pedagogical integration of ICT.
Prof. Mereku noted that the emphasis had been on the development of ICT for the development of the students’ skills in operating the equipment and not necessarily developing their ICT literacy.
“In Ghanaian institutions, ICT is not used as a way to learn, they are what is taught, that is teachers focus on initiating new users to the basic functions of the equipment,” he said.
The workshop, which brought together various stakeholders, was to undertake a critique and fine tune the findings of the research which would be presented at an international conference in Bamako, Mali in January next year.
Prof. Mereku recommended that educational institutions, with support from their Boards and Parent Teacher Associations drew their ICT plans and further resourced their implementation.
He said the research results indicated that at the pre-tertiary level some attempts had been made by the MOE to formalise the teaching of ICT and encourage its integration into the teaching and learning process.
Prof. Mereku said: “Nonetheless, little integration was observed in teaching and learning in schools”.
He said it was observed that though some basic schools and senior high schools had computers and computer laboratories, most of the equipment had neither been networked nor connected to the internet.
Prof. Mereku attributed the challenges to the belief of both policy implementers and teachers, that it was important to understand these functions well before proceeding to apply them to other learning situations.
He indicated that in some institutions because of lack of plans, a gradual decline in deployment of ICTs was observed, leading to little or no students’ hands-on experience during ICT lessons.
Prof. Mereku said there was enthusiasm at the tertiary level to deploy ICT tools, but the tools were not being utilised optimally in the way the technology proponents anticipated their use in higher education.
He related such developments partly to overemphasis on deployment rather than integration in the national ICT policies and partly to the inefficiencies in the design of the curricula being implemented in Ghanaian institutions.
Mr Joshua Baku, General Secretary of Educational Research Network for West and Central Africa, coordinators of the research project, explained that it was being undertaken in 12 African countries, with funding from the International Research and Development Centre.
He said the various stakeholders would compare reports and findings to see how best to improve upon ICT usage in educational institution in their respective countries.
Source: GNA