The MoE released details of the new initiative in a recent press conference on February 24 and the Acting Director of the ICT Department at the MoE was quoted as saying, "The e-Hijrah Initiative led by the Department of ICT is designed to support and accelerate the rate of change and innovation in the education system initiated by SPN21 and to support achieving the goals of Wawasan 2035."
According to information from the MoE and the GlobalSOF Consortium (the project's consultants), the first output of the e-Hijrah initiative is the e-Hijrah Strategy, Blueprint and Implementation Plan, which translates the broad vision and objectives outlined in Wawasan 2035, SPN21 and e-Government Strategic Plan and other coordinating national strategies into a set of focused Pathways with an implementation roadmap for ICT in Education.
The e-Hijrah is also set to make a substantial contribution to key themes of the e-Government Strategic Plan, including a tech-savvy society, citizen centric and integrated services through increasing the digital confidence and capability of teachers and students, as well as expanding the development of educational e-Services.
The three e-Hijrah Strategic Pathways through which these changes are set to occur are whole school ICT development, i-services and foresight and innovation, and 43 integrated initiatives representing a comprehensive list of all actions, programmes and projects required to transform education through ICT have been identified to deliver the said changes.
The e-Hijrah Bluepirnt also provides an Evaluation Framework with a series of performance indicators designed to measure the progress and impact of each initiative as they are designed, developed and implemented.
Speaking to the Bulletin, Samir Patel, Principal Consultant from GlobalSOF Consortium was quoted as saying, "This project is very exciting, because its the first time where we've had a coordinated effort across the country for ICT and education, and is very important also for Brunei because there are a lot of IT gadgets and technologies, and things like facebook, virtual worlds, and it's sometimes difficult to have kids apply those in a way that increases their skills and benefits them as human beings.
This initiative basically puts all of that in a more structured and coordinated way so that teachers understand the way that children think, and the kind of technology and tools they use so that they can be incorporated into their education; into their learning, because children use technology in their everyday lives as it is.
So, for Brunei that's very important, because from a national development perspective we want to build good information workers who function in good industries for the 21" century, and in education it takes us 20 years to get those skills done, so we need to do that now, so we can prepare the students over the course of the next 25 years.
Personally, as an international consultant, I'm very happy to see that there's a lot of excitement with school teachers around e-Hijrah, and they're very primed to work with us to deploy this over the next six years, because its' not easy, it's a very difficult challenge, and they seem to understand that, and they're embracing the fact that it's going to take some personal development from them," he added. "Those are the things that are very critical in making the ICT initiative successful."
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Danial Norjidi
Quelle/Source: Bru Direct, 26.02.2011
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