Final presentation on JICA grassroots project “Sustainable use of ICT for improving the quality of primary education in rural Mongolia(2012-2017)”

On 11 May, 2017, the final report for JICA grassroots project “Sustainable use of ICT for improving the quality of primary education in rural Mongolia(2012-2017)” took place in JICA Tokyo International Center. This was the final presentation open to public. Project team members represented by Prof. Yamaguchi, Dr. Yamamoto and Mr. Li attended the session together with Yamaguchi-Takada laboratory students. From JICA Tokyo International Center, Vice-Deputy Director Hasegawa Toshihisa, Mr. Onuki, a Section Chief of Citizen Participation Section 2, Advisor Hashiguchi, and Officer Ohashi attended the meeting as representatives.

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JICA project report participants

Prof. Yamaguchi from Tokyo Tech presented and discussed the project background, project design, activities, evaluation in detail. She discussed five outputs from the project: 1) capacity building of Mongolian National University of Education, 2) national and aimag level training of methodologist, and local primary school teachers, 3) development of digital teacher training materials by local primary school teachers, 4) application of student-centered approach in local classrooms, 5) capacity improvement of pilot schools. She also shared the very positive outcomes of the project, such as the expansion of teachers’ in-service professional development opportunities, and the improvement in teachers’ perceived professional competency through self-development.

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Presentation session

The audience from JICA and other participants listened to the presentation with great interest, and exchanged ideas and questions with the project team. First, JICA Project Specialist raised two questions: 1) who is the key person in Mongolian side? 2) what is the amount of input of the project? Prof. Yamaguchi answered that there are multiple key people on Mongolian side, for example, Prof. Jadambaa, who had worked with central and local administrator and teachers through important posts in his career including Vice Minister of Education, President of Teacher Training Institute of Khovd province, Advisor to the President of Mongolian National University of Education. She also mentioned that the project Steering Committee members were composed of experts from government, universities, training institutions and JICA. This formulation was very important to discuss issues and come up with relevant solutions whenever needed. Related to project inputs, professor explained that the project did encounter challenges with the depreciation of Japanese yen during the course of project, however, the project managed to complete most of the planned activities with efforts to come up with alternatives and monetary and non-monetary contribution from the local government. Secondly, JICA Project Specialist expressed great interest in the project implementation, and raised two questions: 1) did the training cover pre-service teachers? 2) did the project look at the impact to student academic achievement? Dr. Yamamoto responded to the first question that she perceives the potentials to extend training for pre-service teachers by the teacher training institution covered by this project. For the second question, Prof. Yamaguchi pointed out the complexity in conceptualizing the improvement in student academic achievement, which may be the result of multiple factors rather than professional competency improvement of teachers alone.
The audience listened to the presentation with focus and interest, Vice-Deputy Director highly appreciated the project and the report session, commenting that “the project quality sets a high standard of JICA grassroots project that we would like to see the same quality implementation for other grassroots projects”.

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