Objectives

• To foster, facilitate, enhance and build functional collaboration, cooperation and the pooling of resources among students, teachers, managers and administration in education through the use of Intranets and the Internet.

• To improve and modernise teaching and learning through the use of information and communications technology applied to the teaching and learning processes in schools.
• To ensure that all students leaving a school system at the end of at least nine years of schooling are computer literate and can effectively use information and communications technology applied to the activities of daily life.
• To improve, modernise and make more efficient the management of schools and Ministries of Education through education management information systems that are networked and linked dynamically.
• To expand the pool and improve the quality of persons in the OECS who can be educated and trained as information and communications technology specialists.

General Philosophy

Information and communications technology has become ubiquitous in its applications to modern life. It is a tool of work, learning, entertainment, communication and management. As important is the fact that it has become a symbol of modernisation and progress. For people living, learning and working on islands but who wish to share a common destiny, information and communication technology becomes a virtual bridge across the expanse of sea that separates islands from each other.

Information and communications technology applied to education reform in the OECS, therefore, does not only represent a skills of skills to be acquired for its effective use, but more importantly as tools of learning, teaching and management as well as a symbol of modernisation and progress, and most critically as a virtual bridge linking students in schools and colleges, managers and administrators in institutions and Ministers within and across islands. Taken together information and communications technology skills can be effectively applied to modernise and enhance teaching, learning and management, mobilise new support for education and provide the infrastructure for regional collaboration, cooperation and the pooling of resources to unprecedented levels. The impact of the latter is likely to be a great sense of sub-regional identity and solidarity than could be achieved by any other means.

The revolution that has taken place in information and communications technology is ushering in the knowledge society. Wealth creation is now predicated on knowledge and technological competence matched with creativity and perspicacity. Schools and colleges are about knowledge - generation, dissemination and acquisition. Schools and colleges are, therefore, seen as focal points in the knowledge network centrepiece of community access that can interface with the information and communications technology infrastructure. As information and communication resources are established in schools and colleges, they must serve the wider communities in which they are located with respect to access and training in their use. In this regard, the sharp boundaries of in school and out-of-school will be blurred and rendered ambiguous in meaning.