TEACHERS' EXPERIENCES IN EDUCATIONAL MULTI-MEDIA CONTENT DEVELOPMENT The case of Tanzania’s Institute of Adult Education

This paper is an academic observation of an Educational Multimedia Content development-training programme funded by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) in Tanzania. This project focused on skills development in script writing and in radio and video programme development, aimed at transforming selected subjects from text to multimedia content. The ultimate objective was to enable better and easy understanding of the lessons, for Open and Distance Learning learners. A group of 25 teachers from the Tanzania’s Institute of Adult Education participated in the training and development of the programmes. In this paper the author shares the new and exciting experiences of teachers on adding such skills to their professional career, as the development of these programmes. Author’s own participation and interviews with peers in the project were employed as methods of data collection. A total number of 13 videos and 12 radio programmes were developed over the span of six months. Five school subjects were covered, namely: English, Mathematics, Biology, History and Geography. Some of the challenges encountered in developing the programmes included: difficulties in developing a video idea from the textbooks; working as a group online in collaboration with the training consultant in another country especially in script development; memorizing words (as actors playing in the productions) and saying it on camera; and time constraints (working under pressure). The author recommends to African nations and educators in other parts of the world to access these multimedia-learning programmes online since they are OER, and to use them in their context. The video and radio programmes reflect the Tanzanian context to some extent, but most of the lessons are general for use by any country. The paper concludes that skills development on technological innovations among ODL teachers in both formal and non-formal education system is essential towards attaining EFA goals