Successful series of project based learning (PBL) and telecollaboration workshops continued in Bangladesh

By Mostofa Mohiuddin, British Council Bangladesh

In June 2011 the British Council Bangladesh and UNESCO Asia and Pacific Regional Bureau for Education (UNESCO Bangkok) decided to combine some of the digital work that the British Council was doing with schools in Bangladesh, with UNESCO’s project based learning (PBL) approach to teacher training.  

There are currently 230 schools across Bangladesh working on a global online platform named British Council Schools Online. The platform provides an online discussion forum for teachers and projects for schools around the world to work on it together. 

In June 2011, teachers from a selection of schools that had done a lot of work on the web platform were introduced to a new approach of PBL and telecollaboration. It was a successful workshop and the teachers started using the PBL approach in their schools soon afterwards. 

Word spread amongst the community of teachers in Bangladesh and there was a lot of interest in a second workshop. 

The workshop eventually took place at the end of January 2012 and included teachers from twelve schools in the TQI-SEP (Teachers Quality Improvement-Secondary Schools Project) and three schools from UCEP (Underprivileged Children’s Educational Programmes). 

UCEP is an NGO that works for the underprivileged working children of Bangladesh and their schools run a different curriculum with more emphasis on vocational education. 

The workshop is also part of a larger UNESCO project, “Facilitating ICT-Pedagogy Integration” funded by Korea Funds-in-Trust that aims to create an enabling environment for student-centered use of ICT by building a stronger partnership between teacher education institutions (TEIs) and schools using project-based learning (PBL) and telecollaboration.

The training was three and half days long, divided into nine sessions. Rahinur Islam, a teacher and one of the participants of the first workshop, presented a case study in the second session and also provided support to participants to help them understand the PBL approach. 

Sessions three and four helped participants to understand core concepts about PBL. Session five and six involved UNESCO introducing a set of seven CD’s with an abundance of educational resources to the participants and demonstrating how to integrate various ICT tools in PBL. 

Session seven discussed project assessment and the groups gave their final presentations in the eighth session. The final session focused on follow up plans feedback and the awards ceremony.

The feedback was very positive from the event.

Here are some comments that teachers posted to the PBL forum on British Council Schools Online (registration required): 

schoolsonline.britishcouncil.org/phpbbforum/viewtopic.php

During the workshop the level of enthusiasm and engagement was excellent. The next stage for the teachers in Bangladesh is to submit their PBL proposals to UNESCO and then hopefully being selected to participate in a planned regional conference later this year.  There is a lot of interest in the PBL approach and we hope that we can run this workshop in Bangladesh again.