A SHORT NOTE ON THE IMPACTS OF THE CONNECTED LEARNING FOR TEACHERS CAPACITY BUILDING IN STEM PROJECT (CL4STEM) IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

Abstract

The CL4STEM project is a South-South collaboration among higher education institutions associated with teacher professional development to adapt and pilot the Connected Learning Initiative (CLIx) (https://clix.tiss.edu), which was already developed and scaled in India, to new contexts in Bhutan, Nigeria, and Tanzania. The CL4STEM project is funded by the Global Partnership for Education Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (GPE-KIX) in partnership with the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada. The Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai, Nigeria, is the lead of the CL4STEM Consortium which comprises Samtse College of Education, Bhutan and Open University of Tanzania as the country partners. Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India, is the technical consultant to the project. The Nigerian collaborators are Bayero University Kano and Kaduna State University. Thirteen (13) online modules (three each for physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics and one common pedagogy module) were co-developed and were further localized for each country context. These modules were then curated and shared as open education resources (OER). In each partner country, twenty junior and middle secondary school teachers in physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics (a total of eighty teachers) were invited to participate in the project. The results obtained in the project countries with regards to teachers' instructional practices reveal a shift from the traditional classroom practices to innovative instructional and assessment practices embedded in the CL4STEM modules.