Under the Brunei e-Government, His Majesty's Government aims to establish electronic governance and services to best serve the nation.
One of the flagships under the e-Government is the e-Education. MoE becomes the lead agency for this flagship and through this, the e-Education has its vision in transforming Brunei Darussalam to a more knowledgeable, thoughtful, multi-skilled, competitive and smart nation.
Several strategic goals and objectives have been identified to achieve the vision such as providing reliable and efficient ICT resources; appropriate and relevant training; ICT pervasiveness in the working and learning environment; appropriate transformation of teaching and learning environment; ensuring management, administration and operational excellence in the education system and the establishment of e-Education related research and development capabilities.
The Ministry of Education has long formulated its system by creating the infrastructure on e-Education as a medium to exploit ICT.
The strategy of e-Education is an orientation towards the e-Government core strategic goals and the 8th National Development Plan objectives as well as a mechanism for building the human capacity development.
As one of the key areas in e-Education, ICT has been introduced in schools several years back. In 1999 with the provision of $2.5 million under the umbrella of Brunei Darussalam Economic Council, the first phase of this project was initiated in 50 primary schools where each school received 13 computers.
The second phase was launched in 2001 with $11.3 million injected to provide the remaining 73 primary school with the range of 5 to 40 networked multimedia computers.
The project was also extended to 26 secondary schools with 33 similar networked multimedia computers. 1n 2002, another $6.9 million was injected for the phase 3 'Internet for Schools Project'.
With this programme, all primary schools and secondary schools will be connected through the Intranet and Internet.
The projects on physical and technological infrastructure were supported by the human resource development (HRD) programme. These included the training of ICT skills to teachers and officers.
Last year, in collaboration with the BAe system, a pilot programme that involved two primary schools and two secondary schools for the Design and Technology with ICT was initiated. A group of teachers from primary and secondary schools were selected to join the training on the Design and Technology, Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) and also ICT and Electronic Classroom.
Many ICT programmes and initiatives are very timely.
MoE is committed to provide more learning opportunities to our students so that we have the necessary physical and foundational bases that will support the ICT-enhanced learning environment and this will be integrated in the curriculum design to facilitate a more pupil-centred strategy for learning.
Through a concerted and committed approach guide by a national HRD initiative, we will be witnessing the realisation of this year's theme of BITEX 2003 namely 'Empowering People With Knowledge Through Education To Enable Them to Maximise Their Leverage'
Quelle: Borneo Bulletin
