The ELATE Programme

Phase 1

The ELATE programme began in May 2007 as a professional development initiative to enhance secondary teacher training in Uganda. It has sought to do this by involving teacher educators in the production of Open Educational Resources to help trainee and newly qualified teachers. ELATE has enabled trainers to work collaboratively with practising school teachers and other educational professionals. As a multi-disciplinary team of 50 people working in 8 core secondary subjects they have sought to put themselves in the shoes of young novice teachers and imagine what they would need to do an effective job. The subject materials assembled include syllabuses, examination papers, schemes of work, lesson plans, exemplar classroom activities and valuable advice and guidance.

The programme has been a testimony to the power of stakeholder collaboration across the education sector. Teacher trainers from Makerere University, Uganda, and the Open University, UK, have worked with classroom teachers, subject specialists from Uganda National Examinations Board, the National Curriculum Development Centre, the Ministry of Education and Sports, national publishers and educational NGOs. This is the first time there has been such a broad collaboration in Uganda and it has been a great learning experience for all concerned.

During 2008, over 800 CD-Roms were distributed to schools throughout Uganda and the ELATE website (www.ugandaschoolresources.org) received over 24,000 visitors. Thanks to an agreement with MK Publishers work has begun on the first of a series of Teachers' Handbooks which are designed to reach those teachers with limited or no access to computers. The first "Handbook for Entrepreneurship Teachers" transcribes electronic business case studies from the ELATE website into print and adds additional support materials and advice mapped to the new Entrepreneurship syllabus.

While the central aim of ELATE was to help teachers in Uganda the reach of the materials extends beyond Uganda's borders. An email received from a teacher in Kenya said:

"I find the ELATE website a perfect resource for secondary school teachers here in Kenya. The ELATE project encourages teachers to get students to think creatively because of the interpretation tasks using data, graphs and pictures. It has a content which is interesting and locally relevant to the whole of Africa."

Teachers in Malawi, Togo, Sierra Leone, the UK, Netherlands and across Europe have expressed their appreciation of the materials. In short the ELATE programme has demonstrated that it is possible for African countries, such as Uganda, to become suppliers of Open Educational Resources to the World Wide Web to the benefit of teachers in Uganda and across the entire world.

Phase 2 "Job-Mark" Initiative

With renewed British Council funding, Phase 2 of ELATE started work in February 2009. While maintaining the orginal philosophy of empowering secondary teacher trainers and teachers, this phase marks a subtle re-orientation towards enabling teachers to better prepare students for the wider job-market. The team will also create materials and a Teachers' Handbook to support the new entrepreneurship curriculum in Uganda.

ELATE 2 has begun by defining a working-set of generic job-related skills, which include such attributes as: communication, team working, problem solving, numeracy, information technology and a range of personal skills such as, punctuality and time management, reflection and self-learning.

Our subject teams are working on materials which allow students to develop transferable skills and, in the process, become active learners. The pedagogic benefits will be to demonstrate how teachers with large classes in low-resource settings can generate more engaging learning experiences for school students.

We have picked a strong Entrepreneurship team which includes members of the design and examining team for the new national curriculum in the subject, authors of new textbooks, a small enterprise adviser, teacher trainers from two universities and a number of practising entrepreneurs.

The ELATE team has been strengthened by the appointment of two Enterprise Advocates who work with 10 project schools operating in a mixture of urban, peri-urban and rural settings. The advocates are preparing handbooks which document existing employment and skills-related activities which use the external environment of the school as a resource in teaching. They books will also document new strategies developed by the team which have been tested and evaluated in partner schools.

Over the course of the year the ELATE team intends to step up the dissemination effort by contributing to regional training courses for teachers and headteachers run by the Ministry of Education, educational NGOs and textbook publishers.