A new chapter for Zambian open schooling

As part of its open schooling initiative, COL has been supporting the Directorate of Distance Education at the Ministry of Education, Zambia, in developing curriculum-based digital open educational resources (OER) and deploying them through AptusPi in 20 pilot centres across the nation. The pilot project revealed learners have a great deal of interest in OER content, especially those in the country’s central region, where Internet and device access is stronger. Online access to digital content was especially useful during the Covid-19 pandemic, with over 17,000 downloads of OER lessons in the first few months. The Ministry of Education is looking to COL for continued support of its curricular reforms, especially to vocationalise the curriculum for out-of-school youths and use educational technology more.