KUCHING: The Sarawak campus of the Swinburne University of Technology will help to overcome the shortage of trained teachers in the state by offering a course for those interested to become educators.
This will help to address the 41,000 vacancies for teaching posts in the state.
The Australian university's vice chancellor Professor Lau Hieng Ho said the first intake to the Diploma in Education course will start in the first half of next year.
Lau said the course was offered in response to the Sarawak government's appeal to address the shortage of teachers in the state.
He said this during the Raspberry Pi training programme for teachers here which was launched by Sarawak Education, Innovation and Talent Development Minister Datuk Seri Roland Sagah.
The university is the main coordinating partner of the Sarawak Education, Innovation and Talent Development Ministry for a training module involving of the Raspberry Pi, which is a tiny computer developed in the United Kingdom.
The computer provides an inexpensive tool for teaching basic computer science in schools in developing countries.
During the state assembly sitting last month, Sagah had said the ministry would look into the issue of teacher shortage holistically and would work with the state Education Department on it.