National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC)
Rwanda
Capacity Audit Provisional Report
By
Esther Wachira & Senthil Kumar
August, 2008
Background
The National curriculum development centre (NCDC) is charged with the
responsibility of developing quality curricula for pre-primary, primary and
secondary schools in Rwanda. It is also responsible for preparing teachers’
guides and other pedagogical materials in accordance with MINEDUC policies
and plans with specific reference to the curriculum development policy. This it
does in cooperation with other MINEDUC departments and institutions and
other non-MINEDUC partners.
NCDC is currently organized in six departments; the Science and Arts
department, Language and Humanities, Vocational and professional
department, Pedagogy and Production department, Finance and Human
resource development and the ICT Unit. Each of these departments is headed by
a director who report s directly to the NCDC Director General.
Each department, except for the ICT section, has several curriculum developers.
In total NCDC is staffed with 80 curriculum developers, among others, all of
whom are trained teachers and have had a teaching career for a period of not less
than five years.
Introduction
This document is a provisional report which as been compiled for the purpose of
providing some background information before the digital content evaluation
workshop that has been planned that will take place between 8th and 12th
September 2008. A full report will be provided after this workshop based on the
activities that will be carried out during the workshop and the feedback that will
be received from all the curriculum developers. The findings herein are based on
a visit that was made to NCDC between August 18th and 22nd 2008 by Esther (eLearning specialist) and Senthil (Country Programme Facilitator). During the
visit, the following personnel were interviewed; The NCDC Director General, the
Departmental Directors in Science and Arts, Languages and Humanities,
Pedagogy and Production and the ICT unit. Each director appointed 3
curriculum developers who were also interviewed in a focus group and who also
gave an indication of the skill sets available in NCDC. Hence, only 12 out of the
80 curriculum developers were interviewed during the visit. However 60 other
questionnaires were left with the curriculum developers and will be collected
between 8th and 12th of September 2008. Once these are collected it will be
possible to provide a more comprehensive report.
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Objective
On the one hand, the Ministry of Education (Rwanda) has in its custody digital
content from a number of organizations. These organizations have approached
MINEDUC with a goal of having the content used in Rwandese primary and
secondary schools. According to good practice, it is necessary to have this
content subjected to a review process to ensure that it is aligned with the
country’s educational and curriculum objectives, supports the values and the
norms that should be propagated by the education system in the country and
that it is in line with the existing educational philosophy.
On the other hand, 299 Rwandese Secondary schools have already been provided
with computers. These computers have no digital content that can be used to
promote the curriculum goals. A further large scale pilot of 5000 ‘One Laptop
Per Child’ (OLPC’s) are currently with the Rwanda Information and Technology
Authority (RITA) and have no digital content. These, it is hoped, will be
deployed in primary schools in the month of September 2008.
Clearly, there is an urgent need to have digital content available for use with
these computers. It is against this background that GeSCI was asked by
MINEDUC to facilitate the evaluation of the digital content in its custody for use
in the schools.
Before carrying out the digital content evaluation exercise it was deemed
necessary to:
 Understand the existing print content evaluation framework within
NCDC and see how this can be used to evaluate the digital content before
it is dispatched to the schools. This is envisaged to be done by the various
curriculum developers within NCDC according to their subject
specializations.
 Audit the available human and resource capacity for the content
evaluation exercise
 Understand NCDC’s current and projected plan for digital content
evaluation, customization and development.
Methodology (state the objective of focusing on each group)
The findings provided in this report were collected through the use of:
 Questionnaires,
 Interviews
 Observations
 One focus group comprising of 12 curriculum developers who were
randomly sampled and interviewed during the visit.
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Findings and observations
NCDC Director General
Findings from the NCDC director indicate that he is completely supportive of
digital content evaluation, customization and development.
He also
underscored the role of NCDC in providing the appropriate digital resources to
supplement the existing print material. However, he highlighted a wide lack of
understanding among the curriculum developers of the role they should play in
the development of this content. Further, he noted, there is not only a lack of
skills in this area but a high level of misunderstanding of what digital content is
all about.
The existing content evaluation framework for print materials is such that,
whenever there is a need to evaluate the said content, a team is normally
convened depending on the subject matter. This team is derived from the
relevant departments depending on the task at hand. As such, there is no
standing committee whose function is to evaluate content. His view was that the
same approach should be adopted in evaluating digital content. However for
this to be actualized, all the curriculum developers within NCDC need to be
sensitized and exposed to the various aspects of digital content development
from a very basic level. The skills and understanding of what digital content is
about are widely missing. The misunderstanding is made clear by the fact that
curriculum developers at the moment view the digital content evaluation
exercise as a function of the ICT unit.
Departmental Directors
Every department has been assigned one person in the ICT unit who should be
responsible for the digitization of content. This means that the technical persons
in the ICT unit have some pre-designed roles in the Languages and Humanities,
Science and Arts, Vocational and Professional training. The following are the
highlights from the Directors.
 The departmental Directors interviewed felt that digitizing of content is
the work of the technical team but they do not have the requisite skills to
actualize this.
 There was clearly a lack of communication between the Ministry of
Education and the NCDC in terms of what is currently happening, action
plans and the current policies within MINEDUC in the area of digital
content.
 The Directors registered a wide lack of understanding of what content
development, evaluation and customization entails.
 NCDC staff had never attended any of the GeSCI workshops except for 3
persons from the ICT unit.
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In the Pedagogy and Production department (which is charged with the
development of teaching aids and models for all the schools), the director
indicated that he was very strained in carrying out his tasks. This is
because the development of these models is expensive and their
distribution equally has heavy financial implications. Consequently he
has a plan to train teachers in the schools on how to develop their own
teaching aids. He recognizes the role that animated diagrams and
simulated scenarios could play as effective teaching aids while at the same
time going round the cost incurred in the distribution of such. Further,
the digital teaching aids would easily be re-used.
The Directors in the Science department did acknowledge that most of the
science subjects are taught theoretically as the laboratories in the schools
are widely un-equipped.
Director General of inspectorate
He was very supportive of the content evaluation exercise and would like to
identify subject matter experts for this workshop. He mentioned that the
Inspectorate is currently highly decentralized in Rwanda. Hence he has to
identify the suitable talent associated with this content evaluation exercise.
Further, he noted that he has been specifically focusing on providing academic
and pedagogical inputs as a function of the inspectorate as opposed to the
administrative monitoring which characterized most of the inspectorate’s work
in the past. He underscored the need to build capacity among teachers in the use
of e-Learning content and making it widely available in the Rwandese schools.
Curriculum developers
12 respondents were interviewed from the three departments: Science and Arts,
Languages and humanities, Pedagogy and Production. Questionnaires were
distributed to the remaining 60 curriculum developers. As a result details on the
capacity skills among this target group will be more comprehensively analyzed
in the final report. However, there are a few indications:
 The staff in the ICT unit have no pedagogical skills as they are computer
science graduates
 The staffs in the pedagogy and production department are also technical
persons, are functionally more of machine operators and have no
pedagogical training. It is also worth noting that this department plays a
central role like the ICT unit in that it produces teaching aids and models
for teachers for use in all the schools.
 It was reported that all the staff in NCDC have basic ICT literacy skills
but again these are at varying degrees. This factor is important as the
computer will be the medium of communication during evaluation.
However, they can comfortably use a computer and each of them is
equipped with one.
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The skills in Multimedia are at best rudimentary with a higher number of
respondents indicating that they do not have these at all.
A general understanding of the digital content development is lacking
among the curriculum developers.
The Curriculum developers have varying proficiencies in the use of the
English Language. This is an important factor as all the content to be
evaluated is in English. More than 75% of respondents indicated that they
can read, write and speak English, 25% can read and write.
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ICT department
This department is largely non-functional. There are five personnel in this
department with a lot of theoretical background. 7 computers are available in
the computer room with two of these being non-functional due missing hard
disks and RAM (Random Access Memory). They have no speakers and
multimedia functionality. It was also clear that the staff in this department did
not have technical maintenance skills. The computers are maintained through a
contractual agreement with Computer Byte Limited. The ICT director indicated
that there is no budgetary allocation for the many functions that the department
is expected to perform within NCDC and they have to write funding proposal s
for any capacity building activities or any other activity.
Conclusions and Recommendations
Based on the above preliminary findings, review of the digital content evaluation
workshop programme should include:
 Sensitization and creation of a better understanding of what content
development is about. This should include a session on the steps of
digital content development
 Develop a project plan for any perceived activities in NCDC in relation to
digital content as this is non-existent.
 Project management skills are also absent. If a project plan would be
developed, project management skills should also be inculcated.
 Policy and plans from MINEDUC are not communicated to NCDC and at
some point we were almost like informants.
 There is a need to develop a capacity building plan for the NCDC staff for
digital content development, evaluation and customization
 There is a need to convene all the curriculum developers and sensitize
them on their role in content development and how they can/should
work with the ICT and the Pedagogy/Production units to address issues
related to digital content.
 A criterion should be provided for the selection of those who will
participate in the content evaluation exercise.
This should span
pedagogical skills, language proficiency skills, ICT literacy skills and
subject matter expertise.
 There is a need to develop a profile for the ICT unit in terms of the
requisite skills required for content development if the department is to be
functional.
 There is a need to work with the team in costing content development as
the figures in the proposals were indicated through guess work without
any rationale.
 It was noted that most of the practicing teachers may have challenges in
the English language; consequently a recommendation was made by the
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departmental directors of the different subject areas that we should co-opt
the teachers who are usually involved in the setting marking of the
national examinations as these would also play the dual role of
representing the examination council and that of subject matters expertise
from a practicing teacher’s point of view.
Given the lack of skills in many respects within the domain of content
development, one digital content evaluation workshop will not be
enough, but it should serve the purpose of creating a suitable
environment for digital content evaluation to be followed by more
intensive evaluation exercises which should be developed conjunctively
with NCDC.
There will definitely be a good reason to outsource personnel in content
development, customization and evaluation for NCDC if it is to actualize
its dream of providing digital content in the Rwandese schools.
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