Digital Literacy Among Teacher Educators in Ethiopia: Implications to the Achievement of SDG4 and (Education for) Sustainable Development

Introduction

Ethiopia gives due recognition to the value of digital literacy. The country’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Policy and Strategy acknowledges that ICT is crucial in addressing access and quality of education as the vast majority of the Ethiopian population still live in remote areas where there is a severe shortage of teachers (FDRE, 2016). The ICT Policy therefore sets the following goals with regard to education: “Ensure that ICT is equally available across all levels of the school system and across all levels of the country, is an integral part of the educational system, and is used to extensively deliver quality online education” (FDRE, 2016, p.17). It is striking that the aforementioned policy doesn’t make any reference to teachers and teacher educators in its objectives. However, three of the nine strategies carry provisions related to teachers, namely, achieving a critical mass of computer literate teachers, devising affordable schemes for teachers and students to acquire ICT products and services, and linking academic institutions and libraries electronically to enable both teachers and students to access information resources (FDRE, 2016).

The ICT Policy of Ethiopia also lists what it calls ”key challenges” faced in deploying ICT in schools. These include the problem of maintenance, the inability of rural schools to afford the price of an internet connection, and ICT being not widely implemented across the curriculum. With regard to the preparation and development of teachers, the policy seems to be quite uncertain and admits that “teachers may not have been trained properly”. This seems awkward as policy of this kind is expected to be based on a sound assessment of the situation. This was also one of the reasons why the present-study was planned and executed. In other words, the absence of any statement directly related to teachers and teacher educators in the objectives of the ICT Policy, and the uncertainty about the level of training of teachers in Ethiopia (not to mention teacher educators) are taken as adequate justification to carry out a study that explores the level of digital literacy among teacher educators.

The specific objectives of the study are to a) explore the level of digital literacy among teacher educators in Ethiopia, b) examine factors that enhance and/or limit the competence of teacher educators in using digital technologies for educational purposes, c) analyze the implications of the current level of use of digital technologies in view of achieving SDG4, and d) provide recommendations to improve digital literacy, also in the context of Education for Sustainable Development, among teacher educators in Ethiopia.