According to the World Bank, over the past decade, aid funding for education has declined to less than 10 percent of global official development assistance, leaving much of the financing to national governments strained by conflicting priorities.
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During times of crisis, such as the ones we have been experiencing during 2020, learning and development custodians were challenged as, overnight, many learning platforms were simply no longer available.
But there’s a stronger motivation for learning ecosystems.
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The PeerGroup reports that users are migrating, at a significant pace, from social media groups to independent online communities.
Over the past few years, we’ve had the vision to build a cross-continental online space for African teachers to connect. While our standard process is to be guided through a process of design thinking, we’ve worked in the online education space for some time now. We made a call to start a community called The Complete Teacher and share, listen and learn as a continuous cycle of improvement.
If one Googles the challenges in African education, similar themes appear including the quality of teaching and learning, the dropout rates, lack of access to technology, 21st-century learning tools, professional educator development, and lack of access to each other – to peers, among others.
Learning communities have been proven to work and this is true, prior to the pandemic. There are a number of reasons that learning communities provide relevance and work. From a philosophical perspective, learning communities are changing the way knowledge is accessed and consumed. In other words, there’s a philosophic shift in knowledge sharing and acquisition. According to researchers, learning communities fit into what the research has demonstrated and finally from a pragmatic perspective, they work.
Photo by energepic.com from Pexels
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