A collaborative partnership between UNESCO, the International Task Force on Teachers for 2030 and The Open University has resulted in an online version of the Teacher Policy Guide being published and launched at the 12th Policy Dialogue Forum in Dubai on 10th December 2019.
Designed by Freda Wolfenden, Kris Stutchbury and Deborah Cooper of The Open University, this newly launched online guide proposes courses and interactive learning elements to help users who are developing teacher policies. For example, the online guide features an interactive glossary, which means that definitions for words used in the text are easy to search and access.
The online guide also includes some focussed activities that have been placed throughout chapters 2-5 of the guide to help policy-makers and education stakeholders apply the knowledge provided to their own context and help them frame their teacher policy as it develops. Users are also able to track their progress through the chapters and activities thanks to a dedicated user-account on the website.
The other interesting feature of the new online guide is the addition of short quizzes at the end of chapters 2-5. They are designed to assist learning and understanding the concepts encountered in the guide while working through the chapters.
The quizzes are not designed as a memory test and the questions have hints if the user does not get the answer right the first time. They can be attempted as many times as the user wishes and each attempt will draw upon a slightly different selection of questions from the question bank for that chapter.
Working through an online chapter and successfully passing the chapter quiz results in the user receiving an online digital badge for that chapter. Completing the whole guide and all the quizzes online results in a printable Statement of Participation, which includes all four badges.
The online guide chapters can also be downloaded to allow the users to work on them offline (so far in PDF and Word format). However, unlike the online modules, these are not tracked for progress and do not include the quiz questions.
The online version is currently available in English and can be found at the following link www.open.edu/openlearncreate/UNESCO-Teacher-Policy or accessed through the QR code below.
Online versions of the Spanish, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Chinese and Russian copies of the guide will be published in 2020 in the same online collection.