PRIMAT – UED Uniandes

Most primary school teachers in Latin America and the Caribbean are not sufficiently prepared to teach the mathematics that their students should learn. PRIMAT is a program of three MOOC courses with which we seek to contribute to the development of the competencies, knowledge and skills that we consider necessary for primary school teachers to improve their teaching practice in the mathematics classroom, offer more and better learning opportunities to their students and, in this way, contribute to their formation as citizens. To this end, these courses seek to provide the teacher with opportunities to learn the content of elementary mathematics, its learning and teaching, and the processes of curriculum design. PRIMAT is one of the few free training opportunities for primary mathematics teachers in the world. Thanks to PRIMAT, primary school students will have more opportunities to further their education, become reflective and critical citizens, and achieve greater well-being.

Education is the best investment a country can make for its economic progress and the well-being of its citizens. This investment takes on greater importance when it is made at the base of that system (primary education) and in a central area of student training (mathematics). The training of students in mathematics influences their formation as citizens capable of solving problems and arguing their opinion in the situations that society presents them with. However, the results of different national and international tests in mathematics consistently show that elementary school students have many difficulties in solving problems that have some degree of complexity, their answers to simple problems arise from trial and error processes, and do not demonstrate skills to solve real-life problems. The almost self-taught way in which most elementary school teachers learned mathematics (usually as part of their high school training and with very little deepening in their undergraduate training) is a decisive factor for their knowledge of this area to be centered on the memorization of symbolic-type processes involving the resolution of routine exercises. As a consequence, they have few conceptual and methodological tools to offer their students opportunities in which they can develop their mathematical competencies. To teach mathematics, the elementary school teacher must have a deep knowledge of the topics to be taught, with the level of reflection and breadth to understand and anticipate the learning process of his or her students and to design and implement activities that promote this process.

Most primary school teachers in Latin America and the Caribbean are not sufficiently prepared to teach the mathematics that their students should learn. PRIMAT is a program of three MOOC courses with which we seek to contribute to the development of the competencies, knowledge and skills that we consider necessary for primary school teachers to improve their teaching practice in the mathematics classroom, offer more and better learning opportunities to their students and, in this way, contribute to their formation as citizens. To this end, these courses seek to provide the teacher with opportunities to learn the content of elementary mathematics, its learning and teaching, and the processes of curriculum design. PRIMAT is one of the few free training opportunities for primary mathematics teachers in the world. Thanks to PRIMAT, primary school students will have more opportunities to further their education, become reflective and critical citizens, and achieve greater well-being.

PRIMAT's ultimate goal is to contribute to the well-being of citizens. This welfare depends on the training they obtain as professionals. Access to quality professional training depends on the mathematical training of the baccalaureate. A high school graduate will have good mathematical training if he or she received adequate training during his or her primary education. The mathematics that a primary school student learns depends on the learning opportunities that his or her teacher provided in class. The quality of the learning opportunities that the teacher can offer is a function of his or her mathematical and didactic knowledge. PRIMAT's primary target population is primary school teachers who teach mathematics in Colombia, Latin America and the Caribbean. PRIMAT's secondary target population is the students of these teachers. To the extent that these students do not receive adequate mathematical training during their primary education, they will not be able to aspire to progress as individuals and professionals. Most of the world’s primary school teachers are not sufficiently prepared to teach the mathematics that their students need to learn. PRIMAT is one of the few free training opportunities for primary mathematics teachers in the world. By promoting their participation in the project, PRIMAT will enable primary school teachers to build the knowledge and develop the skills and attitudes necessary to provide more and better learning opportunities for their students. As a result, primary school students will be able to progress in their mathematical education, to become reflective and critical citizens, and to achieve greater well-being.

PRIMAT will provide elementary school teachers with concepts and curricular techniques that they do not have and need to better design and implement their mathematics classes. As a result, their students will be able to learn more and better mathematics, with which they will be able to progress in their education as high school graduates and professionals. In this way, PRIMAT will support primary school teachers who teach mathematics with the teaching and learning tools and resources that will ensure the proper development of the future competencies of children and adolescents in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The first PRIMAT MOOC was published online on Coursera three years ago. The third course appeared online 20 months ago. By August 2021, the three-course program reached more than 51,000 enrollees. The program is beginning to consolidate among Colombian primary school teachers who represent 70% of the enrollees. We have two objectives for the future. First, we want the majority of Colombian primary school teachers to be aware of the program and to be able, if they wish, to enroll in it. To this end, we are developing efforts with the Colombian public institutions in charge of education. Secondly, we want to reach more Latin American teachers. To do so, we will have to make promotional and dissemination efforts outside Colombia. These are efforts that we hope to develop over the next five years.

In most Latin American and Caribbean countries, primary school teachers do not receive specific training in mathematics. Teachers are generalists and must teach all subjects. PRIMAT is the only free online program that offers mathematics training for primary school teachers in the region. In this sense, it offers a previously non-existent solution to the problem of insufficient training for primary school teachers. Currently, and taking Colombia as an example, most educational institutions that offer undergraduate programs in primary education do not have a curriculum with an emphasis on mathematics. Although this subject is part of the syllabi, the hourly intensity or the credits programmed in the study plan are not sufficient for practicing teachers to have the necessary tools to design, implement and evaluate teaching strategies in accordance with the educational level in which they work. In Colombia, the costs that a primary school teacher must assume for his or her postgraduate training can be between USD1000 and USD2000 per semester. These costs, together with the difficulties of transportation and time available, prevent a teacher from accessing formal classroom training programs. The above arguments highlight the need to offer spaces for permanent and massive training of primary school teachers in mathematics at low or no cost and easy access that contribute to the improvement of student learning. PRIMAT has filled a gap that existed in this market in the region.

PRIMAT is a three-course MOOC program offered through the Coursera platform. Coursera is a global online learning platform that offers anyone, anywhere access to online courses and degrees from leading universities and companies. This technology allows a person with a digital device (cell phone, tablet or computer) and Internet access to participate in courses. PRIMAT also uses curricular concepts and techniques that constitute an innovative educational technology for elementary teacher education in Mathematics Education. This technology is based on the didactic analysis model (Gómez, 2018). This model describes the ideal performance of a mathematics teacher in the classroom. Based on this model, it is possible to establish the competencies, knowledge and skills that the teacher must develop to adequately perform his or her teaching practice. This information allows us to determine the information and stimuli that we should offer to the teacher in the program.

Gómez, P. (Ed.). (2018). Formación de profesores de matemáticas y práctica de aula: conceptos y técnicas curriculares [Training of mathematics teacher and classroom practice: concepts and curricular techniques]. Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad de los Andes.

Coursera is a fully established technology for delivering MOOCs. Coursera collaborates with more than 200 universities and companies around the world. Currently, more than 77 million people take courses and learn on this platform (https://www.coursera.org).

Coursera’s technology introduces no risk. A person can register for and take PRIMAT courses with just his/her email address. Coursera implements a strict personal data protection.

As of August 30, 2021, PRIMAT has 51,720 enrollees. We expect to reach 70,000 enrollees in one year and 150,000 enrollees in five years.

Our goal is to influence the well-being and future of children and young people in Latin America and the Caribbean by giving them more and better opportunities to develop their mathematical education. We will achieve this goal to the extent that more teachers in the region have the competencies, knowledge and skills to offer primary school students better opportunities to learn mathematics. Each primary school teacher serves an average of 130 students in a year. We hope that, in the next year, we will have at least 20,000 new teachers enrolled in PRIMAT. This would have an impact on at least two and a half million primary school students. Over the next five years, we expect at least 100,000 new primary school teachers to enroll in the program, with an impact on more than ten million children and youth in the region. We will achieve these goals as we reach more teachers through outreach efforts and contacts with education authorities in the countries of the region.

Currently, we track weekly the number of teachers who visit the program's web page, enroll in the program and complete the courses.

Our team consists of six full-time and three part-time employees.

UED is a reference center in Mathematics Education in Latin America and the Caribbean. It has more than 35 years of experience in research and mathematics teacher education. Its members have been practicing teachers in primary, secondary and middle school education. All of them have master’s degrees and three of them have PhDs. Its primary teacher training programs, its research projects and the conceptual frameworks it has developed have allowed UED to understand and characterize the problems and difficulties that teachers at this educational level face in their pedagogical practice. UED members are professionals committed to education and the well-being of children and youth. PRIMAT is an example of this commitment, as a project that fulfills the team’s mission: to contribute to the improvement of mathematics learning and teaching in Colombia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Colombia (like most of Latin America and the Caribbean) is a diverse and inequitable country. Only a few people with adequate resources and geographic location have access to quality education. UED aims to address this situation by providing access to quality Mathematics Education to teachers who otherwise would not be able to have it. This is the case, for example, of our Master’s Degree in Mathematics Education for which we sought and obtained funding that allows us to offer scholarships for public school teachers. It is also the case of our online virtual courses for which we have managed, by partnering with the education secretariats, to provide teachers with access to this training. PRIMAT is a clear example of this purpose. We offer a completely free training program that is accessible to primary school teachers in all regions of Latin America and the Caribbean.

TPrize would be a very important recognition for PRIMAT. The TPrize seal can allow us to access more funding for the project and make the necessary contacts so that the governmental entities in charge of education in Latin America and the Caribbean are aware of the program and promote it with the teachers in their charge.

We need support to publicize the project with the purpose of scaling it up. We have three target populations. First, we are interested in contacting organizations that may be interested in providing funding for the project. Second, we need strategies, procedures and information to contact governmental entities in charge of education in Latin America and the Caribbean. We want these entities to know about the program and help us disseminate it to their teachers. Third, we need to reach more teachers in the region. Support from entities such as Google, Facebook and Instagram would be very helpful for this purpose.

We are interested in establishing partnerships with organizations that can financially support the project. We need to establish alliances with the ministries and secretariats of education in all Latin American and Caribbean countries. We are also interested in establishing alliances with media and organizations such as Google, Facebook and Instagram.