Since 2019, BAKTI in cooperation with Ruangguru - a national technology company - have implemented a program to increase competency of teachers in rural-remote areas, targeting a total of 286 high school teachers and 80 high school students from four remote and underdeveloped regencies in Indonesia. Recognizing teachers’ key role in delivering education services yet their lack of access to education and training to equip and improve themselves, particularly for teachers in remote and underdeveloped regions, BAKTI and Ruangguru leveraged their combination of experiences working in remote and underdeveloped regions and designed a unique blended learning method to improve teachers’ pedagogical, professional, social, and soft skills through the use of ICT. The program had been implemented intensively in four regencies in remote and underdeveloped regions in Indonesia, namely Sorong, Sangihe, Asmat and Ende Regency. It involved a comprehensive support, starting from provision of training materials, intensive discussions and counselling for teachers and structured mentoring for one full year via online and offline method. This differentiates the program from other capacity building activity, and as a result, the program has not only successfully improved the teachers’ competencies but also their confidence in delivering online learning method for better students’ learning process.

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• Indonesia

• Women
• Remote and rural communities

The Indonesia Teaching Fellowship (ITF) program provides many valuable lessons learned on the use of ICT to facilitate effective learning processes for teachers and students in remote and underdeveloped areas. The program demonstrated two important pillars:
 Development of online learning platform that is suitable and stable enough for the limited internet bandwidth available in remote and underdeveloped regions (technical aspect) and interesting contents that facilitate learning process and encourage active participation (content development)
 The most suitable mix of strategy and methods to increase teachers’ competencies in various aspects (pedagogical, professional, social, and soft skills) including the experience of using the ICT technology to facilitate learning process.
These two pillars are important building blocks in adoption of ICT to facilitate distance learning and even life-long learning for teachers as well as students. The lessons learned are valuable for BAKTI, its partner Ruangguru and the local education services in designing future program. The presence of “local champion” teachers who are active in proliferating their knowledge to their peers and partner up with the local education services would scale up the program results. Ruangguru, BAKTI’s partner, a technology company that focuses on education-based services in Southeast Asia, could utilize the valuable lessons learned from ITF program and apply it in their operation in Vietnam and Thailand. In addition to this, Ruangguru has extensive partnership with 32 (out of 34) Provincial Government and 326 Regency/ City Government in Indonesia, which present the opportunity to replicate the program in other remote and underdeveloped areas. Meanwhile, BAKTI at the national level also has reached out to the Ministry of Education to explore the potential collaboration in scaling-up the program to other areas.

The Indonesia Teaching Fellowship (ITF) program was designed with sustainability factor at its core. Instead of only focusing to deliver capacity building activities to teachers as its main beneficiaries, the program also empowers the teachers to be “local champions” in their areas. These “local champion” teachers were selected based on their initiatives and motivations to share what they had learned in the program to their peers. Furthermore, the program also connected the “local champion” teachers with local education services as its sustainability strategy. Local education services are the mandated agency responsible to plan and implement education policies and programs in their area. Hence, connecting the teachers with local education services offer opportunities for long-term engagement to advance education programs in each area.
This strategy has been successful particularly in Sangihe and Sorong Regency where the program has been completed. In total of 52 “local champion” teachers, 31 teachers in Sorong and 21 teachers in Sangihe, are ready to cooperate with the local education services to implement education programs in these two regencies. The teachers had become tutors for their peers and to date there are 156 additional teachers from 28 schools who have been tutored by the local champions. The “local champion” teachers are also actively participating in other capacity building program for teachers, sharing their knowledge to other teachers or actively involved in teachers’ organization. In addition to this initiative, there are currently six teachers from Ende Regency from this program who are also engaged in the national program of Ministry of Education of “Guru Penggerak”. “Guru Penggerak” is a national capacity program aims to turn teachers into education activities who take up leading positions in the education sector. The program will further be aligned with national education strategic roadmap as outlined in the Ministry of Education Regulation No. 22/2020.

This project upholds WSIS values in relation to capacity building that each person should have the necessary skills and knowledge to understand, participate actively in, and benefit fully from, the information society and knowledge economy where literacy and universal primary education become the key factors to building a fully inclusive information society. Hence, the intervention targeted teachers in rural and remote areas who are not only key in providing education services to students but also at the same time have very limited access to training and life-long learning. The project also paid attention to the ratio between men and women beneficiaries, ensuring that at least 50% of the beneficiaries are female teachers. For example, in Sangihe and Sorong, 75% of the training participants were women. While promoting the use of ICT in the capacity building of teachers, the program also enabled the teachers to increase their confidence and skills in using online platform and furthermore to benefit from the ICT. As a result, teachers could better facilitate learning process to their students not only during offline but also online sessions and transfer their ICT literacy knowledge to the students. Hence, it is expected that students would have better learning outcome and ICT literacy that enable them to pursue further study, formally and informally, that will increase their employability.