 And we are together working to bring the, trying to bring the quality of education that we are offering at a private school to a wider audience in Uganda because there's a great need. I'm Bea Bodermatt, her father. I've been working in educational, in education in Africa for about 30 years, started in Ethiopia way back in 1979. I have a wide variety of experiences working with NGOs, church organizations setting up schools in Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan. So I have a heart for education and like Miriam said, we would like to see the things that we know and the things that we are capable of doing going to a wider audience. And today is an effort to get information and help from the open education community in seeing how we could do that effectively. So we're going to start out with talking about basically the situation as it exists in Uganda. So Uganda, like many sub-Saharan African countries, has huge issues related to how education is offered. There is, preschool is almost non-existent for children. Primary attendance is mandatory but not at a high level of quality. And of course, that's not a surprise when you consider the fact that 47% of the Ugandan population is between the age of zero and 14 years old. So almost half of the population in this country is under 14 years and under. This creates huge challenges for education and anything that can be done to make education affordable is of course critically important for a country that already is lacking in resources but then additionally has so many children that it has to educate. So because of the way situations occur in Uganda, teacher absenteeism is very high. It's incredibly hard being a teacher here. You can imagine the size of classes we have and we'll talk more about that later. But 60% of teachers frequently just don't even come to school to teach their classes. So this is an example of a classroom. They're obviously all smiling and wonderful. There's 31 kids in this photo and it's not even close to the entire classroom. So one in four children, only one in four children finish primary school education. So as they progress up to the levels fewer and fewer of them finish, only about 24% of adolescents actually roll into secondary school education and there's a lot of reasons for why that happens. For one thing children with any kind of disability are frequently excluded from school because there's no special needs teachers. There's no facilities and then the ability to actually integrate these children is severely lacking because teachers just don't know how to integrate children with special needs into the classroom. Additional challenges in the school environment is lack of toilets and washing areas. Sexual abuse is very common, close to a quarter of Uganda children at point report sexual abuse in schools. And then the way discipline is enforced is through caning and physical punishments which means that school is just generally not not an enjoyable environment. So there are three major areas that Ugandan schools have issues. One is lack of quality resources and methodology. Teaching methodology in Uganda is very much the old style colonial you sit, you memorize what I told you and you reproduce the thing you've memorized on the examination. There are very few resources in the classroom. The curriculum is fact based but not in a good way. This is what you should learn and anything that doesn't exist in the specific facts that I'm teaching you isn't relevant. It's very rigid, very structured. Students are not asked to discover or learn or figure out about the world. They're just asked to memorize. So school is therefore obviously not enjoyable. This isn't something that you would choose to do. It's not a pleasant experience to be in school for the majority of Ugandan students. The second issue is that teachers themselves have challenges beyond the curriculum itself. The first challenge is that teaching is not actually considered an honorable profession. You do teaching if you can't do something else which means that the teachers are often the lowest comm denominator. You've done enough that you actually can get to university but you're not a good enough student that you do the other more honorable type of degrees which means the quality of teachers can be very low. Though obviously there are very dedicated teachers. We have many that are employed here at UCANN that are fantastic teachers and they have a real heart for children. Unfortunately though that's not the general approach to teaching in the country. So when you consider that a lot of teachers are not well trained then you also have issues of how they teach. So classrooms become just kind of rigid sit and do what I tell you. We have wonderful resources or places in Uganda where children can go and learn and discover things like the zoo. But when you see a Ugandan school children at the zoo they don't ask questions. They do what they're told. They walk around and they get the zoo person who's showing them around will give them a tour and tell them things. But then the children will just absorb it. They'll write down whatever they think they're supposed to write down. But they're not curious or maybe they are curious but they've been discouraged from asking questions so they just stand there. When you see children who aren't in that kind of education system at the zoo the difference is so stark the way the children interact and ask questions versus just stand there and do what they're told. Teacher pay is also very low. It's unreliable. Very frequently we hear stories from teachers in the Ugandan system where they haven't received their pay for two or three months which means that a lot of teachers have secondary jobs that they're doing instead of teaching because that's how they can afford to live because they're not actually receiving pay for the work that they're doing. And then the last challenge teachers have is massive class sizes of 60 or more students cramped into spaces that you shouldn't have that many kids in them. And of course you can't individually give attention to students. You can't help them develop. If you have that many students you just don't have time. And then the third issue is students are passive participants and I've already talked a lot about this. They just do the work that they've been assigned rather than asking questions. In fact questions are frequently seen to be discouraged because teachers are afraid they won't be able to answer those questions so they don't want to hear questions at all. So our vision is that OER can make a difference and we'd like to see if we can implement it. We're very new to the OER and we'd like to see how we can use that here in Uganda to help make a difference. So our proposal is that we would establish a learning center. The center would train and mentor teachers and administrators. It would create an OER library that could be used offline. That's very important because challenges with resources or sorry with internet speeds and bandwidth mean that we could and also the cost of internet means we need to be offline. We would carry out curriculum integration where we have a curriculum develop that teachers can be used. Develop resources and liaison with government agencies and authorities because obviously this needs to be integrated into the system that's already in place here. So the first step of course is training administrators. We need to work top down to make this happen and we need passionate people that are very interested in education. This here is the easiest and the hardest. Finding people who are passionate about making education happen here in Uganda is actually not hard. There are many people who are very dedicated to wanting to create a better system but they need training and that's where the challenges come in is to provide the training and expertise needed so that they can be effective believers. And then I just I really like this quote because it says how it defines how it is that we are trying to approach education. Then the second line is training teachers. As we've already discussed there's huge issues with how teaching has occurred or teacher training has occurred and the kind of individuals who are often brought into education because they don't have a lot of other options. So this is probably one of the most challenging aspects of this is to retrain teachers, retrain thought processes to help get teachers on board in ways that are really positive to give them the skills they need to make this happen. We can have all the most amazing resources and the affordable resources through OER but we need to be able to train teachers in order to use those resources effectively. So basically what we're looking at is we need a mentor. We need someone to help us navigate OER, find resources that will help us get where we need to go and that's part of the point of this presentation is to try and find a way forward where we can implement this idea that we have. And then the third thing is hands-on material. Since we're at a primary and secondary level we need to be able to develop resources that are going to be there. They need to be affordable. They need to be easy to make because we'd like to make them in country. We would like to be able to have a lot of these things to make learning more fun, more hands-on for the students involved. Thank you Miriam. So the challenges we have, what it comes to actually using the resources from OER, the many wonderful things that are out there that are being used in other parts of the world are not easily used here for a number reasons. There is a lack of computers, printers, audio-visual equipment. One of the big challenges is low bandwidth. So even if there wasn't an affordable way of getting or a way to get on the internet, often the bandwidth is so poor that things just drop out along the way. Internet is quite expensive. The internet connection we have for the school, which isn't fantastic, is costing us over $300 a month. And then there's a lack of skilled personnel to take care of the hardware and software. So it's a real challenge to figure out a way to make things work. So we have come up with an idea of a proposed way of doing things and that is that rather than try to operate off the internet on a daily basis, is that we actually set up a server at each participating school and that the learning center would make the downloads, organize material, curate material, and then that material would be put on the local server. And then the local server in that school, in a particular school, the local server then would there would be screens in each classroom. And so the teacher could use the material that is stored locally without having to worry about internet. The other thing is that server can have a small battery backup so that again, we don't end up with the issue of power going off because that's another big issue here. We regularly lose the power so then we've gone for two or three hours. So the idea is to have a local server running within the school. And so I think I've covered much of this. The other thing that of course we need to do is we need to work with the ministry of education and we have a good rapport with the ministry so that we can set up some model schools that would show how this would work. Now the big challenge on all of this is the financial side. We have a good vision but we don't have a lot of financial resources. This is always a huge challenge to find how we're going to do that. And so we are looking for suggestions from the people in the open education community as to how we could set up five pilot schools where the finances, if there is any way that finances could be found for something of this nature. And of course collaboration. We want to collaborate. We need to collaborate. The great thing about this last four or five days is we have learned so much. We came into this as babies and you probably recognize this from our presentation that we are still just learning how all of this works. And we've already received emails from a number of presenters who are interested in guiding us and leading us and we want to thank you for that. And I think we have time for a few questions or comments. Thank you very much. Interesting overview and we are here to help I would say. I think that's all part of this conference and this community to share best practices and to help each other. In the chat I already shared the link to the open education for a better world mentoring program that might be of interest for you. I saw a question from Matilda. Your objectives are very noble. How do you keep motivated given the dire circumstances? We love kids. We love education. We love this. This is our life. This is who we are. This is what we do. I would just add to that that what we do currently with our school is we bring in students that are from low income. We can't bring a lot in. We bring in what we can based on the income of the school which is not much. And seeing what we can do for these kids that some people might write off because they haven't had the opportunities is just amazing and that helps motivate. We also within the school we have a heart for children with learning disabilities so we are on an ongoing basis. We just love education. That's what it's about. That's great. And then Bea adds we're also learning from you. So that's I think also very interesting. So thank you very much for this presentation. Please stop the recording.