Fond of Learning and Freetown

Written by Wilfred  to help students revise and pass Functional Skills maths .

To be able to upskill  Africans, policy makers and educators will need to establish their literacy and numeracy levels. This is common practice all over the world and is used to determine a person’s suitability for a course or skills training. One body that has worked on establishing levels is the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED), which designed a framework to classify educational activities. Borrowing from their classification, I recommend that Africa focuses in the first instance on the ISCED attainment levels:  0 — Pre-primary education 1 — Primary Education 2 — Lower Secondary Education At Level 1, a learner will be expected to: write a message for someone read and follow simple instructions read and write whole numbers use a calculator to add, subtract, multiply and divide perform a basic internet search with a phone, tablet or computer At Level 2, a learner will be expected to: write straightforward emails and letters complete a form

I was reading through a topic on marketing personas, fictional characters used to represent your customer or target audience.    You will give your persona a name, age, interests and any other characteristic you deem necessary to be able to visualise them.  Then it hit me that I should be using the same concept when designing lesson plans.  In fact, this should be relatively easy as I often know who I will be teaching or training.  I will write an update at a later stage to tell you how well it is going.

Jane Hart, writing on her blog, has this to say about traditional Learning and Development professionals: They believe they know what is best for their people; they think that an understanding of pedagogy and instructional design skills is enough. They disregard the fact that most people are bored to tears sitting in a classroom or studying an e-learning course at their desktop – and don’t realise that many are working around L&D to sort out their own learning and performance problems rather than have to endure an L&D-designed initiative. Source

The four things I believe are stopping more Africans from taking advantage of e-learning are: Electricity:  With most parts of Africa having little or no electricity supply, it becomes a moot point accessing the Internet.  And yes, one could use phones but these require charging. Connectivity :  There is still not enough bandwidth availalable and sometimes connection speeds could be crippling.  I tried watching a Youtube video in Freetown recently and had to give up after 1 hour. Equipment:  Laptops, Tablets and even Smartphones are still too expensive for the average student.    Payment:  Although a lot of online resources are free, some  very good Africa-focused education products are paid for: Pass , African Virtual School , and Eneza Education .  Students or their parents do not have easy access to credit/debit cards or are not aware of alternative payments. I believe that once these barriers are reduced, E-learning in Africa will take off.

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