A Survey on ICT Education at the Secondary and Higher Secondary Levels in Bangladesh

Abstract

In this study, we show the status of ICT education and find the gaps between rural and urban institutions for providing ICT education in secondary and higher secondary institutions in Bangladesh. For this purpose, we use primary data collected using a survey questionnaire that is answered by ICT teachers engaged in those institutions. The variables used in the questionnaire are the name of the respondents, educational qualification, locations of the institutions, syllabus structure, the total number of students for ICT courses, number of computers, etc. The data were collected from institutions located in urban and rural areas. We apply several statistical functions along with conditional logic to our data for getting the desired result. We find that the students-teacher ratio in secondary (resp., higher secondary) is about 288:1 (resp., 212:1), existing teachers have a heavy academic workload. We also find that there exist low facilities in rural institutions compared to the urban institutions because students-computer ratio (SCR) is 46 in rural areas whereas SCR is 22 in the urban area. Moreover, we find that more than 80% of the teachers conducting ICT classes have graduated from the discipline other than ICT or related discipline. Furthermore, teachers who cannot complete at least 80% of the ICT syllabus in time are mostly non-ICT graduate. Based on these findings, we propose some recommendations to meet the above gaps of the current ICT education in Bangladesh.