Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH)
Faith Shimba who is the Director for Knowledge Management at the Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH) revealed this during the Higher Education Science and Technology Exhibition in Dar es Salaam over the weekend.
He said the initiative will build capacity of institutions of higher learning using openly available curriculum of world-class excellence to produce graduates with skills that will make them compete at national and international labour market and also make them create jobs if they wish to do so.
He said the Science and Technology Higher Education Project (STHEP) under Ministry of Education and Vocational Training is supporting the goal.
“Tanzania is expected to increase its ability to attract high calibre students from the region. This creates a greater need to deliver higher quality curriculum on-campus in Tanzania,” he said.
He said with the right support, students should be able to successfully master world-class curriculum. At the moment an extremely small percentage of highly capable African students go abroad to meet their needs for academic challenge in the field of IT.
He said there were four major factors driving the need for high quality degree curriculum in IT in Tanzania which are the country's path to improve quality of higher education and the country's increasing ability to attract high calibre students from the region.
Others are limited ability of African students to travel and stay in the western world to acquire world-class education and the growing need for IT and ICT knowledge and skills necessary to meet growing demand for technically skilled workers in Tanzanian corporations.
According to Shimba, the project identified and designed all curriculum and content for the SMART Knowledge Hub in Dar es Salaam.
He said it includes reviewing, assessing and participating in current Coursera Massive online courses (MOOC) IT and ICT curriculum, recommending MOOC curriculum and curriculum sequencing, liaising with university leadership in Dar es Salaam to identify willing partners, and recruiting additional academic discipline-targeted faculty from surrounding university IT department,” he said
The Institute of Finance Management and The Open University of Tanzania participated in the pilot project.
The assignment also required to train new faculty in the MOOC, flip the classroom pedagogy and assess quality of instruction and student outcomes. He said
He said the combination of training the students from the participating universities from Dar es Salaam and the faculty helps in creating the model to expand the MOOC across the country.
Commenting on the initiative, Director General for COSTECH, Dr Hassan Mshinda said it was the first ever initiative that will bring Universities, higher learning institutions and students in particular under one roof.
“In recent years we have witnessed increase of Universities which is good but lecturers are few in number such that one lecturer has to travel all the way from Dar es Salaam to another University sometimes upcountry and teach students on part time basis there. This programme is also aimed at addressing these problems,” he said.
For Tanzania to achieve the mission of enhancing the IT and ICT learning outcomes and quality of graduates with the provision to attract scholars from the region, the approach of MOOC is vital for taking the advantage of the critical mass. He said.
MOOC has many platforms of hundreds of courses that can produce quality workforce in the IT field. It is also encouraged that Universities uses MOOC in some of their classes in quest to increase the quality of teaching and learning process.
SOURCE:
THE GUARDIAN
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