Nepal is transitioning through a period of significant change, both in national politics and educational policy. The government has adopted a new constitution, which demands changes to educational policy, for example.
The Developing Pedagogy for 21ST Century Skills in Nepal -project is related to two of these changes:
- to improve the quality of teaching at all levels of education, the government has decreed that teachers’ minimum level qualification will be a master’s degree
- access to education, from primary, through secondary, to tertiary and higher education, must become more equitable.
Recent projects have built a more robust infrastructure and created the foundations of a student-centred approach to learning throughout the education pyramid. Moving away from traditional teacher-centred learning to a methodology that puts the student at the centre of the process
requires vastly different skills of university-level teacher educators.
To benefit from modern communication through which education can be accessed at any time from anywhere, means that teachers must learn vastly different skills than before. The process of acquiring new, modern skills must begin at the teacher educator level: people who train the teachers of tomorrow must understand and be able to adapt modern communications technology in a pedagogically sound manner.
That is where the 21stCS Nepal project begins.
The consortium consists of two Finnish partner higher education institutions, JAMK and HAMK, plus two Nepalese HEIs, Trubhuvan University (TU), and Nepal Open University (NOU).