Distance Education and a Realistic Teacher Education Pedagogy in Uganda : Impact of an ICT-supported learning environment

ICT is hardly used in Uganda to develop distance education and this despite political goodwill, the positive experiences reflected in some of the showcases and the limited but available infrastructure. Key enabling factors have been identified:government commitment, planning, availability of resources, technology,private sector partnership and commitment. The major challenges:lack of adequate resources, standards, a negative attitude and the lack of an ICT policy to guide implementations. A central element in this research was an RTEP oriented learning approach to counter the technical rationality that is observed in teacher education. The ICT-based learning environment was to promote the quality of education. The ICT-based environment was also considered to be helpful to meet the growing need for teacher education in Uganda and to promote more flexible access to teacher education. Student teachers studied in an RTEP-oriented and ICT- based learning environment. The impact on the level of student interaction and the level of cognitive processing metacognitive variables, the student teacher perceptions, instruction and flexibility of