HOW MIGHT WE LEVERAGE OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES FOR KENYAN CLASSROOMS?
In early 2019, the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD) wanted to expand the content offerings on the Kenya Education Cloud (the country’s national digital learning platform), in an equitable and cost-affordable way for learners, teachers and school communities. They asked, how might we leverage Open Educational Resources (OER)?
THE BIG IDEA
Let’s partner with local and global content producers to develop interactive educational media, support KICD subject matter experts curate content that meets curricular standards, and train teachers on how to mobilize these resources in the classroom.
PHOTO COURTESY OF KICD.
OUR DESIGN APPROACH
70% of OER globally are only available in English, and because OER initially emerged to disrupt tertiary education, few OER exist for primary education – even fewer for the Kenyan context. Through a multi-pronged approach, we identified local and global organizations with high-quality content to establish partnerships with KICD. We worked with KICD staff to map 1,000 easily localizable OER to Kenya’s new competency-based curriculum. We designed and conducted a series of hands-on training sessions for 45 KICD curators and vetted OER across Kenya’s 9 learning areas for grades 1-3 to ensure they met rigorous quality assurance standards. We also created a 5 day immersive professional development training for 63 public school teachers (urban and rural) on how to adapt these resources for their own students and classrooms.
TA-DA! THE OUTCOME
We developed a comprehensive strategy to support KICD with interactive content development mapping, partnerships and acquisition, from creation to mobilization in the classroom.