The ELATE Programme

Phase 1: E-resources for New Teachers

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. Our multi-disciplinary team of 50 people, working across 8 core secondary subjects, has tried to put itself in the shoes of young novice teachers and imagine what they would need to do an effective job. The resulting exemplar materials that we provide include syllabuses, examination papers, schemes of work, lesson plans, exemplar classroom activities and appropriate 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 significant learning experience for all concerned.

During the first year of operation, 2008, over 800 CD-Roms were distributed to schools throughout Uganda and the ELATE website (www.elateafrica.org) received over 24,000 visitors.

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: The "Job-Mark" Initiative

With renewed British Council funding, Phase 2 of ELATE started work in February 2009 with a particular focus on the promotion of entrepreneurship and employability within secondary schools. 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.

We have 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. Thanks to an agreement with MK Publishers two "Handbooks for Entrepreneurship Teachers" have been written. These transcribe electronic business case studies from the ELATE website and add additional support materials and advice mapped to the new Entrepreneurship syllabus.

In ELATE 2 all eight of our subject teams have embodied active learning approaches in the new materials, and they all seek to foster the development of the following transferable "work-related" skills:

The "Job-Mark" Skills

The ELATE Phase 1 materials have been reworked to include activities which develop the "Job-Mark" skills. The new activities demonstrate how teachers, even with large classes and in low-resource settings, can generate more engaging learning experiences for school students.

The ELATE team has been strengthened by the appointment of four Enterprise Advocates who have worked with 10 project schools operating in a mixture of urban, peri-urban and rural settings. The advocates have worked with partner schools to develop the use of the external work environment as a resource in teaching, as well as assembling the Enterprise case studies which are found in the "Special Topics" section of the materials.

The ELATE team has an active dissemination programme, which involves running and making contributions to regional training courses for teachers and headteachers run by the Ministry of Education and Sports, educational NGOs and textbook publishers.