Academy for Educational Development

For more and more education projects in developing countries, an increasing wave of investments are being made in computers and related Internet technology in schools and communities.  Yet even with basic skills, what can teachers and students do with these new personal computers?  How can computers and connectivity help teachers teach better, and help students learn more?  The answer is that wireless connectivity or internet-enabled laptops alone are not sufficient unless complemented by easy-to-use learning communities and online collaborative tools.

That's where the Global Learning Portal (GLP) comes in. GLP is a free, multilingual online portal with tools for building social networks and digital libraries with a focus on developing education country challenges.  GLP permits individual teachers and education groups to collaborate with one another online and to find and share knowledge and quality materials.  Teachers, administrators, policymakers, ministries of education and a growing array of development partners worldwide now use GLP to participate in a global conversation on education challenges and share knowledge and experience on how to facilitate student performance and learning outcomes

In October 2007, USAID Administrator Henrietta Fore called the Global Learning Portal “an innovative approach to private sector engagement in education, empowering educators to share their knowledge, materials, and best practices with others.”   GLP is not a project but a global alliance and network for the benefit of teachers and learners.  GLP is open to all those interested in improving education quality in under-resourced schools and under-teachers and learners in developing countries.  As a portal as opposed to a web site, the Global Learning Portal allows two-way knowledge-sharing and communications, whereby all users can add their own materials, documents, lesson plans, and comments in discussions of interest.

From A as in Afghanistan...

Teachers in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, are putting their lives and schools back together after the brutal five-year rule of the Taliban. Materials are so scarce that some teach using 30-year-old handwritten notes—in Russian. "I have one book," observed a geography teacher. "How can I teach with one book?"

The Afghanistan Higher Education Project (HEP), funded by USAID, reaches out to 16 teaching faculties around the country, building professional resource centers and working with rectors and teachers to rebuild and expand capacity.  The Bamiyan teaching faculty has a new computer lab, funded by the project, and teachers use their new computer skills to hunt for teaching materials online, Googling away for textbook chapters, physics lessons, English language tests — anything that they can use in the classroom.

GLP was enlisted to build a custom portal just for Afghan teachers in English and Dari. The GLP role is to work with HEP to find, digitize, organize, and upload quality education materials. It also provides online spaces for workshops, online registration for an upcoming Master's program in teacher education, and links to professional journals, among other resources.

In a country where resources are hard to find and harder to keep, storing quality materials in a safe, accessible place is important. “Teachers will be able to search by subject and language for something to use,” explained GLP program officer Steven Ehrenberg.

...To Z as in Zambia

GLP is helping to improve education sector collaboration and donor harmonization through an online community where the Zambian Ministry of Education and its development partners can share documents and discuss their joint work.  A public, web-accessible project database has been designed to catalog and share information on and between education projects in Zambia. 

In addition, GLP is expanding the use of ICT and web-based resources by bringing Internet connectivity and ICT skills training to fourteen colleges of education for teachers throughout the country and setting up digital resource libraries at the colleges.  Online communities have also been set up for community schools, the Zambian National Union of Teachers and on the theme of “Teaching in Zambia” where GLP online tools allow education stakeholders to distribute materials, share ideas and hold online discussions.

A Global Forum

GLP online communities help educators and provide a platform for policymakers to discuss development strategies. Standard community tools allow users to upload documents, add link to favorite web sites, create and participate in discussions, post news and upcoming events, and take online surveys. A diverse population of users has put these tools to a wide range of use.

In the past year, GLP enabled a worldwide conversation about barriers to quality basic education, moderated by specialists from World Bank, UNICEF and USAID.  Participants from 35 countries contributed their thoughts. Other communities on GLP supported a contest to gather breakthrough ideas in education, a business meeting and symposium organized by the UNAIDS Inter-Agency Task Team, and a discussion forum for the Education for All (EFA) Fast-Track Initiative.   

The Gender and Education community hosted by the EQUATE: Achieving Equality in Education project shares and exchanges information at how gender considerations are being incorporated into education programming in areas such as HIV and AIDS and school-related gender based violence.  Teachers in Kyrgyzstan search the Partnership, Education and Knowledge Strengthening (PEAKS) Project for primary and secondary school lesson plans, training materials and curriculum modules. 

"GLP has helped me improve my professional skills," said Ssewanyana Teopistsa, a teacher in Uganda. "For example, I used the GLP Library and read through various lesson plans of mathematics, English and social studies from Zimbabwe and South Africa that helped me enhance my own lesson plans with follow-up activities for my students."

For more information on the Global Learning Portal, email GLP at info@glp.net.