Hope in chaotic times
By Moonbin Jeong
More than ever, the world economy is suffering from severe recession due to the COVID-19 pandemic. During this situation, we must focus on the structural vulnerability of basic education systems in developing countries. I would like to first emphasize the destruction of the basic education system. In contrast to countries such as Korea with strong educational infrastructure, this is not possible for developing countries because of the poor online education ecosystem.
The Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) and other institutions like the Future Resources Institute offer capacity-building programs through official development assistance (ODA) to strengthen workforces, policies and even systems. The Future Resources Institute has been in charge of many capacity-building programs with KOICA for a long time. These programs are important, because they have to be designed for the coherence and sustainability of hardware systems like infrastructure projects. In other words, they can act as software to operate and maintain hardware properly. Therefore, the “hope” is to give people substantial access to the system.
Since I started working at the institute, I have participated in many programs with KOICA. Among all these projects, I felt the most pride working on the “Capacity Building on Education Policy and Management Programs” with Nigeria's higher education officials from the Federal Ministry of Education (FME), Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Secretariat and Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC). Due to the pandemic, the training program was conducted through online videos and Webinars. Through the internet, we focused on the needs, providing education relevant to the Fourth Industrial Revolution such as AI and multimedia.
Months of hard work culminated in success. The trainees listened to the lectures and submitted their tasks on time with our online classroom. There were challenges. For example, some online seminars like the opening ceremony and the action plan seminar were interrupted due to poor internet connections in Nigeria. Thus the trainees had to move to the Korean Embassy in order to participate.
Consequently, we recorded the remaining seminars for the training program like the open conference with education experts and the closing ceremony. Despite the poor internet connections, I was pleased that the Nigerian officials were able to use the online training course. Furthermore, they were very interested in taking lectures through videos and webinars. The action plan seminars provided meaningful output like the Training of Trainers (ToT), and four-phase management of existing projects to improve their multimedia education policy.
Online capacity training can be effective for developing the multimedia education policy of Nigeria. The action plans will help reinforce the education system, because it is fundamental to identifying the root cause of the problem and solving the issues through various projects. I think online capacity building is the first attempt at fighting the breakdown of basic education systems in the pandemic era. There have been many difficulties due to the lack of relevant policies and infrastructures. These include studying at home without clear directions on how to use multimedia and future education pedagogies, which I attribute to the lack of a relevant policy-building system and capacity. I hope Nigerian children can improve their methods of studying at home with multimedia pedagogical tools and materials provided by our trainees from the knowledge they gained through the training.
Although the program with Nigerian officials has already ended, I am sure that the majority of the officials are returning to their responsibilities with a high sense of duty to take what they learned and apply it to practice. I do hope to participate in further online capacity-building programs in the future.
The writer is a researcher at the Future Resources Institute.