Impact of Distance Training for Secondary School Teachers on the Quality of their Training in Niger

This research attempts to assess the impact of distance education for secondary school teachers in Niger on the quality of education through the appropriate use of ICTs. The quality of education in Niger is poor because of inadequate initial and in-service teacher training. Several factors may explain the problems of teacher performance in Niger. The first is related to the hiring of contract teachers with little or no training to replace qualified teachers. Niger is the country where the shortage of trained teachers remains the greatest in the world. Currently, the number of contractual teachers is estimated at 84% of the total teaching staff (UNESCO-IICBA, 2014). How can we fill vacancies, create new ones, and train existing teachers? One of the challenges of education in Niger is the need to improve the initial and in-service training of teachers. For example, Niger is seeking new methods of teacher training and is making the mobilization of CTBT a strong focus on its policy. However, very few studies mention this in the context of education in Africa. Our research follows on from the project Use of Information Technology for Teacher Training in Niger (UTIFEN), initiated by the Agenceuniversitaire de la Francophonie (AUF) and funded by the Agence Française de Développement (AFD). Our experimental system is based on a smart and adaptive online training platform, accessible via computer, tablet or smartphone, for 614 secondary school teachers in Niger. Using the ex post facto method, we collected information on the evaluation of secondary school teachers (Ministry of Secondary Education (MES, 2021). This information allowed us to establish a link between the percentage of effective teachers (quantitative dependent variable) of 2,704 teachers and the use or non-use of distance learning by their trainers (qualitative independent variable). Thus, the categories of teachers trained at UTIFEN, ENS and UTA’s FSE remain qualitative. These categorical data consist of the frequency of observations of the selected categories. On the other hand, the percentage of effective teachers, which remains quantitative, reflects the efficiency of secondary school teachers in teaching. We converted this quantitative variable into a nominal categorical variable (quality of education). This is divided into two categories: “ineffective teachers” for the percentages 1–49 and “effective teachers” for the percentages 50–100. This gives us a nominal independent variable (Teacher Training). There are three modalities: teachers trained at UTIFEN, teachers trained at ENS and teachers trained at ESF. In a second step, we obtain a nominal dependent variable (quality of teaching with 2 modes: non-effective teachers and effective teachers). The chi-square test shows that there is a causal link between UTIFEN distance learning and the efficiency of secondary school teachers in teaching.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Not applicable

The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].

This work did not receive any external funding.