**2. Teachers' professional development: The contexts of the Global South**

In the Global South, millions of children have no access to schooling and no opportunity to engage with any teacher at all. Teachers' professional development has become a policy priority for all nations across the globe. For most countries in the Global South there is an acknowledgement that the quality of teacher education and extent of the provision of training will need to be increased. In many countries explicit policies to improve the level of qualification, to establish meaningful forms of career long professional development and to enhance the status and education level of teachers are being put in place. The institutional structures and capacities are completely inadequate for providing quality teacher education as well as overcoming the challenges for the scale required of this century.

The provision of a high quality professional development programme for teachers in the Global South represents one of the critical educational challenges for the 21st century. For instance, in Bangladesh, 1 in 5 teachers have no teaching qualification (UNESCO Institute for Statistics [UIS], 2006). The quality of education and training of teachers is central to the success of the EFA campaign worldwide and 'schools and teachers remain central to the achievement of a quality education process' (Yates, 2007, 2). Millions of unqualified teachers are already working in schools in the Global South. They need professional training and access to qualifications to improve their skills and knowledge. There is a pressing need for continuous professional development (CPD) programmes for teachers who are already qualified. If that is to be school based, then it follows that some form of supported self-study seems the only feasible and appropriate way forward (Moon, 2003).

The emerging technology is going to be a solution for teachers' professional development in meeting the crisis of inadequate teacher supply in the Global South. By using school-based training, the Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) project is working for teachers and student teachers in 12 African countries. Led by the Open University (OU) UK, the TESSA project brings together 20 universities and organisations across those countries involoved, giving teachers access to high-quality resources which they can use to develop their own practices without leaving the school. As a result, TESSA's open educational resources (OER) provide ODL opportunities for disadvantaged teachers in remote areas, this way of training and developing their own skills and gaining resources is invaluable. The OU is also working in the South Asian countries, specially in Bangladesh to develop teaching and learning materials as well as teachers' professional development programmes. Teachers as specialists in learning recognise that the new technology which they will be exploiting in their own teaching have the potential to be an important means of their own professional development (Shohel and Banks, 2010). Therefore, the OU is creating opportunities of open and distance learning for teachers' by introducing mobile technologies for enhancing teaching and learning in resource constrained contexts.

School-based supported ODL provides a more effective way for the in-service teachers to put into practice compared to face-to-face traditional training away from their schools. Since supported ODL for teachers' professional development programme provides opportunities for teachers to apply and experiment with the pedagogical techniques that they are learning, rather than waiting until after the training period to do so. Similarly, case studies of teachers' professional development in the Global South show that open and distance learning can be used for all four components of teacher education such as for general education, to strengthen teachers' knowledge of the subject, in teaching pedagogy and child development, and as a guide towards good classroom practice (Perraton, 2007).
