Walsh, Chris, Woodward, Clare, Solly, Mike, and Shrestha, Prithvi (2015) The potential of mobile phones to transform teacher professional development to build sustainable educational futures in Bangladesh. Asian Association of Open Universities Journal, 10 (1). pp. 37-52.

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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 projec'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.

Item ID:	43743
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2414-6994
Keywords:	futures thinking, school-based professional development(SBPD)model, teacher professional development(TPD), mobile phones, open distance learning(ODL)
Related URLs:	Publisher
Additional Information:	© 2015 The Authors
Funders:	UKaid
Date Deposited:	22 Apr 2016 00:40
FoR Codes:	13 EDUCATION > 1303 Specialist Studies in Education > 130313 Teacher Education and Professional Development of Educators @ 100%
SEO Codes:	93 EDUCATION AND TRAINING > 9302 Teaching and Instruction > 930203 Teaching and Instruction Technologies @ 100%
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