Learning by watching
One teaching method that’s used in schools here is to use what’s called ‘Plasma Learning’. Some colleagues have visited schools which have only very basic facilities (perhaps not even functioning toilets), but then in each classroom there’s a big (expensive) plasma TV to broadcast lessons to students.
The idea is that students across Ethiopia all receive the same standard of lesson at the same time (these lessons are broadcast, not pre-recorded on DVD). This may help with the fact that experienced teachers are in short supply, but introduces its own problems, which are probably too numerous to mention, but I’ll give it a go… firstly there’s the question of power supply. Once the broadcast has started there’s no way to stop or pause the lesson, even if it’s obvious students are getting stuck (or they’re late), the lesson ploughs on. Naturally, it’s completely one-way, plus it’s all in English – so a fairly high level of English is needed even to understand a biology lesson for example.
Not sure how this compares to the old OU/BBC night-time broadcasts, but at least people had the option of recording them, or watching a later repeat and they were in the viewers native language.
