Enhancing IT Education: Education Technology for Teacher Training

Abstract

One of the pressing issues in the Indian IT education today is an acute shortage of skilled teachers. While common sense says that we should use IT to do teacher training and student training, it is not clear how that may be done and in how many different ways the teachers can be helped. The project, described in this article, studies contextualized solutions for the improvement of IT education in Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) in India. This project is being conducted at EnhanceEdu, Centre for Educational Technology and Learning Sciences at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-Hyderabad). This project takes an action research (AR) approach in order to design, implement, and study the impact of new support structures for teacher training. These support structures include learning materials, teaching materials, and educational technology tools such as Learning by Doing (LbD) online courses, Open Education Resources, automatic assessment and small private online courses. This project is yielding important understanding in organizing teacher training programs, and searching for the best ways to use educational technology as a part of teacher training. The wider future implications include improved teacher training, improved IT education in Indian HEIs, and better equipped graduates from Indian IT universities. This paper describes the current phase and future scope of this project exploration.