Exploring the Potential of Open Distance Learning in Teacher Education in Kenya: Opportunities and Challenges

In the Kenya’s vision 2030, education is recognized as a social pillar, it is expected that Kenya will become a middle income country with high quality of life to its people. Education is an important ingredient to a country’s development. The quality of an education system is highly dependent on the quality of its teachers. A country cannot develop beyond the quality of its teachers. The main aim of this paper is to explore the potential of open and distance learning to the development of teacher education in Kenya. The paper traces the historical development of teacher education in Kenya from the second half of the nineteenth century when western education was introduced to Kenya by the Christian missionaries. The history method of research has been used in the study. Data were also collected by means of literature review. The teacher education in Kenya is concerned with the training of early childhood teachers, primary teacher education, diploma teacher education, secondary teacher education and technical teacher education. Most of these teacher education programmes and other post qualification trainings are done through the traditional face to face model. Most of these teacher education programmes are not efficient and cost-effective. Kenya needs a comprehensive search to finding a cost-effective, conducive, efficient and comprehensive way of training teachers. It is our view that a search should include the use of open and distance learning as a viable solution to the training of teachers. Open distance learning should be seen as a complementary to the traditional mode of training teachers in Kenya. This paper holds that for teachers to effectively contribute to Kenya’s vision 2030, the teachers should be given the most appropriate tools during training and during practice-including the content knowledge, skills and attitude so as to make them work as professionals who will bring the desired change. Finally, this research highlights the need of open and distance learning to the development of teacher education in Kenya.