Brent Eneri is a lecturer at Kiribati Teachers College (KTC), the only teacher education institution in the island nation of Kiribati.

Under the ‘Teacher Futures’ programme, COL has provided support to the Ministry of Education and KTC to improve the pedagogical practice of teachers in senior secondary schools, and also the quality of programmes developed and offered by KTC to pre-service and in-service teachers through technology.

Brent has been part of the implementation of ‘Teacher Futures’ in Kiribati from the beginning. “When the COL programme started in 2017, I realised that many lecturers were new to Moodle, an e-learning platform that would be used to train both pre-service and in-service teachers,” says Brent. He explained that many of his colleagues found it challenging to use the platform despite the support from the IT services department.

After participating in blended and e-workshops supported by COL, Brent was happy with his newly-acquired skills in course design and online facilitation. He felt that he had a duty to support his colleagues because they needed eLearning skills to engage with teacher trainees.

“For me personally, after completing the e-design course, I saw this as the opportunity to assist fellow lecturers in developing their courses. Most of the lecturers still found it difficult to search for relevant OERs and use Moodle,” said Brent. “A few weeks after COL offered two courses in 2018 as part of the ‘Teacher Futures’ project, more lecturers began to see the importance of eLearning in their teaching.”

Since then, Brent has not only been able to develop his first online course on pedagogy, but he has also supported fellow lecturers in finding resources and uploading them on Moodle.

Brent has also had the opportunity to assist in the delivery of a two-week TESOL in-service training course to more than sixty teachers. The training sessions have built his confidence not only in himself but also in the capacity of KTC to offer technology-supported programmes.