Discussion on curriculum alignment: Realities when Internet is limited
Above all, making sure resources are aligned to the curriculum is about saving time: providing options and agency in a trustworthy, well-organized, and thoughtfully matched format so that educators can engage in the parts of lesson planning that are most rewarding and efficient in the settings where they work. One such hardworking educator is our friend and longtime supporter Joseph Akorli, who has been spearheading the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) via Kolibri at his school in Ghana for several years.
In undertaking the process of curriculum alignment, Joseph found significant hurdles, roadblocks, considerations, and even opportunities specific to reviewing large numbers of resources and recording or communicating about their alignment in a low-connectivity environment. He spoke to Learning Equality’s Global Curriculum Specialist, Shivi Chandra, to share his strategy and his advice, with the hopes that others will also be able to set up solutions to support projects like his. We share their conversation below.
Shivi: Thank you for speaking with me this morning, Joseph! I’m excited to dig into your experiences working with the Kolibri digital resource library today.
To start with, your experience working with and helping other teachers prepare digital lessons using a library of digital content, in settings with low connectivity, is seriously impressive. Could you describe more about the context where these materials will be used?
Joseph: Thank you very much. My experiences with using Kolibri have been through the NGO EDUCOA, which we’ve been working with over the years before getting a grant to implement Kolibri. Because I had already been using the platform, I happened to be the man on the ground to do the implementation. We had a lot of experience using the Kolibri platform in our school in an academic way: teachers come to the school and use Kolibri to assign lessons, and students use client devices to do the lessons.
Shivi: So you had experience with the use of these materials in a practical setting already, which is uncommon for curriculum alignment projects which usually take place before teachers begin to use the material. How did you become interested in supporting the alignment of learning resources?
Joseph: I became interested in alignment because it became clear when we were using the library that some of the resources did not match with what teachers expected. So teachers would come and look through it, but they would not find what they need for their lessons. That complaint kept on coming. But when you helped them go through the channels, I saw you could help them see that the content was actually there. And I wanted to do the alignment to see whether the resources really did match with the curriculum.
Shivi: Whether they really did meet teachers’ expectations. So what does meeting those expectations through alignment look like to you?
Joseph: It means that the content we see on a platform should meet our objectives. If we are considering the Ghanaian curriculum, then the content must follow that.
First, we consider the subject matter, scope, and philosophy. For example, for a course like science — when we look through the Kolibri collections, we expect to come across a resource that is very exact to what the teacher needs to present to the student. It should be at their level, also at their interest level. So when teachers come, we have the laptops and devices all right, but then they look at the content and they think it is beyond the level of the student, that it’s strange, or the student might not have interest in that. And some of it may not be addressing the scope or objective, or it doesn’t match what they need to teach.
Shivi: Do you have any examples?
Joseph: In the Ghanaian curriculum, specifically Grade 6, we have one topic, Industrial Processes. When we teach that, we try to talk about processes pertaining to Ghanaian products, and the scientific processes used in creating those products. For example, we have garri, kenke, and cassava, traditional products. We realized that OER did not have any knowledge about kenke or garri, though it’s a typical Ghanaian food. In doing the alignment activity, I realized that most of the content was just trying to point out some scientific processes, like fermentation, so I know that these things can be brought in while you are talking about it to students. But if the teacher doesn’t have enough time to analyze that, you might just think the content does not match.
Shivi: That’s a great example. I saw that there was still a lot of material which you did reject as not relevant, so how do you draw the line between what could be adapted or augmented and what shouldn’t be included at all?
Joseph: I would always remember that alignment is tedious work. It needs time and a critical look at OER. If you are not careful, you may be willing to too quickly judge it. If you take time to analyze the resources carefully, you do see that there are a lot of matches. But you need the time to go through the activity and understand each concept very well. I found a lot of related content, and even some content that was very exact and perfectly matching, but there were others which needed some adaptation and/or from which the teacher just needed to pick the salient points. Where it is irrelevant, there is just not enough time for the teacher to do that.
But it is not the case with OER that there is such a vast difference in science — all over the web, we are all looking at science from one point of view, although there is some cultural variation.
Shivi: So you felt that many of the resources were usable by the teachers you work with, just with some adaptation? What were the kinds of adaptations you found yourself recommending?
Joseph: Before we looked at the content in the Kolibri Content Library, we already had in mind what we are looking for: we look at people’s interests, materials already in class, the aims of the education, and then the specific objectives that we need to address. I have suggested to teachers to have a closer look at the resources, and if they look very carefully, they will see that these are very rich resources and they should spend the time.
But before assigning them to the students with their client devices, they should actually select the content that they are sure contains the information they want the student to get, and they should highlight the aspect they want the student to concentrate on. Once that is highlighted, it will definitely be a good lesson. And that process actually also increases the teacher’s subject matter knowledge.
Shivi: One of the ways in which we restructured your alignment process due to the difficulties with connectivity was making sure you were able to do much of it on your own, on a flexible schedule with offline tools like spreadsheets. We used an asynchronous method where I would narrow down a selection of materials and share them with you, and then you would later go through them one by one and annotate them on the spreadsheet with detailed notes. This helped me in turn select a better set of resources for the next grade and topic.
This made it a lot more feasible to go through this process without connectivity, but it also took away a lot of the type of organic collaboration that’s so natural to you in your school leadership role. It must have been difficult to conduct this process as a solo subject matter expert working with all the materials on your own. But it’s obvious that your thoughts were with your colleagues and how they could use the materials throughout.
With that in mind, could you tell me more about how you imagine this process might have gone if you were working in a group? For example, if you found yourselves having a disagreement about the appropriateness of a resource, how would you resolve that?
Joseph: We have to sit down and draw a clear border line showing what we are looking for, because we have very clear indicators about that from our lesson planning and curricular activities. If those are there, the objectives are clear, and the learner activities are clear, then what the material has to offer is clear.
If I have a colleague I am working with, we can actually analyze the OER in line with the guidelines we have decided for ourselves. If it falls into those lines, then nobody argues with that, we know we have to accept it. This could be the easiest way, but if someone believes it still doesn’t match, we have to ask more questions about what he means by “not matching.”
To treat content well, the selection has to be based on the needs of the students, the age of the students, and the resources available in the form of teaching and learning materials that they are already using. Many teachers here use both general and national books, then we have our subject standards, then competency standards that they want us to try to implement. When those things are guiding us, alignment with colleagues is a very peaceful exercise.
Shivi: That’s an interesting point that the resources you do already have guide and impact the selection of new digital content you find in OER collections like Kolibri, or other educational apps and websites, and how in your classroom due to the connectivity you often see a lot of physical and analog materials. Can you give some more examples of the kinds of things you would already be using, that might influence how you receive the new digital content and what the gaps are?
Joseph: Ghana has just introduced the competency-based curriculum, which already has specific topics and units as well as the activities to teach them, so everything teachers need is already there. What they still need is some guidance on how to bring those resources together, to make sure they can address exactly what they have been asked to teach.
For example, say a teacher has been asked to teach reproduction in plants. The guidelines are already there in the new curriculum, but it’s still a new curriculum, so the textbook, syllabus, and teacher’s guide are not ready. So what some of them have tried to do is look out for books — actual books from bookshops — and doing a lot of individual compilation that will guide them in being able to treat the various topics in the curriculum. Some of them search on Google and look for information there, as well.
Shivi: That’s a lot of supplementing not to replace but to follow the curriculum, and it’s evident that it takes very thorough planning. About how much time do you spend on that process, and find that it takes for your colleagues?
Joseph: Within the week, we have about 12 classes, and we use Kolibri for about four of the classes. With eight teachers, I have about one hour with each teacher, so that’s eight hours. I am the only teacher to guide all of them, and sometimes we meet as a group, or sometimes I have to meet one-on-one to discuss. So we have about eight working hours to find and plan with the materials that align.
Shivi: In the process that you and I went through while aligning together, we found that it was most seamless when we cut out those parts of the process which relied on internet-based tools, because it allowed you to move more quickly without worrying that you might lose your work. Do you have any similar advice for others who are seeking to undertake this work but may experience the same types of connection problems?
Joseph: The easiest way to do this is to use a spreadsheet. But while I was using it, I also realized there should be an easier way to access the collection of content. Even with Kolibri, you have to be fully connected to [initially] download some of the resources to the remote computer that is used as a server, and if you are not strongly connected, just getting started already becomes a challenge. These are areas in which connectivity is very low, so there should be more information available to help download the materials and on what to do if that does not work. So above all, I want to recommend this spreadsheet approach: it makes the workflow very easy.
The other advice is about helping decide what the most important thing is to consider. For me, age as a factor should be taken into consideration first, then the academic standards for various content. If these things are considered in that order, it makes spending time on the right materials very easy.
When I went through the [Kolibri] Studio tool at the beginning, I felt it would be the best approach, but without stronger internet [connectivity], it was hard to practice enough to understand certain principles of using it. But so far, that platform is very rich. I am not being shy, but can actually say that it’s a very rich resource! Some of the materials you come across are from respected academia, like doctors or professors, so you can be sure that they have accurate information.
Shivi: That’s great to hear that a pre-curated collection of resources could also save you an extra step in checking the reputability of the resources. Do you have anything else to share in reflecting on this process?
Joseph: What I would like to share with this audience is to be open to OER — they are very good, and in any part of the world, if teachers want to have easy access to good academic work, they should actually be looking for resources like these.
When the pandemic came in and caused a lot of troubles across the globe, I just think if people actually knew — students and teachers — that they could easily access educational resources. Ever since we started using Kolibri, we’ve had so much interest. I enjoy when I see students working with the materials we’ve selected; they are freely learning on their own, they can interact on their own. For example, one resource I love is Ubongo. Students listen to the plays, the activities, and they get so happy as they learn. And if the child is interested in what they are learning, 100% of our work has been done already. Better than that, teachers just spend time talking, this is much more interactive.
I hope anyone listening to me can look more into OER, and I do believe that doing this they can actually achieve our national goals of education.
Although Joseph accessed the 6–8 unique sources of Open Educational Resources he used via Learning Equality’s Kolibri Studio curricular tool, we believe the consideration and practices he mentioned generalize well to any OER repository, offline learning platform, website or app of digital resources, or other similar learning solution such as a USB key or local server. We invite you to consider how these might apply to whichever technologies you’re using to share learning resources!