We have just completed three years of publishing the World Bank’s EduTech blog.  As we did at the end of 2010 and 2009, we have put together a consolidated list of ‘top posts’ from the last year. 

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The EduTech blog is meant to provide an informal way to share information about some of the things (projects, challenges, technologies, approaches) that we think might be of interest to a wider audience, especially in so-called “developing countries”, hopefully serving in some modest way to promote greater transparency related to some of the sorts of information, conversations and discussions that previously were accessible only to limited groups of stakeholders and partners with whom the World Bank is in regular dialogue.

There is no shortage of blogs that focus on educational technology issues.  The vast majority of the ones available in English are written by and for people working in schools and education systems in the United States, Canada, the UK and other places in Europe, Australia, etc.  While we are certainly happy when *anyone* reads our short weekly posts, this is decidedly *not* our target audience. (People interested in that sort of thing are directed to the lists of excellent educational technology blogs available here.)

On the EduTech blog, our goal each week is to “explore issues related to the use of information and communication technologies to benefit education in developing countries”, and it is through this prism that we always try to view things. Most posts are actually extensions of, or complements to, on-going conversations that we are having with various groups about particular projects and, truth be told, we often write a post with an explicit target audience of just a handful of people in mind.  That said, we are quite happy that we seem to have found a pretty wide and dedicated weekly readership.

International development institutions are often seen as notoriously traditional and hidebound institutions, especially in their embrace of new technologies, and by publishing (nearly) every week, we hope to demonstrate to various partners within the UN and international development community, as well as our partners in government around the world, that it is possible to share information quickly and cheaply with interested groups in ways that are a bit more idiosyncratic, and possibly more interesting, than via a press release touting the achievement of some milestone or a dense paper that goes through a lengthy review process before finding a wider audience.  Both of those mechanisms obviously have their place. 

That said, based on personal experience with this blog, I find that the immediacy and wide readership of some blog posts prove useful to advance dialogue on some topics in ways that other ‘traditional’ publishing mechanisms is less suited to do. (Yes, this may be old news to many readers — this paragraph isn’t directed at you.) Whereas press releases and more formal academic papers often signal the end of a process of some sort, this blog is often used to spark conversation about starting something new, in places where some of the topics or ideas or approaches are not widely known.

So: That’s enough preface.  Below is a collection of top posts from 2011.  There were fewer posts to pick from this year, given that we suspended publication for three months due to other commitments (and from sheer exhaustion — maintaining the blog remains a largely ‘extracurricular’ activity), but we hope that you found something of interest and relevance to your work.

Top World Bank EduTech Blog Posts of 2011

10. Reporting back from eLearning Africa 2011 & Education & Technology in Africa: Creating Takers … or Makers? & eLearning, Africa, and … China?
Collectively, these three posts about the use of ICT in education in Africa — all occasioned by 2011′s eLearning Africa event in Tanzania — were widely re-circulated.

9. Crowdsourcing, collaborative learning or cheating?
The introduction of computers often challenges educators, parents, communities and educational systems in ways that are poorly anticipated.  This post looked at how the ability to communicate instantaneously, and to cut and paste, highlights some of the issues at the core of what it means to ‘educate’ someone in the 21st century.

8. Using ICTs in schools with no electricity
In many places in the world, the ‘digital divide’ is as much about access to electricity as it is about access to the Internet and computing resources in general.

extra: Latin America
When people ask about where educational technologies are being widely used in ‘developing countries’, many instinctively look to Asia for answers.  The fast pace of changes and initiatives in Latin America — like in Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal — is attracting greater interest around the world, and was the subject of many blog posts in 2011, including What’s next for Plan Ceibal in Uruguay?, One-to-one computing in Latin America & the Caribbean, Educational Technology Use in the Caribbean and Surveying ICT use in education in Brazil.

7. The Aakash, India’s $35 (?) Tablet for Education
Interest in a cheap computing device for students shows no sign of abating.  The latest gadget to grab headlines is India’s Aakash — this post described a visit to the World Bank by the head of the company that makes it.

6. Running your own FAILfaire
No one gets promoted for failing. So why talk about it?  And even if you do want to talk about it: How can you do it without getting fired?  This post draws on lessons from a number of FAILfaire events that have been held at the World Bank to help share lessons about what hasn’t worked in the past, in the hope that this might provide some useful guidance and perspective for people contemplating similar things in the future.

5. When students are in charge of maintaining the computers in schools
Few education systems provide sufficient budgets to ensure that computers in schools remain in working order. This post looked at an interesting initiative that enlists the help of students to keep everything running.

extra What Are the Costs of Not Investing in ICTs in Education?
Whether one agrees with such a question, it is commonly asked (if not rigorously considered) as an important part of considerations of large-scale investments in ICTs in the education sector in many countries.

4. What happens when all textbooks are (only) digital? Ask the Koreans! & e-Learning in Korea in 2011 and beyond
The bold decision by educational leaders in South Korea to introduce digital textbooks in all subjects at all levels by the middle of the decade is being closely watched around the world.  This is a topic that we will continue to revisit over time, especially given the close partnership between the World Bank and Korea exploring how best to support the effective and relevant use of ICTs in education in developing countries.

3. SMS education in Pakistan & More on SMS use in education in Pakistan
There is much hype about potential uses of mobile phones in education.  A lot of this excitement is related to the potential for applications running on high-end smartphones.  What about the types of low-end phones most people in the world actually use?  These two posts looked briefly at one World Bank-sponsored initiative in Pakistan.

extra Education & Technology in 2025: A Thought Experiment
This short blog post tried to turn a common discussion held at ministries of education about the use of educational technologies on its head, asking If costs weren’t an issue, what would you be seeking to do with technology to support learning? Would this change your perspective on the role of ICTs from what it is now?

2. School computer labs: A bad idea?
Sometimes it is useful to take a step back and ask: Do we need to change some of our fundamental approaches to how and where we consider the use of educational technologies? The concept — and reality — of a computer lab is central to the use of new technologies in most schools in developing countries. Should it be? This short post ignited a lot of discussion in a number of places.

1. Mobile learning in developing countries in 2011: What’s new, what’s next?
As in past years, the topic of mobile phone use in education continued to draw lots of readers to the EduTech blog.  Will 2012 finally be the year where this topic breaks into the mainstream in some new places?

While blog posts are often meant by their very nature to be rather ephemeral, a number of EduTech posts from earlier years enjoyed strong readership in 2011, including Worst practice in ICT use in education, 10 Global Trends in ICT and Education, and pretty much anything about mobile phones.  The lists of top posts from 2009 and 2010 may also be of interest. An easy way to be informed of new posts on the EduTech blog is to follow us on Twitter @WBedutech and/or to subscribe to our RSS feed (we put the complete text in the feed, to make it easy to read off-line and/or to re-publish on other sites).

Finally, an end-of-year “shout-out” to our sister site, the Educational Technology Debate, which continues to spark interesting discussion through regular contributions from a wide variety of people from different backgrounds; the main World Bank education sector blog (where EduTech items are occasionally cross-posted) and IC4D blog (not sure where the “T” got lost); and a general thank you to a number of international development-themed blogs, from one-man-shows to collective endeavors of various sorts, from which I continue to draw inspiration, and which regularly provoke me to think about things I often don’t think about it — or which challenge me to about things I do think about but in different ways. Happy New Year!

Note: The image used at the top of this blog post of the celebration of the 750th anniversary of the founding of Berlin (“lots of people celebrating another happy birthday”) comes from the German Federal Archive via Wikimedia Commons and is used according to the terms of its Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license. (Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1987-0704-015 / Schindler, Karl-Heinz / CC-BY-SA)

This mode of education was first introduced by the World Bank, through its African Virtual University (AVU) project, that worked with Makerere as a Partner Institution. The experiences and lessons have enabled the University adapt to the changes within its context.

Emerging trends and best practices

There are emerging trends in ICT usage which can be utilized in the various segments of the Education spectrum.

Ubiquity:The growing ubiquity of mobile devices has provided opportunities for their use in education. The expansion of Smart phone growth in all areas has given rise to more educational opportunities in teaching, learning, supervision and assessment, in the process expanding ICT applicability.

Affordability: In the last few years, there has been a growing interest in lowering the costs of connectivity of telecommunication services to a reasonable level. Competition in the sector has offered more people access and utilization of these services. Outside voice transmission, there are now provisions of banking services, payment of rates and utilities, dissemination of results, electronic applications and many others.

Richness: The mix of digital educational resources has enabled various affordances to be explored. The internet, the mobile phones, the podcasters, Web 2.0 tools are some of the resources which have eased content delivery. This richness allows for users to adapt and use them in education and other sectors.

Opportunities and Challenges

Foremost has been the Development Partners’ willingness and contribution in supporting various initiatives, either in terms of infrastructural development, research, capacity building or piloting emerging online teaching methods. They have been particularly amiable towards ICT related projects. Their role has accelerated Makerere’s rate of adoption and adaptation.

Secondly, the staff members went for further studies or attended workshops outside the country and got exposed to some of the online tools like Web 2.0. On their return, they shared, exposed their colleagues in their use and used them in their teaching, research or in supervision.

Thirdly the proliferation of several affordable mobile devices in the country has created opportunities for inclusion of multimedia content towards teaching, learning and research, in the process enhancing both the lecturers’ and students’ abilities.

However, there have been several challenges in the implementation of Online learning. Foremost has been the slow pace of its full integration in the University system due to the restrictive budgetary allocation. This has affected the rate of implementation of online activities.

The bulk of support has tended to come from Development Partners who have ensured that online activities are functional. The University needs to provide a conducive environment for e-learning support to keep abreast with the current educational trends. This could be in terms of specialized equipment, acquisition of software required for the design of electronic content and a commitment to build the necessary capacity for staff to use it in the preparation of their content.

Secondly, the readiness of academic staff to participate in electronic learning is still wanting despite training over 30% of the lecturers since 2005. Most of those trained never translate their training into developing online courses either as a result of a fixed mind set or fear of extra workload. Presently there are only about 30% of total courses created in the system which can be said to be active.

Thirdly, like most Sub Saharan African countries, the use of ICT in Uganda is still new, rare, and prevalent to a specific age group. Unfortunately, that age group is not at decision making level which makes it difficult for them to make or influence policy. In a recent PHEA (Partnership for Higher Education in Africa) ICT study, usage of ICT was more prevalent among the Lecturers and below than the Lecturers and above categories. Most lecturers are stuck with the chalk and talk teaching method with very low adaptation rate. Sensitization and some motivational methods could be used to reward early adapters.

Fourthly, there is the widespread challenge in accessing and using Internet, despite the Seacom cable promise. While accessibility is intermittent, the regular power outage has not helped the situation either. To date there are many students who cannot activate their emails and usually find it difficult to get around the system despite being given direction by their lecturers. This is either due to a phobia or lack of skills which need to be addressed.

Provision of Content

Most of the content in the LMS is not interactive. A number of lecturers have tended to use the system as a repository rather than as a learning tool. This lack of integration into the teaching process does not encourage students to be enthusiastic about this mode of learning. To date, only 50 courses have been designed and quality assured by pedagogical experts and is being used as model courses. Despite this, a lot needs to be done to reach a level where it is appreciated as fully online courses.

There is need to train more people to handle student support otherwise many who are interested might be put off. The support should be in form of educational counsellors, with empathy and capacity to handle online student frustration.

Furthermore, online support requires much time to be spent on students. This has raised motivational concern from lecturers especially during training. Devising a reward scheme would motivate those involved in the delivery of online content.

Finally, assessment methods have been contentious in terms of inadequacy and policy. There is need to design multiple assessment methods to ensure that trust is built in the entire online process. A well thought out approach needs to be used for its success.

Due to slow internet, streaming and buffering of online sessions and downloading session modules is difficult. This is compounded by factors like power failure and system malfunctioning. In addition, the software associated with online learning requires minimum computer specifications. Its absence, and the large number of people accessing the services, often causes the system to crash. There is need to fit the Institution’s requirements with user capabilities to ensure that online learning is effective.

Lastly, a strong ICT team is needed to support, and make regular system updates to safeguard against intruders and sustain a seamless system. Presently, there is no dedicated team to do so although this falls within the ICT Support Directorate’s mandate.

Reflections

There are a number of questions which require some answers. For instance, there has been an increase in the use of social networks especially among the students in the university. It is acknowledged that these networks increase collaboration and team work. Within our own context, how much of it can be incorporated in Teaching and Learning especially as there are many lecturers who are not very keen to join these networks? How much creativity does it promote given that most of the students use it for social relations?

In most institutions the use of computers has been relegated to computer literacy (using MS office). This is a common phenomenon in most educational institutions. How much ICT can be integrated in teaching and learning (where technology facilitates learning across the curriculum)?

Of more concern is the present disparity in access and use of ICTs in education. Is it likely to widen divisions along economic, social, cultural, geographic, and gender lines?

Recommendations

I would like to make four recommendations arising from the Makerere experience. Firstly, there is need for ICT policy to be formulated at various levels, for primary, secondary and tertiary institutions. The policy should spell out the road map on how ICT is integrated into education and the role each stakeholder should play in the delivery of content. This will assist many educational institutions including a number of Universities in Uganda.

Secondly, the Intellectual Property Laws need to be well articulated and publicized in view of the online resources which are currently developed under Creative Commons license. Many people in Uganda are not aware of this alternative license scheme and are therefore reluctant to upload their content for public consumption.

Thirdly, the lack of Quality Assurance Framework for Online Education in Sub Saharan Africa is a very serious matter. There is need for an urgent and concerted effort to have this in place if we have to have quality digital learning environment.

Lastly we need to identify champions who are prepared to take Online Education to the next level. In doing this we need to ensure there are adequate ICT facilities in selected tertiary institutions for students and teachers to use. This can be followed by identifying the actual people who are ready to take this process to the next level. The resultant effect will have a multiplier effect and ensure that more people are aware of the potential benefits of ICT in education.

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Internet2 (USA) shares a key characteristic with other National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) and that is provision of connectivity to multiple universities. However, Internet2 is organized as not-for-profit whereas some NRENS are government/ministry based. Internet2 takes pride in being community led and member focused.

Internet2’s core mission is “to ensure that scholars and researchers have access to the advanced networks, tools and support required for the next generation of collaborative discovery and innovation and for effectively preparing the next generation of innovators, our students”.

Started in 1996 with 34 universities, Internet2 now has 372 members and 131 sponsored education group participants. Members include U.S. universities, corporations, government research agencies, and not-for-profit networking organizations representing over 50 countries. Internet2 membership is by institution and has been restructured into four levels based on the Carnegie Classification assignment for Higher Education members, operating budgets for Affiliate members and revenues for Industry members. These levels determine membership dues and fees.

EMERGING TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICE EXAMPLES

Expanding to a broader education community
To bring more innovators to the table, the Internet2 developed a K20 Initiative to connect university members to the broader education community through a process called Sponsored Education Group Participants. The result is connection to the Internet2 backbone network of 66,000 Community Anchor Institutions (CAI) in 38 U.S. states. CAIs are community-based organizations that include K-12 schools, libraries, community colleges, health centers, hospitals and public safety organizations.

The plan is to extend the network to 200,000 CAI through a Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) grant. The $62.5 million grant will upgrade the Internet2 Network to an 8.8 Terabit per second national network. The infrastructure will serve not only the Internet2 members but also 200,000 CAIs. Since CAIS are not Internet2′s traditional research university members, a different network, U.S. Community Anchor Network (CAN) was established to bring together the diverse voices of CAIs, with start-up costs provided by Internet2 and other partners. Thus, the physical infrastructure will be shared by Internet2 and U.S. CAN; however, Internet2 will focus on network R&D needs of its members while U.S. CAN will tailor its programs to the various community anchor sectors.

Opening Internet2 membership to industry partners has reciprocal benefits.
Benefits from industry include significant contributions in support of the development and deployment of advanced, Internet applications and services, including donations of equipment, cash, software, personnel, consulting, and services. By serving on Internet2’s Board of Trustees and its advisory councils, industry members make available valuable input and strategic guidance on advanced networking in research and education. Benefits to industry partners include ability to interact with current and prospective customers, showcase products and services, acquire market and user intelligence, tap and recruit university talent, and discover new market opportunities, among other things.

The governance structure is member-led and member-focused.
The Board of Trustees is inclusive, consisting of representatives, from members, including university presidents and CIOs, and leaders from industry and research agencies. The Board offers leadership, strategic direction, and oversight.

The size and diversity of its membership require advisory councils, again coming from its membership, for its many services–Applications and Middleware, Architecture and Operations, External Relations, and Research. These Advisory Councils guide strategic planning and implementation, help set organizational priorities, and ensure that Internet2 continues to serve the needs of the research and education community members.

Members are engaged and opportunities for membership engagement abound through a variety of Working Group activities, such as:

• Development efforts in network infrastructure, network performance, middleware, applications, and security, and;
• Discovery, research, and collaboration in discipline areas, such as the arts and humanities, health sciences, and sciences and engineering.

Members have access to a comprehensive menu of services, tools, capacity building, and R&D. Examples include access to:

• A systems approach to high performance networking provides a wide range of integrated services, from dark fiber to production IP and optical networking, to middleware and advanced applications. The network is designed to deliver next-generation production services and serves as a development platform for new networking ideas and protocols. The Internet2 Network is scalable to meet bandwidth-intensive requirements of collaborative applications, distributed research experiments, grid-based data analysis and social networking. The network will be upgraded with the BTOP grant mentioned above.
• The Internet2 Commons is a suite of tools that integrate presence, instant messaging, chat, voice, video, data and application sharing. It now offers cloud-based interoperable video services from tele-presence to videoconferencing to desktop and mobile tools.
• The pS-Performance Toolkit includes a pre-configured suite of network performance tools for collection, storage and analysis of network performance data.
• InCommon is a framework for inter-institutional authentication and authorization to enable secure access of protected online network services and resources.
• The U.S. Higher Education Root (USHER) acts as a public key infrastructure (PKI) solution for the higher education community for applications and services that require encryption or true digital signature technologies.
• Internet2 workshops provide participants with the opportunity to learn about and experiment with advanced networking technologies. Workshop topics include: Hot Topics in Identity Management and Federated Identity Management, Network Performance, IPv6, Campus Architecture and Middleware Planning, Digital Video Transport System, Performing Arts and Master Class production to advance the frontiers of high-performance networking in service of research and education.

OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES, SUCCESS FACTORS AND BARRIERS TO WIDER DISSEMINATION AND TAKE UP

The July 2008 strategic plan indicates commitment to “continuous innovation and sustained leadership”. The plan is under review to enable Internet2 to respond to the following 2010 opportunities:

• Involvement in “Community Commons” tools for “computing and services above the campus,” including collaboration tools, cloud computing services, and other initiatives so that campuses are able to better leverage each other’s resources.
• Participation in major U.S. federal programs and policy initiatives that define the future of advanced networking for the research and education community, other community anchor institutions, as well as the general public in the U.S. and worldwide.
• Leadership in shaping and investing in U.S. federal policy development and advocacy and reinforcing the role that the research and education (R&E) community has played, and continuing to provide intellectual leadership in advanced networking and in research and education in network policy in the U.S.
• Recognition that research is a global enterprise requiring (i) support for Internet2 member universities with international programs and with campuses abroad, and, (ii) support for U.S.-based researchers to have the same levels of high-bandwidth access that they have for domestic as well as for international research resources. This recognition will entail working with other nations and regions of the world with regard to the development of a global broadband.
• The best practices highlighted in Section I contribute to success in the achievement of Internet2’s core mission. Success factors include remaining focused on core mission; membership that is inclusive of university, industry, and government agencies that are involved in network R&D; tapping members for leadership roles, governance, and active engagement through working groups; and outreach to the broader education community, including to the global education community. One success factor is showcasing advanced networking efforts among its members. Internet2 recognizes and awards applications of advanced networking that show progress in research, scholarship, collaboration, teaching and learning not only by researchers and faculty but also by students.
• As with any NREN, barriers arise from the fact that the membership is by institution, yet institutions are made of people who may not be inclined to participate due to lack of interest, lack of time, lack of perception of individual benefit, lack of trust, and lack of knowledge to use the advanced applications. In January 2005, faculty and researchers at a member university indicated they still “experience significant barriers in creating and using advanced applications. “ Among the barriers identified were lack of ubiquitous help identifying and solving performance problems; lack of well-integrated and easy-to-use tools for human collaboration; and lack of secure, authenticated access to data and resources. It appears that technology solutions now address these barriers but getting faculty and researchers to embrace these solutions probably remains an obstacle to full utilization of the high performance network.

REFLECTIONS

Clearly, the immediate benefit of Internet2 is connection to a high performance network by its members. This infrastructure allows for collaboration with Internet2 university, industry, government research agencies and not for profit networking organizations on network R&D and discipline specific applications. Member benefits include access to services and tools, such as middleware and other Internet2 commons; updated knowledge on advanced Internet technologies and innovations for technology transfer; market opportunities; and, development of new projects with other Internet2 members. However, full utilization of the high performance network and all its applications is probably not equal among the faculty and researchers and students that make up the member institutions.

It is also worth stating the obvious: that Internet2 serves members primarily from the U.S. and that a regional or Africa-wide REN will necessarily have to deal with many countries with competing interests. While Internet2 has Special Interest Group on Emerging NRENs, NRENS can perhaps look to Internet2 for knowledge exchange, collaborative network research and development, and test the suitability and relevance of the Internet2 network applications, middleware, software and other tools. At the same time, NRENs should be able to offer up their own success stories, particularly in the use of mobile phones for applications and content delivery. NRENs should be able to facilitate discussion on a global commons for research and education not only in networking but also in discipline specific areas.

While working in Afghanistan a Chief of Party for the Afghan eQuality Alliances, I had a chance to participate, along with our project partners from Kabul University, Ministry of Higher Education, and the Ministry of Communications, in a video conference call with the South Asia Interest Group in 2007. The purpose of the Group was to keep each other up-to-date about activities/needs/projects in the region; raise issues important to the region and help guide additional activities to enhance R&E network connectivity within and to the region. The Afghan participants were able to share what their thinking was with regards to an NREN and what initial steps were being done. The Afghans appreciated hearing about the NRENs in other countries. I sense a disconnect between expectations on what Internet2 can deliver versus the constraints faced by Internet2 in collaborating with under-resourced potential partners.

RECOMMENDATIONS: ON THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT IN THE PROVISION OF PRIORITY ICT APPLICATIONS AND SERVICES IN ORDER TO MAXIMIZE PRIVATE SECTOR DEVELOPMENT

• Develop a broad set of policies, including funding, to protect and encourage competition in the private sector markets that make up the broadband ecosystem (including wireless broadband): network services, devices, applications and content.
• Establish technical broadband (including wireless broadband) performance measurement standards and methodology, with the help of NRENs.
• Support and promote online learning by: funding development of innovative broadband-enabled (including wireless broadband) online learning solutions; encouraging copyright holders to grant educational digital rights of use or offer some of their content to the creative commons; and, establishing standards for locating, sharing and licensing digital educational content across institutions and national boundaries.
• Modify the e-rate program to support modernizing educational broadband infrastructure.
• Encourage the formation of an NREN and a regional or Africa-wide REN that would:
  1. Fill the R&D investment gap by funding network research that would yield net benefits to society
  2. Operate a national and a regional or Africa-wide REN
  3. Provide advocacy on the set of policies, including financing, of the broadband ecosystem at the national, regional and Africa-wide level
  4. Ensure access to standard-based tools and services
  5. Act as the R&E commons for evaluating and adapting software, middleware, and other network tools and services for deployment to and adaption by member institutions.
  6. Promote innovation and technology with industry members
  7. Provide enhanced information technology (IT) applications training, such as applications for e-learning, e-government and e-commerce.

This discussion is part of the eTranform Africa initiative.

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I will describe an initiative of the Washington state community and technical colleges called the Open Course Library (OCL). The Open Course Library is a large-scale curriculum redesign effort leveraging a variety of existing Open Educational Resources (OER) as well as original content by our faculty course designers. I will also discuss the advantages of open educational content that prompted our state agency to invest in the development of education content and to require the resulting digital course materials be shared under a Creative Commons open license. To give context to the Open Course Library I will start by providing some background on our college system, our Strategic Technology Plan, and the formal adoption of an open licensing policy.

The State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) is an organization that provides leadership and coordination for Washington’s public system of 34 community and technical colleges. Based on the current Annual Enrollment Report (PDF), the number of students attending our colleges is 470,000 and climbing. This is the highest enrollment level in SBCTC history, with most of the increase due to growth in eLearning. One reason for this growth is that more students are able to fit school into their busy schedules by attending hybrid and fully online classes.

Technology certainly plays a role in making educational opportunities available to a wider population of students. For example, colleges in Washington are able to offer students a broader range of courses through a network called Washington Online system-shared courses. This “pooled enrollment” model allows smaller colleges to extend their course offerings to include those of partner colleges. At the same time it provides a way for colleges offering less common courses to fill them with students from other colleges. SBCTC provides the technology and system-level policies to enable system-shared courses.

In 2008, SBCTC released its Strategic Technology Plan (PDF) to provide clear policy direction around a single goal: mobilizing technology to increase student success. One of the guiding principles of the plan is to “cultivate the culture and practice of using and contributing to open educational resources” (p. 17). With a clear plan in place the next step was to provide opportunities, incentives, and policies to promote OER in our system. On June 17, 2010 the nine-member State Board for Community and Technical Colleges unanimously approved the first state-level open licensing policy (PDF). It requires that all digital works created from competitive grants administered through SBCTC carry a Creative Commons Attribution-only (CC-BY) license. This license allows educational materials created by one college to be used or updated by another college in our system as well as by other education partners globally. Allowing the free flow of all educational content produced by State Board competitive grant funds is an efficient way to engage in the OER movement while maintaining a focus on the specific needs of Washington’s community and technical college students.

Building on the Strategic Technology Plan, eLearning Director Cable Green launched the Open Course Library in 2010, an initiative to design and openly share 81 high enrollment, gatekeeper and pre-college courses. The goals of the OCL project include:

1. lowering textbook costs for students,
2. providing new resources for faculty to use in their courses, and
3. fully engaging in the global open educational resources discussion.

OCL participants are selected through a competitive grant proposal process. Each winning faculty member or team of faculty designs one course. Each of the 81 course teams is directly supported by a librarian, two instructional designers, and an eLearning director. All teams receive additional support from two institutional researchers, 2 accessibility specialists, and a multicultural expert.

Another important consideration is how we will share the 81 OCL courses at the end of each phase. Internal sharing is easy because of our existing WAOL system-shared courses framework. We will include a copy of the full course in our share course system so it can be viewed and copied by faculty in any of our 34 colleges. For external sharing we have partnered with Connexions and with the Saylor Foundation. Connexions will host our downloadable course packages in two popular formats and Saylor.org will make our course content modular and easy to search and view online.

Open Course Library development will occur in two phases. The first 42 courses are being developed in phase 1, to be released in fall 2011. The remaining courses will be designed in phase 2 and completed by early 2013. Each phase is spread over four college quarters. In phase 1, the first two quarters (summer/fall 2010) were spent designing course objectives, finding appropriate OER content, and creating assessments that aligned with the content. Faculty course designers worked closely with their assigned instructional designers (IDs) during this time to ensure that assignments and assessments are tied to course objectives. Faculty then pilot taught their newly designed curriculum at their college during the third quarter (winter 2011). They used feedback from two peer reviews and the course pilot to make updates to the course during the fourth quarter (spring 2011). Phase 2 will follow the same, four-quarter timeline and will benefit from lessons learned in phase 1.

It is important to emphasize that SBCTC will not mandate the use of Open Course Library materials within our system. But we are already getting positive feedback from students who are grateful they don’t have to pay $200 for a textbook. Because these are open, digital resources anyone will be able to access, modify, adapt, translate, and improve the Open Course Library materials. The cost of making a million copies of digital materials is not much more than the cost of the first copy, and print-on-demand solutions are making print copies very affordable as well.

As we look beyond the content development process, the next major challenge is to increase the adoption of these OCL courses. We will start by making it as easy as possible for our faculty to find, browse, and copy OCL course content. We will train newly hired faculty so they are aware of the Open Course Library content available to them as they are developing their lesson materials. Other ideas include adoption incentives for faculty who teach with OCL courses for several quarters. In addition to boosting adoption, this would also give us an opportunity to measure student performance in OCL vs. regular courses. As we look for ways to encourage a culture of OER use and sharing in Washington’s community and technical colleges we must create opportunities for Open Course Library content to be adopted, updated, maintained, and shared back with our system and with the world.

Commonwealth of Learning has described OER as “digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and re-use for teaching, learning and research”. Knowledge and educational materials became accessible in ways that were hitherto extremely restricted. The value of such resources to educational institutions in developing countries is even more significant considering the many challenges they face as the resource constraints deepen and student intake increases.

Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), like other institutions in developing countries, has had to deal with an ever increasing number of students, inadequate faculty, insufficient funding, resource constraints, limited infrastructural capacity, low research capacity, and basic ICT infrastructure among other challenges.

For example, the School of Medical Sciences which was originally expected to admit a maximum of 50 students per annum, has for the past 15 years enrolled more than 100 students a year without a commensurate expansion in resources and infrastructure. These challenges and the need to maintain the quality of the educational experience make the use of OER at KNUST attractive.

KNUST’s steps into OER

The first encounter of KNUST leadership with OER was at a workshop held in Accra in 2008 and jointly sponsored by the Hewlett and Soros Foundations. The potential of OER in addressing some of the challenges faced by the College of Health Sciences in delivering quality educational content to clinical students was highlighted. Subsequent workshops at the Institute of Medicine in Washington DC and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor the same year threw more light on OER.

In 2009, KNUST, through its College of Health Sciences (CHS), became part of an OER collaborative project funded by the Hewlett Foundation. The partners included the University of Michigan (UM), OER Africa, University of Ghana, University of Cape Town, and the University of Western Cape.

Under the project sensitization, policy and production workshops were organized for administrative heads and faculty members which brought together staff from the College of Health Sciences, the KNUST library, the ICT Directorate, the Department of Communication Design and other parts of the university. This was part of a strategy to build a multidisciplinary team for the development and use of OER at KNUST. The OER concept was embraced with a great deal of enthusiasm, demonstrated by the several pilot e-learning and OER projects that were proposed by the faculty members who attended the first production workshops. A professor of internal medicine was subsequently appointed to coordinate OER activities in the College.

Faculty members began creating instructional modules on self-selected topics in their areas of expertise using various formats. Authoring faculty proposed the specific subject and type of material to be developed. They received technical support from media specialists and web designers to create appropriate and user-friendly content and designs suitable for publication. Reviewers then checked the materials for copyright and other issues prior to their publication by the web administration team on KNUST’s dedicated OER website which serves as a repository for the university’s OER materials.

The process took advantage of the diverse expertise at the university to ensure efficient production of OER. The development of e-learning materials for teaching and learning in the College was also accelerated by the introduction of OER. The College benefited from the assistance of a visiting professor from the University of Michigan who spent one year at KNUST and dedicated most of his time helping faculty with OER development. Materials developed included medical, psychiatric, and obstetric case studies; clinical demonstrations as well as surgical and laboratory procedures using various formats such as videos, text and narrations; and the use of drawings, animations, graphs and other illustrations to enhance the learning experience. During the first six months, KNUST faculty completed seven (7) OERs from scratch with many more at various stages of completion.

Impact

Even though no sustained systematic evaluation has been undertaken regarding the use of OER the benefits of these locally produced materials as well as their impact on teaching and learning became evident even at the early stages. Students considered the productions as a valuable enhancement, but not a substitute, to the traditional forms of pedagogy. Combining the traditional in-class learning environment with OERs enhanced self-learning and resulted in more quality contact between learners and faculty as students were already familiar with the material. The use of videos, animations and other illustrations also made complex and difficult-to-grasp scientific processes such as PCR and laboratory procedures easier to understand.

The use of OERs promoted access on demand by students, better contact with the learning materials, learning at learner’s own pace and learner-centred approaches in teaching and learning. It facilitated the demonstration of clinical skills at the bedside and in the operating theatre to a large number of students. Students had access to a wide range of content outside the local resources. These benefits to both learners and teachers increased the acceptance of OER in the College of Health Sciences.

Challenges

The initial enthusiasm about OER was followed by a decline in the number of faculty actively producing them. This was attributed to a number of unanticipated challenges. For instance production required additional effort which was not rewarded. Other challenges included the lack of administrative, technical and infrastructural support for faculty; non-release of over-committed faculty from regular commitments to make time for OER related activities; and funding constraints which became more apparent as the programme grew.

The few faculty members who continued to produce OER were mainly self-motivated. Others engaged in it as a form of electronic “hobby”. As the OER efforts at KNUST were part of a project based in the College of Health Sciences, wider institutional awareness, interest and support were lacking. It became evident therefore that the existence of an OER policy of the university was necessary in order to ensure its growth and sustainability.

Policy Environment

Establishing an overarching policy framework which is conducive to the creation and use of OER in KNUST was identified as a critical step if the OER initiative was to succeed. During the early stages, a workshop was held for the relevant administrative heads at KNUST to introduce the concept. Additionally, a review of the current institutional policies identified the need for an appropriate policy framework for OER. A committee was set up in 2009 to draft a policy on OER which was approved by the KNUST Academic Board in 2010 and published online in 2011.

The policy seeks to address issues regarding human resource and budgetary allocation, infrastructure, collaborations, publication rights and licensing, technical support, review process and quality assurance, access, potential liability, motivation and academic rewards among other things. The policy for instance, states KNUST’s adoption of the Creative Commons licenses. The policy also addresses some of the challenges outlined earlier and paves the way for the institution-wide adoption of the OER initiative. The OER policy for KNUST, the first such policy in Africa, is ready for implementation and it is our hope that it will positively impact on teaching and learning across all disciplines in the university.

Conclusion & Recommendations

The experience of KNUST and the College of Health Sciences in particular, revealed vast opportunities that OER brings to education. These include helping improve the quality of education, widening access to learning far beyond what is locally available to learners and reducing the costs of accessing educational materials.

The experience also brought valuable lessons to the fore which could be useful for educators, policy makers and other stakeholders interested in a sustained use of OER in education. Early institutional ownership and integration, the development and implementation of an appropriate policy, wider stakeholder involvement including the Ministry of Education, faculty, and students, as well as sustainable funding and investments are essential factors in any OER initiative. It is also critical to incorporate the development and use of OERs into the regular teaching and learning processes, develop appropriate quality assurance processes, and metrics for evaluating its impact. Institutional networking and collaborations such as the African Health OER Network are among measures that will enhance sharing and create valuable synergies for sustaining the endeavour.

OER has undoubtedly presented an opportunity for higher educational institutions in developing countries to create knowledge and use a wider range of educational resources. It can help educators bypass the long resource building period and enable them provide high quality education through open access. It further provides a platform for higher education institutions and faculty to become producers and contributors to global knowledge.

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The Human Development Index, originally developed by Amartya Sen and Mahbub ul Haq, places education and health as 2 key measures of human development. The founders of Mindset recognised that in order to nurture much neglected human development in South Africa and in other places on the continent, it was essential to place the focus here. As Nelson Mandela once said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

And so, in 2002, Mindset Network was launched by Mr Mandela and has since operated as a non-profit organisation creating, sourcing and delivering high quality educational content for use in the formal education and (since 2004) health sectors where such provision can support human development. Wherever possible, access is made free or affordable to the end user.

About Mindset

Most of Mindset’s work is directed at South Africa and in this Mindset focuses on leveraging its skills and position to assist Government deliver better services rather than establishing parallel systems of delivery. In the Schooling programme, for example, it is clear that the Apartheid legacy still bedevils many attempts to improve the quality of education delivered to most children and that there remains the tendency for more affluent learners to attract a disproportionate share of the available resources thereby advantaging them and perpetuating the original income gap. Mindset actively works to assist Government to try and correct this imbalance which, if left unchecked, will result in the gaps in income and educational attainment widening.

As a non-profit organisation, Mindset relies on external funding to sustain many of its operations. To date, funding has been received in cash and in kind from South African and international businesses (including Liberty, Standard Bank, Intelsat and Multichoice) as well as multilateral donors and funding agencies. Increasing, however, Mindset is developing its own revenue streams to ensure financial sustainability and indeed an increase in its productive output. For example, all its video production and delivery capabilities have been spun out into a for-profit company servicing the needs of a range of additional clients.

Mindset Content

The development of high quality, contextually relevant content is naturally a key part of Mindset’s business. In the last 9 years, Mindset has developed over 500 hours of video content for grade 4 to 12 South African learners and teachers and approximately 250 hours of video content for the public and Healthcare Workers on issues around HIV/AIDs and TB. Allied to the video are hundreds of hours and thousands of pages of interactive multimedia and print content respectively. In all cases, Mindset creates content in these multiple formats to be mutually reinforcing and also to ensure that as many people as possible are able to benefit from it irrespective of the technology they have access to.

The key challenges in producing such content tend to be:

• developing high quality content as cost effectively as possible;
• ensuring that all content is perfectly accurate and correctly aligned;
• keeping content up-to-date in the midst of changing school curricula and shifting health policies;
• finding and investing in building the skills of suitable content developers and producers;
• understanding and correctly exploiting the educational affordances of each media format;
• and constantly measuring and evaluating the notion of high quality.

Since 2002, Mindset has developed a set of robust processes to deal with the issues and has shared its learning and skills with many other organisations. Such content production capacity development is an important part of Mindset’s work.

Content Distribution

Mindset uses several digital platforms to distribute its content including satellite broadcast, the Web, distributable media like DVDs and, increasingly, mobile devices. The choice of these digital platforms is based on the need to distribute content as widely and cost effectively as possible. Satellite broadcast, for example, while requiring high upfront costs provides significant economies of scale and exceptional reach, particularly to traditionally technologically under-serviced areas. In addition, television tends to be a familiar and non-threatening technology.

Currently, Mindset broadcasts its schooling content on 2 pay TV networks (one – Dstv – with an Africa wide reach) to over 2.5 million households and approximately 1300 individual schools and resource centres. Mindset Health is broadcast by Mindset as a free-to-air channel to over 490 clinics and hospitals through South Africa. Mindset is currently exploring opportunities to broadcast several additional free-to-air channels through its capacity on the IS17 satellite.

Broadcast television is necessarily restricted to the delivery of video content. The Web, DVDs and many emerging mobile devices provide the ability to distribute other media formats like interactive multimedia and traditional print as well as representing additional access points. Coupled with this is the web and mobile devices ability to also allow one to provide other value-add services to users. For example, Mindset Learn has recently launched a free help desk to Grade 10 – 12 learners accessible through the Learn website, Facebook and MXit.

Free Content

As an educational non-profit organisation, Mindset not only believes in providing free content in the financial sense. Especially in formal education, Mindset sees the need to give users creative freedom to use its content in ways that enhance its educational benefit. Thus, early on Mindset made the decision to release versions of all its content on its website under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike licence. Attribution was selected to ensure that Mindset and, by extension, its funders were appropriately credited for the original work while Share-Alike was selected to ensure the continued freedom of Mindset content.

Significantly, Mindset chose not to apply the non-commercial restriction for 2 reasons. Firstly, it seemed that by applying this restriction, users’ freedom to remix Mindset content with other content would be severely limited due to licence incompatibilities. Secondly, as part of Mindset’s vision was and is human development, it made sense to try and empower those with the ability to value-add Mindset content in ways that Mindset could not and so to create a way to keep such endeavours financially sustainable noting that the attribution requirement would always point users back to the free version thereby nullifying the business model in instances where no perceived value was being added.

Face-to-Face Meetings

In order to increase the extent and quality of impact that Mindset content has, the organisation develops and runs face-to-face workshops with teachers and community health practitioners. In the case of teachers in particular, Mindset actively encourages the use of Mindset content in locally developed resources as part of an overall effort to help teachers create their own high quality teaching and learning resources in the context of an underlying resource based teaching methodology.

These face-to-face workshops also provide Mindset with invaluable opportunities to test the efficacy of the content it has developed. In addition, significant samples of Mindset content are user group tested during the development phase not only to ensure that the content is factually accurate but is also at the correct language level, that the visual cues are well understood, that it meets the educational needs of the intended audience and that it is enjoyable and engaging to watch.

Periodically, Mindset also undertakes large scale programmatic evaluations to measure the identified proximal indicators for impact and ensure that all aspects of the programme are delivering effectively and efficiently.

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Information and communication technologies (ICTs) combined with the open intellectual property arrangements of Open Education Resources (OER) and networked collaboration have the potential to change fundamental business models for the education sector in Africa. In this blog post I explore the contemporary challenges we face and the opportunities for using digital OERs to implement new models of educational provision in Africa.

The concept of open education encapsulates a simple but powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that the open web provides an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge.

Internationally, the education sector is now exploring and implementing the potential of OER to provide free learning opportunities for all students worldwide. Africa has a unique opportunity to leverage the benefits of open education and digital ICTs in providing free learning opportunities for her learners, especially those students currently excluded from the formal sector.

The problem

Today, in Sub-Saharan Africa the majority of children of school going age will not have the privilege of completing the last three years of their schooling and very often do not have access to affordable textbooks. With reference to the higher education sector, Olugbemiro Jegede, Secretary General of the Association of African Universities reminds us that even if Africa were to build one new university per month, still this would not provide a cost-effective solution for the projected 7 million applicants who will be seeking university placements over the next 5 years.

OER offers two significant business enablers for sustainable education futures:

• the marginal cost of replicating digital learning materials is near zero, and
• sharing course design and development costs among institutions is cheaper than doing this alone.

Therefore, it is possible to provide affordable access to high quality learning materials and textbooks, even for learners who may not have reliable or low-cost access to the Internet. Moreover this would not necessarily require new money or investment.

Within the publicly funded education system, the educators’ salaries who produce learning materials are already to some extent sponsored by the taxpayer. Rather than investing new money, all that is needed is a policy shift to re-license selected outputs produced by state-supported educators under open content intellectual property arrangements where the respective institutions provide permissions for others to reuse, adapt and redistribute learning materials at no cost.

• Why should taxpayers have to pay twice for their learning materials?
• Why do publicly funded education institutions restrict access to knowledge through restrictive copyright regimes when we have the digital technologies and legal tools to share freely?

We also have the technologies to produce print-based materials from digital OER repositories for learners who may not have affordable access to the Internet. In WikiEducator, for instance, educators can collate open textbooks for printing or offline editing with the added advantage of using the same digital repository for integrating teaching materials into online delivery systems for those institutions who use learning management systems.

Worldwide, there is a growing inventory of open access learning materials on the Internet. There are literally thousands of courses, research journals and OER available under open access licensing provisions, which could be integrated into selected courses for academic credit in Africa. With permissions to adapt and modify these materials, it is now easier for African educators to share and localise learning resources for the Continent.

Already Africa hosts a number of exemplary OER projects. OER Africa is a continental network supporting and driving the development and use of OER across all education sectors in Africa.

The African Virtual University has launched the OER@AVU portal which will provide 219 high quality modules of Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, ICT in Education, and Teacher Education Professional Courses available in three different languages – English, French and Portuguese. Individual institutions like the University of the Western Cape and University of Cape Town in South Africa support open content projects.

The Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) project brings together teachers and teacher educators from across Africa working on OER in four languages to support school based teacher education and training. Siyavula is a ground-breaking project working collaboratively with school teachers to produce open textbooks for high school students.

• Notwithstanding the pioneering work of these projects, taking into account the large number of learners excluded from the formal education sector in Africa, what are the reasons for the slow uptake and mainstream adoption of OER on the continent?
• How can we scale-up and share the successes of these African OER projects for all African institutions?

As the global inventory of OER increases we are presented with new opportunities and challenges. Specifically, learners who access digital OERs on the web and acquire knowledge and skills either formally or informally, cannot readily have their learning assessed and subsequently receive credible credentials in recognition for their efforts. Open assessment and credentialisation services are needed. The Open Education Resource (OER) university concept is a new international initiative which aims to address these challenges.

The OER university concept

Existing delivery models cannot address the growing global demand for post-secondary education. Many countries do not have the resources to build the number of conventional universities that would be required to meet the future demand for tertiary education.
The OER university (OERu) is nurturing the development of a sustainable and scalable OER ecosystem for the formal sector. The OER university concept aims to create a parallel learning universe based solely on OER for learners excluded from the system to augment and add value to the formal education sector. These learners may choose to enrol at formal education institutions in the traditional way or participate in free learning provided through the OERu network. Assessment and credential services will be provided by participating institutions on a cost-recovery basis or may be funded through scholarships or grants from the respective Ministries of Education.

A Scenario

Ibrahim Omowale has worked as a carpenter for twenty years in Nigeria and is now teaching at the local technical college. He wanted to upgrade his qualifications for his new career in vocational education. Due to work and family commitments, he couldn’t pursue full-time study. Ibrahim did not have the financial resources to register in the formal system and there were no scholarships available in his home country.

Ibrahim was undecided about his preferred area for degree study but wanted to combine his work experience and interests with the flexibility to move into new subject areas. Free access to the learning materials for the OER university (OERu) courses provided a “try before you buy” scenario. Ibrahim decided to start with a Diploma of Arts which offered the flexibility to select first-year degree courses across different disciplines. He chose three business related courses combined with a course in international relations and another in communication skills.

Ibrahim did not have affordable Internet connectivity at home but was able to utilise WikiEducator’s features to download offline digital versions of the course study guides. During the week, Ibrahim worked off-line preparing portfolio assignments and noting questions. On Saturday mornings, he visited the local cybercafé, uploaded completed assignments to his online e-portfolio, consulted online discussion forums and posted support questions to the “Academic Volunteers International” website selecting the SMS message feedback option for his learner support questions. Taking the free trial examination, Ibrahim felt he was ready to present himself for assessment. Paying the assessment fee, he submitted his e-portfolio to the University of Southern Queensland in Australia and successfully completed the remote challenge examinations and graduated with the Diploma of Arts — the first step towards a Bachelor of Transdisiplinary Studies.

Ibrahim decided that he wanted to specialise in vocational education and apply for assessment of prior learning. Using the open support materials provided by the OERu website, Ibrahim prepared a portfolio of his prior experience mapped against the graduate profile of a Diploma in Construction Management (second-year degree level). He presented his assessment for prior learning at Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand and decided to continue his OERu learning in the area of Tertiary Teaching, incorporating third-year bachelor-level subjects. Ibrahim’s credits for the Diploma of Arts were recognised under the OERu’s approved Transnational Qualifications Framework and he decided to use the assessment services from Otago Polytechnic for his prior learning and tertiary teaching subjects. Ibrahim decided to complete his remaining subjects at the local national university through the conventional system and graduated with a Bachelor of Transdisciplinary Studies (Vocational Education).

Ibrahim Omowale is now Head of Department at his technical college and is leading a strategy aimed at enhancing the professional development of staff throughout the region.

Note: At the time of authoring this blog post there were no participating institutions from Africa. Therefore, I could not use African institutions as examples in the Scenario text. In time we hope to see a number of African institutions sharing in the benefits of this global tertiary education network.

How will the OERu work?

Concept for an OER university initiative (Adapted from Taylor 2007).

OERu students will gain free access to high quality courses that are designed for independent-study using OER. OERu learners will receive student support through a global network of volunteers and peer support using social software technologies. Students can be assessed for a fee by participating institutions and earn a credible credential.

From an investment-decision perspective, participation in the OERu network would not require new money, but rather a reallocation of existing staff time to releasing selected development outputs under open content licenses for the OERu network. The OERu model anticipates that no more than 1% of existing budget time would be required for release under open content licenses. The institutional costs of assessment and credentialisation services are recouped on a cost-recovery basis from student fees and/or other sources.

• Is the OER university network a viable model for widening access to learning opportunities in Africa?

I firmly believe that OER is the means by which education at all levels can be more accessible, more affordable and more efficient. OER is a sustainable and renewable resource. What do you think?

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The most popular answer to the question of how to improve the quality of schools and education in developing countries is: Invest in more teachers and more schools.

Let there be more teachers

I think there are few people who would contest that having one full time, fully qualified teacher in front of every class of 25 children would bring education of the highest standards to any country.
But could this really be the solution to the educational problems in poor countries? I sincerely doubt whether this solution is feasible. I even fear it is completely impossible to solve the plight of education in the developing world by this route alone.

Here is a statistic that paints a bleak picture, indeed:

India has one of the lowest ratio of teachers. In the US, it’s 3,200 teachers per million people, in the Caribbean it’s 1,500, in the Arab countries it’s 800 and in India it’s 456 teachers per million people. The Times of India (2009)

The US might not be the best example, but even to get at the level of the Caribbean, the Arab countries must double their number of teachers, and India must more than triple its number. And that would be just the number of teachers needed to get at the level of the Caribbean. If the teacher pupil ratio should get close to that of the US, double the number of new teachers would be needed.

Obviously, if the aim would be to decrease the number of pupils per teacher in all developing countries to the level of the developed countries, enormous numbers of teacher would have to be recruited and trained. For many countries in the developing world the number of teachers would have to double, like in the Arab world, in others it would have to triple, like in India and many African countries.

A lot of numbers

How many teachers would have to be recruited, trained, and send to schools? Below, a lot of statistics will be presented. If you are already convinced, you can skip the arithmetic and go to the next section.

Let us look at the numbers, some of which are collected in the table. For OECD countries there are around 16 students per teacher in primary education (CESifo DICE Report). Looking at the numbers, we can take a national average of 15 pupils/teacher as the norm for primary education in developed countries and 13 for secondary education. But note that these are just very global statistics on education. And keep in mind that worldwide, approximately 100 million children that should be in school are not.

Furthermore, as these statistics are global, they do not tell us how the available teachers are distributed. The developed countries are able to organize education in such a way that all children have comparable access to education. The difficult situations in the developing world make that the already low number of teachers are also distributed unequally. The pupil/teacher ratio can be much higher in rural areas than in urban areas. So for many children, the situation is even worse than these averages indicate.

Teaching staff in millions, pupil/teacher ration (P/T), and enrolment ratios in percent (net- NER and gross- GER) in primary and secondary education. Data for 2008 unless indicated otherwise. Source: Unesco

Just to get the average number of teachers in the developing world to the level of that of the developed world would mean that the number of teachers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South- and West-Asia must more than double. In other regions increases of over 50% would be required.

To get these numbers in a global perspective, there are currently some 58 million teachers in the world, 28 million in primary education and 30 million in secondary education (see table). If the worldwide average ratio of pupils to teachers should be reduced from 25 to 15 for primary and from 18 to 13 for secondary education, an extra 30 million new teachers would be needed (19 million in primary, 11 million in secondary education).

Even a more modest aim to get the pupil to teacher ratio to 20 in primary education and 15 in secondary would require some 13 million new teachers, world wide. And that is without increasing the enrolment ratios in primary and secondary education to 100%. That alone could require another 20 million teachers.

In conclusion, any attempt to improve education in the world by increasing the number of teachers must prepare to recruit, train, and deploy well over 10 million new teachers, and maybe even up to 50 million new teachers. Trainers are needed to train these new teachers. If we are in a hurry, we would have to train them in, say, 6 years for a 3 year teacher training program, that would make 4-13 million new teachers a year entering training. This training program would require anywhere from 130,000 – 400,000 trainers for these teachers.

Round numbers:
13-35 million new teachers: Recruit, Train, Deploy
40 million teachers: Retrain
150,000 – 250,000 trainers for these teachers

Can we really rely on training more teachers alone?

Obviously, the numbers given above are rough ballpark estimates. But it is clear that “invest in teachers and schools” often means “double or triple the number of your teachers”. A truly gargantuan task.

There is an important question that has to be answered before such an effort is undertaken.

Why is it that there are not enough teachers in the first place?

It is not that training teachers is an unknown art. Teachers have been trained for a century now. Why is the world short of tens of millions of teachers?

It is not for a lack of trying. Ever since development aid became into existence somewhere after WWII, it has been known that more teachers are needed. But somehow, the developing countries have been unable to supply them. There are many reasons for this shortage, underfunding, bad working conditions, labor migration away from rural areas, competition from other employers, low social status, bad organization etc. These are social problems. And we know that social problems are the hard problems. And there are as yet no convincing ideas on how to solve these very hard problems.

So, that is why I think any plan to “invest in teachers, not technology” is bound to fail. There is simply no known policy that can solve the problems that plague teacher recruitment and training in less than a generation, if they can be solved at all. Trying to recruit and train millions of new teachers is simply going to fail. Any attempt to just throw money at the problem will fail just as badly as all the other cases where a solution was dropped on the developing countries.

I like the idea of supplying every child with a well trained teacher in a class with only 30 pupils. My sole objection is, it cannot be done. And even if it could be done, what should be done for the children that enter and leave school in the meantime?

Technology to the rescue

Compare the problems of supplying children with teachers to supplying them with technology. If we would supply the roughly 900 million children in dire need of education with OLPC laptops over a period of 5 years continuously, this would cost around $40B a year, worldwide. (200 million laptops a year at $200). I can write a small encyclopedia with all the objections to spending $40B/year on OLPC laptops. But we all know that it is actually possible to produce and distribute 200 million laptops per year. It costs money, but it can be done. This is technology, and technology is easy.

As education will have to rely on the existing workforce for the foreseeable future, their work, and that of their pupils, should be made as easy and productive as possible. In a service industry like education this means using technology, i.e., ICT. But we should not forget that a lot can be done using less glamorous technology. For instance, in many regions in the world, a bicycle may improve mobility of children and teachers alike and enable children to continue further education (Indian Times, 2009).

Without light and heating, education would have to be curtailed severely during the winter in my own country. But such measures, e.g., electrification or increased mobility, have obvious positive impacts on economic development. Such measures do not have to be argued. Here I would like to concentrate on ICT4E, the advantages of which are much more contentious.

ICT4E has the same problems as ICT4D(evelopment). It is inconceivable that a solution to every local problem could be devised by a person sitting behind a keyboard in Western-Europe. People on the ground, locals, know what is needed and what is available. Bicycles can help some children get to school in the Netherlands or regions of India, but it would be a complete waste to send bicycles into other areas, e.g., the Andes or Himalaya. However, there are many “simple” problems that crop up everywhere in the world, and might be solved by a single tool or technology. Just like the blackboard solved a problem experienced in every classroom in the world, there might be technologies that are valuable everywhere.

In our quest to look for eligible technology, I would like to stick to ICT solutions that avoid the “Top 7 Reasons Why Most ICT4D FAILS” (Rogers, 2010, a nice YouTube movie). The video explains it all so I will not repeat them here.

The central question is how to make ICT useful for schools. Received wisdom is that technology should be integrated in community life before it can be really useful. It is instructive to study cases where this received wisdom has been flouted. Prime examples are radio, television, and mobile phones. History has shown that these gadgets have been embraced by almost all communities, even those that lacked any understanding of the underlying technologies. In a completely different field, the simple formulation of Oral Rehydration Therapy helps local staff tackling one of the leading causes of child mortality in the developing world without lengthy training or expensive infrastructure.

The successful electronic consumer gadgets all have in common that they require zero maintenance and are robust in normal use. The only consumables of the gadgets are electrical power or batteries. A costly infrastructure is needed for all three, but this is both outside of the view of the consumers and the costs are shared by all.

These technologies fitted every human society because they were transparently enabling some of the most basic human needs: Exchanging stories, gossip, and news and playing music. This acceptance is not a matter of User Interface or ease of use. Text messaging on a mobile phone must count under the worst User Interfaces ever invented. But because the feed-back is immediate and transparent, even small children are able to put up with it (and often can do the task blindfolded).

So we need turn-key drop-in technologies that have zero-maintenance, are robust in the field, including fields of the green and grassy type, and latch into basic human behavior. Mobile phones might be the best examples, as they require little more than electricity and a (prepaid card) number. They are easy to carry and protect: Just keep them out of the rain or in a pouch. And they help people to do what they seem to like most, talk and write to each other.

A last feature of successful technology introductions is a long technological horizon. Anything that takes so much effort to introduce should last a long time. We can expect our children to still use something that functions as a phone or a TV. The actual device might look different, but we should be able to recognize the function. Especially in education, new technology should last a generation. The children of the pupils that are introduced to the new technology should be expected to use something alike. So if no continuous upgrade path is expected over the next decades, I think the introduction of a technology should be seriously reconsidered.

To summarize, the kind of technological solutions that I am looking for would fit all of the following (think radio, TV, and mobile phones):

• Solves a global problem or need
• Robust in normal daily use
• Turn-key drop-in
• Zero-maintenance
• Consumes only electricity, and very little of it
• Connects to content or communication channels (including surface mail)
• A long technological horizon

Note that the technological solutions discussed are intended to solve serious problems. Nowhere is it assumed that technology should improve education if there are no real problems. Technology does not replace a teacher, but it can help her teach and help the children learn.

My archetypal example of successful educational technology is the blackboard. The blackboard solved a huge educational problem in teaching for large groups: A simple, flexible, and cheap method to present text and diagrams to large groups of pupils. It allowed to effectively display and explain complex concepts so that children in the back of the classroom could see them too. It is a pity that you need chalk to write (a consumable), but that proved surmountable.

Two examples will explain these bullet points: The pocket calculator and desktop PCs running Microsoft Windows.

Pocket calculators, or better, graphical calculators, were introduced in secondary education in Europe at the end of the 1970s. The problem they solved was that some important mathematical concepts could not be taught because the calculations on anything but toy problems were too cumbersome. With these electronic calculators, realistic problems in statistics, matrix algebra, and function theory could be introduced into secondary education. As these calculators can be used in class and at home, their use can be easily integrated into the relevant courses. Moreover, pupils learned how to perform arithmetic on real calculators like they would need in working life later.

So using the calculators solved a small, but very real problem in the teaching of mathematics, economics, and science. Obviously, a pocket calculator fits all of the other bullet points. They run for months or years on a single battery, get their contend from the text books, and they have been in continuous use for over 30 years now. A clear success story.

On the other hand, desktop PCs in school running Microsoft Windows defy every bullet point. The only general problem that is solved by a PC in school is Internet access. But there is little use for direct Internet access in class. Desktop PCs can be used in courses directed towards computer use, but even that is hardly useful in school. At home, PCs do have general practical value, but that has little to do with the limited presence of PCs in school. Introduction of such desktop PCs in schools in the developing world generally ends in a deception.

An important problem is that Microsoft Windows has a tendency to break in daily use, especially when the computer has an Internet connection. The hardware of desktop PCs is not designed for a tropical climate. Moisture and dust can easily break the hardware. Installation and maintenance are difficult and require special skills and knowledge. Desktop PCs consume a lot of power and, therefore, cannot run on batteries. So their use is very limited in locations with unreliable power supplies. Connectivity is good, if a wired or wireless Internet connection is available. And they can be used with CD/DVD disks or USB memory sticks.

The technological horizon is more complex to judge. In future generations, we can expect to see screens, keyboards, and computers of some kind. However, I still remember a quote from a parent in the 1980s. When asked why she preferred the use of MS Dos PCs over Apple Macintosh computers in primary school she answered “Because when my child will go to work, it will have to use MS Dos, and not the fancy graphical interface of the Apple Macintosh” (paraphrased from memory). And it has been this way ever since.

If we look at the developments of computer use in the last years, we see perpetual shifts. Nowadays, the shift is towards a completely different model of computing with the integrated User Interfaces of mobile phones (iOS and Android) becoming the standard for tablets, netbooks, and upwards into other computers. So the technological horizon of standard desktop computers has always been very short.

An example of new technical gear: The OLPC XO

As an illustration of a recent project, compare the above with the OLPC XO laptop. The design goals of the XO laptop came very close to the ideal of a no-worry drop-in technology.

The software is distantly related to the Android mobile phone operating system with a zero-maintenance update and security model. The laptop was designed to be robust and the only consumable was electricity. The laptop was easy to carry and protect. It enabled access to the Internet for video and voice connections, email and Instant Messaging, and you could also use it to play music. Connected to the Internet, it could replace radio, TV, phone, and music player.

The laptops could double as book readers and store a complete library, allowing schools that could not even afford textbooks to get a library for each child. On top of it, it could also be used as a computer. The technological horizon looks promising as some kind of small, mobile computer with a simplified interface is likely to be around for the next decade or so.
What went wrong with the first version of the XO laptop?

Basically, the execution fell somewhat short of the design goals. Quite a number of laptops were rolled out before the software was finished and these laptops suffered from a lot of very annoying bugs. These bugs could not be solved by the normal update mechanism, but required replacing the operating system itself. The logistics of supplying a new operating system image to laptops in the field proved to be impractical.

On the hardware side, the keyboard was not robust enough and broke in too many laptops, as did the trackpads. And power consumption was still a bit too high for many locations. The mesh network to share Internet connections did not scale well inside schools and did not deliver the planned connectivity. Supplying Internet connectivity to schools proved to be the Achilles heel of the project. And without an Internet connection, the laptops became much less useful for their intended purpose.

In then end, the first generation of the OLPC XO laptops came very, very close to achieving the status of a no-worry drop-in technology. And where there was Internet, they seem to function as intended. But without a solution for the Internet connectivity, the laptops are much less useful. Had there been Internet connectivity at home, we can be pretty sure that the children would have found out how to use the keyboards and navigate the User Interface. If primary school children can find out how to send text messages on mobile phones without formal instruction, they can learn to use the OLPC’s Sugar interface.

But even if the XOs function as intended, there remains the logistic problem of giving out and replacing laptops and delivering electricity and Internet connectivity. In general, all technological solutions require logistics to distribute the gear (TV sets, mobile phones), the electricity (or batteries, or solar panels), and the connections (transmitters, cell towers). These will always be a problem for rural areas in the developing world. But these factors affect each and every attempt to solve problems in the developing world as they are at the heart of the economic under-development to start with.

As many technophiles, I really love the OLPC laptop. But I know that was not the question. What we really want to know is whether there is a technology that solves the problem at hand. However, this discussion is targeted at a global audience, and we know that the cost of technology depends on the production volume. The very first radio was extremely expensive, the billionth transistor radio is a free promotion item. So I will look here at global problems with high volume solutions.

Example of a global problem and solution: Textbooks fantasies

To illustrate the ideas presented above, I will fantasize about a real global problem in education and a technological solution.

Textbooks are a necessity in school, but they are expensive. My country spends around 300 euro ($400) a year per pupil on textbooks in secondary school. For this money, each pupil could get a laptop and a broadband Internet connection at home for the duration of her education. With some change to spare for electronic textbooks. Most of this cost is the result of monopoly rents by the publishers, as it is in many developed countries. But even at half the price, each student could get an ebook reader with a lot of money to spend on electronic books and prepaid mobile Internet.

The root of the textbook problem lies in the cost of production. Textbooks are a difficult market, with high investments in writing and printing and high distribution costs. And it is an all or nothing market. Either your book is selected for the curriculum, and you sell big, or it is rejected and you sell nothing. Moreover, to stay up-to-date, textbooks have to be revised very often. A lot of insider knowledge is needed to produce a textbook that fits in the standard curriculum. As a result, the market for textbooks for primary and secondary education is always limited to a single school system (country).

And in the end, the textbooks are not that great at all. Ansary (2004) gives an illuminating and entertaining, but also infuriating, account of the way text-books are produced in the USA. Quite often it is a pain to use these textbooks. Most teachers have to create extra “cheat-sheets” to supply missing material and explain incomprehensible portions of the text. Beyond all these problems with the content, there is the daily wear and tear of paper books that makes every textbook usable for only a few years, if well cared for.

In accounts of classroom practises in the developing world, we often hear of whole classes that spend their day copying the complete text of a textbook from the blackboard into their notebooks. This seems a waste of time. When copying large amounts of text, you are unable to think about the text or even remember it. However, supplying the books themselves to the children was obviously not possible. So copying a book wholesale might be the only way the children can ever get hold of the text. Still, we will all agree that it would be better if the pupils had the same textbooks as the teacher. The teacher could then spend her time explaining the material in the textbook and children could spend time learning and practising the skills covered by the textbook.

So here we have a truly global problem: Expensive, outdated, low quality, and cumbersome textbooks that are often not available for the children in the developing world. Can we fantasize about a better system? One that gets both teachers and children the books they so desperately want and need?

There is a very good idea that was actually embraced by (some) politicians in the developed world, the Open Textbook Initiative. Creative Commons electronic books produced by authors and teachers in Wikipedia style (Creative Commons, 2010; Beshears, 2005; Durbin 2009). In principle, this can be applied world wide. The ministry can give grants for writing specific electronic textbook, or volunteers and teachers can write their own. The textbook are licensed under some Creative Commons license that allows free distribution and adaptation. The books are archived and made available in a repository and distributed electronically as ebooks.

Teachers, scientists, and students can add and submit changes in Wikipedia style. It cannot be said that ebooks are better than paper books, but they will be preferred over no books at all.
And the costs? As I wrote above, for what the developed countries pay for textbooks now, they can supply top of the line ebook readers and Internet connections to the students, and have massive amounts of money to spare for grants to write the books. And if you ever tried to lift the school backpack of a high-school student over here, you know that ebooks would take a heavy burden from their shoulders.

In the developed world, the Open Textbook initiative solves kind of a luxury problem. The developed countries can actually pay for the costs of over-priced paper books. They just feel they do not get quality for their money. And often no quality at all. The question is, could such an Open Textbook initiative work in the developing world, where paper textbooks are problematic?

Here we have to look again at our technology bullet list. The Open Textbook initiative does serve a pressing need for good and affordable textbooks. We can be pretty sure that every teacher in the world would welcome better, up to date, textbooks. So, provided a collection of good textbooks can be produced by way of government grants or volunteer work, this part is covered.

Current ebook readers are constructed for indoor use in the developed world. They do have too many unprotected openings and fragile components for a developing world environment. However, covering up these holes and putting in more robust components is not very difficult, the OLPC has done most of that work already. For most ebook readers this would be a minor, and cheap design change, not a problem.

The use of ebook readers is quite simple. You drop in an ebook (or a shelf of ebooks) and you start turning pages. Apart of language and date and time there is not much to set. So, indeed turn-key drop-in technology. Theoretically, you can update the software of an ebook reader, but there is not often a need for doing that. An ebook reader can in most respects be considered to have zero-maintenance.

And last, but not least, ebook readers using electronic paper displays have extremely low power use. Their requirements are low enough to make charging with small solar panels feasible. Current retail costs for cheap ebook reader offerings are below $100 for consumers. Ebook readers cannot be repaired (easily) in the field, so any program to supply them should stock for replacement readers.

The next bullet point is connectivity: How to get new books on the ebook reader. Ebooks can be transferred to an ebooks reader by either connecting it to a computer which has them stored or downloaded, or over a wireless connection in the more expensive ebook readers. Most readers have a slot for external memory SDcards, which could be used to distribute ebooks. Even though SDcards might be rather fragile in daily use, they can be distributed over surface mail. So, the connectivity could be handled by sending USB sticks or memory cards with the mail or a messenger. There would have to be some outlet with a computer or laptop to transfer the new ebooks.

Sounds ideal, so why has it not been done yet?

Even at $50 a piece (gross price), a complete roll-out would be a rather big investment for a single purpose gadget. The cost would exceed the total educational budgets of many countries by a large margin. And the organization of a coordinated roll out of so many devices could overwhelm the capacities of most administrations. The cost and organization alone of an ebook reader roll out would exceed the resources of the countries that need them most.

Furthermore, the technology is all very new. If you roll-out ebook readers today, you might miss out on the powerful and cheap tablet computers of next year. A kind of, very realistic, economic deflation fear. So the technological horizon is short, very short indeed with all the new tablet computers coming out. Ebook reader apps are already part of every new smartphone. In a few years time, separate ebook readers will cease to exist and a general mobile platform will have taken over their function.

There is also the chicken-and-egg problem of needing electronic textbooks to use an ebook reader in class, while these textbooks will not be produced if the children have no ebook readers. On the other hand, if there is one thing that can be learned from the history of the World-Wide-Web and Wikipedia, then it is that if there are readers, the writers will come. The real challenge is to get a national Open Textbook initiative going. This will be addressed in the next section.

Teaching the teachers: A program fantasy

From the earlier discussions on Educational Technology Debate, it has become quite clear that the real challenge is not to get cutting edge ICT4E gear in the hands of the children. The real challenge is to ensure that the teachers are able to actually make use of the technology in their lessons. The solution is simple to formulate: Remedial courses for the teachers. But the initial problem was that it was not possible to adequately teach the children. How can we then train the teachers?

First of all, there are much less teachers than children, and they can occasionally travel. So it should be possible to arrange some classes in (semi-)urban areas where it is easier to provide education for adults. On the other hand, children have ample time for learning, adults have other responsibilities. So any courses for teachers must be short, targeted, and effective. The main point is that a one week course during the summer break will not be enough to prepare for a large change in the curriculum including hitherto unseen technology. And for teachers too, it holds that education must be interactive. Simply dumping a large amount of documentation on them will not lead to them actually mastering the subject.

Let us assume some technological solution has been selected for a nationwide roll out. For the sake of argument, our fantasy ebook reader program is introduced in schools which lacked books. The ebook reader program is accompanied by a national Open Textbook program. Now, what follows is my fantasy of a teacher instruction plan to use these ebook readers. It is assumed that the Ministry of Education can hire some local (or international) educational experts to construct a basic curriculum and lesson plan for use with the textbooks on the ebook readers. These plans are the basis for the textbooks.

The current practise is that teachers do group drill exercises, e.g., children copy the teacher’s text book from the blackboard and memorize some part of it. Such drills normally would take most of the in-class time. The task of the training program is to instruct the teacher how to operate and use the technology itself. They should learn how best to teach the children the use and care of the technology. But this introduction to the technology is just the basic part.

The real training must be to instruct the teachers how to use the electronic textbooks in class. As copying and memorizing the text books has become an irrelevant exercise, there is time during class to do other things. So teachers will have to get an idea what these textbooks can be used for. The curriculum will be adapted to reflect the presence of the ebook readers. As other commenters have already remarked, this is not something that can be achieved in a mere 1 or 2 week course.

The solution would be some kind of continuous distance learning program. Any one-time out-of-town courses should be followed by refreshers over correspondence. This could be anything from surface mail of course materials and assignments, special magazines, to special (off-hour) radio and TV programs, phone-in sessions, and if Internet is available, live Internet chat or video conferencing sessions. Given that the whole program will cost quite a lot, a special, one time a week radio or TV show will not be that expensive. Tapes can be send to those who cannot listen or watch life.

For our ebook reader program, the reading and audio materials can be mailed on a USB stick. We can nicely integrate the distance learning course with the Open Textbook initiative. Instead of dumping the textbooks on the schools, it would be nice if the teachers would get a say in what would become part of the textbooks. So, part of the assignments could be to suggest improvements to the textbooks. Maybe write or edit paragraphs. And send back the notes. Nothing fancy, pencil and paper would already be enough. These notes can be processed by the editors of the textbooks. Best to keep a list of contributors at the back of the final textbooks.

Obviously, there is not a lot that can be done in the one to two years in the run up of a large roll out. Especially as the teachers will have their normal responsibilities and duties, which would already take up their time. A course with associated book, magazines, and radio and TV programs would probably be the best option.

This is a format that is used world-wide for teaching languages. There is a lot of experience with such TV/radio courses. The exact formulation will obviously depend on local circumstances and customs. The real advantage of such a program is that it can be produced and staffed by locals. Teachers “on the ground” can be interviewed, and radio shows can contain phone in question and answer sessions as well as listener feed-back. This is all quite ordinary practise in most countries.

It would be unrealistic to expect that all teachers will have opportunity and time to fully participate in the interactive and collaborative aspects of such a program. But the more teachers have a chance to be active in the program, the better it will take root. And for teachers too it will hold that peer instruction is the second best thing after teacher instruction. So if the program can reach a large fraction of the teachers, we can hope that their knowledge will diffuse through the whole community. And there is no reason to stop the information program after the roll out is completed.

Discussion and Conclusions

It is obvious that developing countries will not be able to double or triple their number of teachers in the short term. So for the next decade or so some solution will have to be devised and implemented to improve education for the children entering school. Beyond more teachers, there are only few options left. Technology is one of them. To increase the chance that the chosen technology will actually be effective, some precautions should be taken. Basically, the probability of success will vastly increase if the technology can be used and maintained by children for the intended purpose. Which is basically the main aim of the small bullet list above. Anything more complex or demanding risks being relegated to gather dust in a corner.

But after we have the wonderful gadgets and gear, it should improve education. As teachers will have to change their teaching habits, it is very advantageous to instruct them in using the technology to improve their lessons. Given the other obligations that occupy teachers, any face-to-face training courses have to be short. To make the changes permanent, an interactive follow up is needed over the months that follow the face-to-face courses. A large number of options exist for semi-interactive distance courses and follow ups: magazines and tapes in the mail, radio and TV with phone-in, or question sessions by mail or phone. All these are distance learning practises with a long history. Only think of all the language courses broadcast around the world.

Under-development and over-stretched schools have shown to be very hard problems to solve. Although some kind of technological progress will be involved in the eventual solution, it is still unclear whether introducing any single technology can actually help. But as technologies like radio, TV, mobile phones, and even Oral Hydration Therapy have shown, the dire effects of important global problems can be alleviated by introducing certain types of technology. With only limited instruction, I think it will be possible to find solutions to help alleviate some of the educational problems that result from a chronic shortage of qualified teachers in the developing world.

References

Ansary (2004). A Textbook Example of What’s Wrong with Education: A former schoolbook editor parses the politics of educational publishing, Tamim Ansary

Beshears (2005). The Case for Creative Commons textbook, by Fred M. Beshears, U.C. Berkeley, April 07, 2005

CESifo. Class size and student-teacher ratio, CESifo DICE Report 4/2009

Creative Commons (2010). Open Textbook,

Durbin (2009). Durbin Introduces Legislation to Make College textbook more Affordable (press release)

Huebler (2008). International Education Statistics, Analysis by Friedrich Huebler, Pupil/teacher ratio in primary school, Pupil/teacher ratio in primary school

Indian Times (2009). CM gives Rs 15,000 and a bicycle each to girls, Feb 4, 2009

The Times of India (2009). India has one of the lowest teacher-student ratios: Expert,, Nov 7, 2009

Rogers (2010). Top 7 Reasons Why Most ICT4D FAILS – Dr Clint Rogers

UNESCO. Table 11: Indicators on teaching staff at ISCED levels 0 to 3, (accessed 02022011)

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I suspect others in this forum will discuss these issues. But one powerful argument for continuing to inject more technology into schools seems to remain untouched by all of those concerns. That is the inevitability, at least in the foreseeable future that our children’s lives will be saturated with technology and they will have to know how to deal with a technologically driven society. Thus, all academic or financial arguments that might cast doubt on the efficacy of ICT are typically overwhelmed by the sense that we have to adapt education to the realities of the 21st century.

In that respect, it seems to me that the debate over whether schools have to find a place for ICT is over. The only question remaining is how to do it. In this brief introductory comment, I’d like to introduce just one of several factors having to do with the character of ICT that make that “how” question revolutionary in a different way than most technology promoters believe.

Technology Overload

Let me begin by making two general observations: First, adopting any powerful new technology is always a Faustian bargain (Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology). If the 19th and 20th centuries taught us anything about our relationship with technology it should be that. From the internal combustion engine to DDT to antibiotics, there are always some indirect costs or detriments that show up (usually down the line) accompanying the direct benefits that a new technology brings to us. Considering it is children’s lives we are dealing with here, we ought to be much more careful in anticipating and finding ways to minimize those costs than we have been.

Secondly, we need to recognize that the responsibility to prepare young people for a high tech society does not automatically mean that children of all ages should use high tech tools. We don’t prepare children to use alcohol responsibly by teaching them how to drink when they are six. Schools don’t prepare children to deal with sex by surrounding them with sexual activity, or violence by exposing them to violence. Preparing children for social conditions does not necessarily warrant early participation.

Indeed, typically we have seen childhood as a time to prepare for the external challenges of society by strengthening children’s inner resources – self-discipline, emotional control, moral judgment, empathy, etc. – before the opportunities for participation arise.

Unfortunately, it is the attention to that entire enterprise of strengthening those inner resources that is likely to be one of the costs of revolutionizing education with ICT. As our moderator has already pointed out, one of the most common arguments for ICT is that it promises “to empower learners.” This is, in large part, because these are extremely powerful tools that we are handing to our children.

We like the idea of our children having all of this power, while hardly acknowledging that handing great power to people who do not bring a strong sense of responsibility to it is a recipe for disaster. Though I do not believe that power necessarily corrupts, it almost certainly does if the bearer of that power has not developed a strong moral and ethical foundation from which to guide its use. Where will that foundation come from in our schools? At what age should we expect our children to possess the maturity to display those moral and ethical qualities?

And to what extent do we actually deny children their most powerful internal learning resources, like quiet contemplation or capacity to endure times of disappointment, by telling them that the answers to their questions are to be found through all of this external power we hand them? Even a child’s greatest learning resource, their curiosity, which tech promoters often claim is set loose by ICT, actually has to be severely restricted for fear of the kinds of information that might get into the wrong hands.

Those pushing for a tech revolution in schools generally ignore these concerns about internal growth, opting instead to “solve” the problem with all kinds of technical fixes, from Acceptable Use Policies to Net Nannies. And in doing so, we simply reinforce the lesson that our children are receiving constantly from every corner of our high tech society: that for every problem there is an external technical solution that does not require the development of one’s inner capacities.

In this respect ICT is just part of an ever deepening problem posed by our relationship with technology: from the five year old who is given a pill because he can’t sit still for an hour, to the adolescent who depends on a spell checker instead of learning to spell, to the high school student who can navigate to mountains of information on the Internet but has not one idea in her head about what to do with it, we are teaching our children every day that solutions to problems lie outside of themselves.

And there is plenty of reason to worry that there are consequences to this trend. For example, self-reporting of college and high school students who plagiarize or in other ways cheat has moved above 70% in the last decade, much of it now enabled by ICT (CaveOn; Common Sense Media). There is much discussion going on across American campuses about the increasing fragility of college students (in the ten years I’ve been teaching at Wittenberg University, for instance, the annual number of students who have sought psychological counseling from the University health office has gone up 600%). And these college students are just the young people our society recognizes as successful.

Time Out from Technology

This is not an attempt to pin all of the responsibility for all of our youth’s troubles on technology. The point I’m trying to make is that further increasing our youth’s already massive engagement with powerful machines is likely to contribute to neglecting the development of the very character traits they need to navigate a high tech society. This fall semester, when I assigned 20 freshman students on the first day of class to spend 15 minutes sitting outside totally away from anyone and without any electronic devices, the initial response by the vast majority was that they had not experienced that level of solitude in years.

To my surprise, they decided to do it every day. When they gave me feedback at the end of the course, they were nearly unanimous in agreeing that the most important thing they had learned in any class this semester was the value of putting their devices away and spending time truly by, and with, themselves.

How sad they were 18 years old before they learned that. How sad that so many young people will never learn that, and that our schools will not even recognize how important an educational resource has been lost. It seems to me that if we really want to prepare our children for dealing with a society saturated with powerful external tools, we ought to be concentrating at the earliest levels on helping them develop their inner resources so that they know the full scope of what we humans are capable of apart from our machines; so they know how to put the power of those machines to good use supporting those capacities; and they know when to put all of those machines away.

In his important book, The Future Does Not Compute, Steve Talbott writes, “What I really fear is the hidden and increasingly powerful machine within us, of which the machines we create are but an expression.” Given that our children now spend over 7 hours a day engaged with media technology (Kaiser Foundation), I think this is a fear those of us in education should take very seriously. After all, it is our job to see that children develop their full capacities, and not become one-sided mechanistic thinkers, no matter how well qualified developing that one side might make them for the job market.

Schools often serve compensatory functions. Marshall McLuhan apparently recognized this when he wrote in his seminal book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, that schools would have to become “recognized as civil defense against media fallout.” I’m not sure even he could have predicted just how heavy that media fallout would become.

Young people, particularly our youngest, need a time and place where they can take a breather from the constant bombardment of abstract symbols – pictures and texts – flowing from machines; a time and place where they can have direct experiences, sometimes alone, sometimes with caring adults or other children and often with the physical world that they will have no alternative but to live in and take better care of than we have. They need opportunities to learn from all of their senses and all of their inner resources in order to understand where they fit into the world before we give them learning tools whose objective is to give them enormous power over it.

High Tech Requires High Touch

This has been a very sketchy polemic meant not so much to convince as to inspire a different kind of discussion about the proper place for ICT in education. A broader exploration of those views can be found in a couple of my essays – Charlotte’s Webpage and Education Unplugged, respectively – published by Orion magazine, which are available on-line at:

• Charlotte’s Webpage: Why children shouldn’t have the world at their fingertips
• Unplugged Schools: Education can ameliorate, or exacerbate, society’s ills. Which will it be?

I’ll close by saying that there is certainly a place for ICT in education – even a prominent one. I wouldn’t have taught teenagers with and about computers for nearly two decades if I believed that education would not be well served by injecting ICT into the upper levels of schooling.

But there is a serious developmental issue that we have to address with regard to ICT that takes us well beyond the boundaries of the classroom. Just because children can learn from powerful machines doesn’t mean they should. Let’s keep in mind that in making his bargain with the devil, the price Dr. Faustus paid for nearly unlimited power was his soul.

It seems to me that any revolution in education brought on by ICT ought to be formulated to prevent that cost being incurred by our children. As far as I can tell, that means recognizing that preparation for a high tech society requires an intensively high touch childhood.

The first fundamental barrier in the developing world to overcoming disabilities is that we are missing the human capacity we rely on in other parts of the world – the support workers, interpreters, sign language teachers and others. Existing low cost technology can help substitute for this. The XO Laptop, mobile phones and others are suitable low power, low cost hardware and far lower cost than classes ($15/month > 12 months = 1 OLPC) and interpreters for those who would struggle to afford either.

What we are lacking is high quality (preferably creative commons or similarly licensed) localized content for both children and adults, such as interactive video sign language courses. Often we lack localized text to speech software. Because parents often can’t afford or can’t find the resources they need to communicate with their children they often find themselves completely excluded, and such frustration can easily foster worse problems.

Using blended learning we can make far more effective use of those limited human resources that we do have, so that classes can be supplemented by more effective self study. Some NGOs are making efforts to provide classes, but they all fall far short of what’s needed.

Here in Afghanistan, a self-instructional sign language application running on the OLPC or other hardware is envisioned that will support parents, children and teachers to learn to communicate with each other. Braille could follow. Our Persian E-Speak has a some work left to go. This will provide the lowest cost most accessible option for people Recognizing psychological disabilities for what they are will likely require cultural changes and shifts that took generations to realize in developed countries.

The hardware is there, the technology exists, with HTML5 we can make platform independent materials that can work on devices from phones to normal desktops to OLPC to PDAs. What we really need is the will, vision and resources to glue it together the content and get it out to those who need it.