Challenges in Transforming Education in Maldives
Context of the Maldives
The Republic of Maldives is a small, island nation with a total of 1190 islands. The country stretches 823km north to south and 3130 km east to west. The geographical isolation is the greatest challenge for the Maldives. The islands have great differences in the distribution of service, people and development. However, each island has a government primary school (grade 1-7) in small islands and secondary and higher secondary (1- 12) in bigger islands. The country follows a local curriculum from 1-7, and an international curriculum for the lower and higher secondary level.
The lack of sufficient teachers is another challenge Maldives face. There are 6,407 teachers in the Maldives out of which 1,605 teachers are untrained (MOE, 2010), hence it is difficult to provide high quality and relevant education to all the students and maintain the standard of the education. Therefore, it is important to minimize the gap between the islands and the capital Male, by building a network which would enable the teachers to share the instructional materials.
Information Communication Technology is a very relevant tool to access education for the remote island nation like Maldives. Moreover the availability of internet and technology in schools makes this easier to implement. In terms of Technology, Maldives has achieved a great success in expanding telecommunication access to all the inhabitant islands long back in 1999 (ITU, 2004). From the ITU World Telecommunication Indicators Database, Maldives has a record of number one internet penetration among South Asian nations, with second among less developed countries (LDC) and 14th out of 38 among the small island nations (ITU, 2004). With this expansion of internet access, many schools have identified the importance of capitalizing the available technology in the classrooms. With the generous donation from parents and other community members, many schools started investing on technology. Recently we have seen a lot of competition between schools to use the most recent technologies such as smart board, projectors and LCD TVs in class rooms.
ICT Policy Rationale
Despite many initiatives implemented since the introduction of ICT in education, Maldives urgently requires a national policy on ICT in schools. At the moment, the country is in the process of developing a new national curriculum, which emphasise a lot on ICT integration. Despite the disparity in the ‘educated’ groups in the society, the use of technology among all groups is consistent. However since the most efficient and effective use of such tools has not been addressed formally, the society as a whole does not benefit with such technological advances. Therefore it has become vital to formally teach the use of technology to enable more efficient work environments in both academics as administrative sectors. At the same time addressing ethics of technology use within the society has become a matter of grave concern. This has raised the need for an ICT policy in the country and had resulted in a draft ICT framework.
An expert committee has been established in 2011 to govern the process of the ICT Policy. The National Center for Information Communication has been assigned this task by the Ministry of Education to coordinate the implementation plan. This ICT framework consists of three main areas:
1. Every child is connected (Connectivity)
2. ICT integrated Education (Content)
3. Capacity Building (Capacity)
Challenges
The role of a policy during the developmental phase is crucial. With changes in other system components, such as other sector policies, change trajectories have led to a model of continuous change. This tuning of system components had forced a series of follow- up policies, programmes and resources that connect the initial target components – for instance, pedagogy, teacher training, changes in other system components, such as curriculum and assessment. This implies a change trajectory that had plotted out a series of policy updates. However a number of challenges are faced by the Maldives in providing a broader context of changes and articulate a vision that would motivate people to change and coordinate, otherwise disparate efforts within the system across sectors. The major challenges in the process of transforming ICT in education policies are as follows:
Professional development: Teacher professional development and initial teacher training are an important component of ICT in education policy. ICT policies and programs related to teacher training should be constructed in a way that connects to specific classroom practices or engage teachers in a community of professional practice and ongoing development. We need to incorporate ICT modules in the pre- teacher training programs as well as the in-service teacher training programs. However, the lacks of expertise in the field, the number of teachers who need training, the training modules and an ICT standard for the teachers, are pre-requisites for such a process.
Pedagogical Change: Another important component of ICT in education policies are the articulation of ICT – related changes with innovative pedagogical practices. It requires a more knowledge deepening approach with more advanced applications such as simulations and games. These pedagogical changes would treat the students as active agents who are engaged in collaborative projects to solve complex, real –world problems, or sustained investigations. Hence, the pedagogical role of the teachers should be, to structure and support these practices. The main concern for this change is the academic level of the teachers. A greater percentage of the current practicing teachers are at a certificate levels and have been trained a decade back or so.
Curricular development: The education system will become more experienced in the use of ICT once it is embedded in schools and classrooms. The curricular emphasis can shift to the integration of ICT throughout the curriculum which would support learning of school subjects. Moreover, such approach would extend the curriculum beyond the subject domain and would develop other skills facilitated by the use of computers. In this regard our new curriculum which is being piloting has integrated ICT to a great extent. However it would need time and continuous assessment of the process.
Assessment reform: Most of the assessment policies in a result oriented school, focus on the memorization of facts and application of simple procedure to set up, one- step problems. Hence, we highly need assessment reform which emphasizes the need to assess a new set of twenty- first century skills not traditionally measured by standard assessments. ICT can be a crucial enabler of these changes and assessment should be important part of ICT policy. In this regard, the whole assessment procedure needs to be changed.
Restructuring the school: The traditional model of the schools are designed to meet the needs of the knowledge acquisition approaches, with blocks of time, focused on a single subject in a bounded physical space, limited to a single teacher and a specific group of students. With the technology we need to break these boundaries and expand the opportunities for learning. Hence it requires a significant restructuring of the schools schedule focused on real- world, multi- disciplinary problems and access to people and digital multimedia resources that would allow students to explore key concepts and principles in depth.
Technological infrastructure: The technology itself is a key part of ICT policy. Hence it must address issues related to hardware, software and content development, networks, and technological support. It includes computer hardware, multimedia hardware and broadcast media such as radio and television. At the same time broadband internet is required. Especially a country which is dispersed in the Indian Ocean, telecommunication is a great requirement. Although most of the schools use internet for administration and communication purpose, the low speed does not allow the many available tools to be incorporated directly in the classroom.
Conclusion
ICT policy development and ICT use is one of the highest priority in the Maldives. The drive for such policy and enabling broad utilization has come from the highest levels given from the president’s strong support as well as education ministry. There are clear examples of government collaboration to create the right investments and development of a climate for ICT in our schools. On a parallel basis, the parent community has been, and continues to be, highly pro-active in its support for integrating ICT in schools, and an overall development in the Maldives.