OER for STEM Education — Generative-AI Teacher Training Reaches 90 Educators in Honiara, Solomon Islands

The Solomon Islands is one of nine Pacific Commonwealth countries covered by the Partnership for Open, Distance and Flexible Learning (ODFL) in the Pacific, a five-year (2020–2025) programme funded by New Zealand's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and implemented by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) through its regional centre, the Pacific Centre for Flexible and Open Learning for Development (PACFOLD).

In March 2024, COL and PACFOLD, working with the University of the South Pacific's Solomon Islands campus and the Ministry of Education and Human Resource Development, ran a blended two-day workshop in Honiara that trained 90 STEM teachers to search for, adapt, co-create and contribute Open Educational Resources (OER) aligned to the national curriculum, with online and in-person mentorship continuing afterwards through USP and Ministry staff. The same regional programme has separately delivered comparable generative-AI-and-OER training to STEM teachers in Fiji and Tonga, and a companion peer-reviewed paper from COL describes the broader methodology as 'Teacher-in-the-Loop AI' (TiL-AI): teachers use GenAI to adapt OER to local curricula while remaining the final check on accuracy and cultural relevance, rather than delegating content decisions to the model.

The evidence here is participation and output data reported by the implementing organisation — 90 teachers trained, resources peer-reviewed within the workshop — rather than an independent evaluation of downstream classroom use or student learning outcomes; no Solomon-Islands-specific outcome study has yet been published.

Read the full analysis: https://jl4d.org/index.php/ejl4d/article/view/1934