Teacher Education in sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) is an educational development project run by The Open University, UK. Working collaboratively with partners in Africa, The Open University published (in 2010) a set Open Educational Resources (OER) which support teachers in developing participatory approaches to learning. With the global focus for education shifting from ‘access’ to ‘quality’ (Sustainable Development Goal, 2015) the TESSA OER remain as relevant as ever; student-centred pedagogy is at the heart of the development of 21st Century skills.

In a similar project, Teacher Education through School-based support in India (TESS-India) The Open University developed a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to support teacher educator professional development. The purpose of this paper is to present the TESSA strategy for 2016-2019 and to draw on data from the TESS-India MOOC in order to argue for a MOOC for African teacher educators.

The MOOC had an innovative design drawing on socio-cultural theories of learning; it was task-based, with face-to-face facilitation provided in the project’s target states. Data comes from pre-and post- course surveys for the MOOC; weekly surveys conducted during the pilot phase and weekly reports from MOOC facilitators, including some case studies.

The response to the MOOC was overwhelmingly positive and a completion rate of 51% was achieved (compared to the average for MOOCs of around 12%). Whilst acknowledging that the African context is different, the TESSA team believe that a MOOC for teacher educators in Africa would support the strategic objective of improving teacher education across the continent.

Keywords

MOOC · Open Educational Resources · student-centred pedagogy · teacher education · TESSA