Interactive Radio Instruction (IRI) isn’t sexy per se. It doesn’t employ cutting edge networking and caching technologies. It isn’t an Android application. It doesn’t even do social media. IRI may not have the whistles and bells that often support (and sometimes distract) in ICT for Development, but what it lacks in bling, it makes up for in effectiveness.

1. It scales – one tape player, one moderator, many students.
2. It engages – students’ attention spans are courted and kept.
3. It reaches – thousands learn, in places where cellular coverage providers, electricity utilities, and governments have little incentive to provide service.

However, IRI lacks the “R” – the radio in Interactive Radio Instruction refers to the content, not the mechanism. Students listen to voices coming out of a rectangular device, much like a radio. Where does “real” radio come into IRI?

I have been self-taught with IRI, reading what I could on the subject by experts like Mary Myers and following EDC efforts – probably the most comprehensive programs to date. However, as many community-based organizations know, having the experts create an IRI initiative for a community is expensive (and likely worth the expense, unless the expense is simply out of range). Custom hardware initiatives, such as the Talking Book by Literacy Bridge, offer alternative ways to conduct IRI-based education.

Through my own work in trying to add interactivity to community radio, I’ve gotten good exposure to educational programming and have come up with some permutations of IRI that seem appropriate for communities and less expensive than “expert” IRI providers, even if the processes are not as clean. The traditional model of tape recorder, tape, and teacher starting and stopping the tapes is always fine and good, but limited in terms of extensibility, and collaboration with other schools and organizations that can be helpful in curriculum development and subject matter expertise.

Tapes and their players break. The interactivity is based on information dissemination, not information exchange, remaining a one-way communication system. While real-time two-way communication is a luxury in many communities, there are ways to truly make IRI interactive and to engage radio. It’s time to upgrade the I and R in IRI.

Using Community Radio

I’ve worked with elementary schools where teachers outsource teaching to CDs and IRI programs, even though IRI requires in-class moderation of learning modules. Lessons were often repeated, and learning became rote. As part of an unrelated project to build a closed WiFi network that connected wifi-enabled phones to the community radio station in town, the radio station saw the opportunity to offer interactive teaching, inviting subject experts and teachers come to the station to deliver lessons. Radio receivers are more common than tape players, and having educational content on the air gave the content cachet and visibility that won students and non-students alike to listen.

In addition to delivering lectures and lessons, the radio gave the WiFi phones to the students so that they could answer questions and take quizzes on air. Kids wanted to have their say on the radio, and parents wanted their kids to do better in school as it reflected well in the radio program. Classroom attendance grew, as did program complexity, using SMS and interactive voice recording systems as the community radio producers and teachers became more creative. This may not be a case that can be replicated in every community, but leveraging community radio stations is a great way to add a “real” R to IRI.

Using Mobile Phones

Similar to this, on another closed network in an Amazon educational scenario, teachers from the only high school in 400km used the mobile handsets to call other river communities on speakerphone. There was no community radio in this community, and some of the towns were a three day boat ride away. It used to be that the high school would send books and academic materials on these dugout canoes for educational use, but the river and rain more often than not ruined the texts.

Here, the original IRI model provided an effective blueprint from which to modify for geography and need. Students in other towns, facilitated by the primary school teacher or elder in the community, listened along with the lesson and were prompted to respond to the academic conversation a la conference call.

No Standard Solution, Many Options

There are natural and immediate critiques to both of these scenarios. In the first case, public praise may not be a great pedagogical model. In the second, the often-terrible connections between communities required the use of Citizen’s Band radio – one of the original ICTs! Certainly the content creation is the hardest part – this is a bit easier where English is a national language, but the judgment call needs to be made by someone much more knowledgeable about education that some of us general ICT folks are.

• Is there a national curriculum standard to follow?
• Does that standard have relevance to the students in this community?
• If not, what supplemental information is necessary for community-specific education?
• Does this content reach into vocational/health/development content?

I’ve found no dearth of content in education departments at colleges, where masters of education students are mostly willing to help for a lot less money than content experts demand – and they are also well-versed in curriculum standards and national tests, if that is an aim of the school using IRI for preparation.

Let’s also not forget richer media in the search to integrate community radio and interactivity into IRI. CD and DVD players are common in several communities, primarily in South Asia. Visual cultures seem like a natural fit for such projects as Digital Study Hall. The cost is relatively low, the scale potential is high, and the ability to show – rather than just tell – can’t be replicated by IRI or community radio. It follows one of the most effective models I know, the “see one, do one, teach one” model.

So let’s start leveraging all the ways to hear one, teach one, do more.

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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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One of the measures of an efficient education management information system (EMIS) is the extent to which returns from school censuses and surveys are accurate, timely and up-to-date. This is important for any state in terms of proper allocation of per-capita funding to schools, effective monitoring of learner enrolments and attendance, addressing emerging institutional issues, and providing appropriate information to support planning.

Traditionally, collecting EMIS data in the field is still largely paper-based, with increasing use of email and web-based modes in the dissemination and transmission of questionnaires. However, the significant growth continuously being experienced in the mobile and wireless technologies calls for a paradigm shift in governments’ educational planning strategy, to start thinking of investing more into these technologies as alternative or complementary tools to EMIS.

According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU, 2010), the share of total mobile subscriptions in the developing world increased by one fifth between 2005 and 2010, to stand at 73%. In Africa, penetration rates were projected to reach an estimated 41% at the end of 2010 (compared to 76% globally) leaving a significant potential for growth. And the 2011 Horizon Report (Johnson et al., 2011) places mobile devices as a top technology to watch for in the coming year, occupying the same level as electronic books, in the six featured technologies. And the market has a host of different mobile devices, operating systems, applications and accessories – all with different capabilities, against a backdrop of issues relating to communication coverage, infrastructure and equipment, bandwidth as well as usage costs.

Laptop computers and handheld devices such as Personal Data Assistants (PDAs) and mobile telephones (smart phones) have the potential to improve the collection and dissemination of EMIS data and information. Possibilities of integrating such systems with advanced communications systems such as mobile Geographic Information System (GIS) combined with Global Positioning System (GPS) technology can also be explored.

Technology is also important in educational planning during and after emergencies as PDAs and mobile phones can be used to collect data, often in challenging circumstances. For example, they can be combined with GPS to help in locating affected schools and in school mapping. Additionally, data collectors can communicate directly with head teachers via email or text message during such situations, and the head teacher can send the requested data to the data collector’s PDA or smart phone (IIEP, 2009).

Emerging trends and best practice examples in EMIS

It appears that limited research has so far been conducted on the potential of wireless technology for educational use in developing countries. And although the scope and coverage in the collection and dissemination of EMIS data can be improved using web services and wireless technologies, widespread use is yet to be realised, possibly due to the ‘newness and unexplored capacity’ of this technology – in terms of the collection, processing and dissemination of significantly large amounts of educational data – and the challenges that would characterise its use. However, there are some success stories, especially in Africa, relating directly to education.

Based on their research work, Dias and others (2010) found that the use of short message service or text message (SMS) coupled with several open-source tools on mobile phones by para-social workers in Tanzania enabled them to report summary data on orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs) to relevant government officials in a cost-effective and efficient manner.

A project launched in Kenya – and supported by the UK Department for International Development (DfID) – lobbied policy-makers, technologists and educationists to support the development of a targeted bulk SMS system for in-service teacher training, and explored the possibility of running much of the country’s schools’ statistical returns off SMS (Traxler and Dearden, 2005). The project’s initial exploratory results concluded that SMS is a viable and innovative technology for improving EMIS operations in Kenya. For example, mobile phones in each school could be used and head teachers would send a standard format message each week, perhaps giving pupil numbers by age and gender, to a specified phone number.

From mobiles4dev, the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland reports that it conducted a pilot study on the use of mobile phones to collect EMIS school-based data in Ghana. The study covered 35 head teachers and 21 education statisticians from two districts in the Ashanti Region. They demonstrated how mobile phones could be used to gather faster, easier, simple, cost effective and reliable school-based data for educational planning.

The Ministry of Education and Sports in Uganda tasked the Agile Learning Company in 2010 to design and develop a new decentralized national EMIS covering 81 existing districts, and 17 newly created districts. The Uganda project, whose implementation will continue into 2012, also covers the piloting of a school-based EMIS application in selected schools for the purpose of reviewing its ability to enhance school management and link critical school data directly from schools into the national EMIS-GIS.

Rwanda’s Ministry of Education also contracted the same company in 2009 to develop a similar solution for the country’s schools and universities. And its National Examinations Council tasked the company in 2008 to develop a registration and SMS-based online results management information system – the latter enabling students to query the database by SMS for their examination results. A similar initiative is proving effective in Kenya where the government has partnered with local mobile service providers. The software has also been successfully piloted in countries such as Mauritius, Botswana and Swaziland.

Tomlinson and others (2009) investigated the feasibility, ease of implementation, and the extent to which community health workers with little experience of data collection could be trained and successfully supervised to collect data using mobile phones in a large baseline survey in Umlazi suburb, South Africa. The project deployed a web-based system that allows electronic surveys or questionnaires to be designed on a word processor, sent to, and used on standard entry level mobile phones. They found out that the benefits of mobile technology, combined with the improvement that mobile phones offer over PDA’s in terms of data loss and uploading difficulties, make mobile phones a feasible method of data collection that needs to be further explored.

Opportunities and challenges, success factors and barriers to wider dissemination and take up

Recognising the great potential of mobile devices for collecting education data in developing countries, the Academy for Educational Development (AED) has created a software package of applications, called GATHER, that can be downloaded to mobile phones, PDAs, laptops or other electronic devices. It enables cost-effective and efficient data collection, analysis and reporting. It can create data collection instruments, immediately transmit data to other devices or databases, and perform data analysis. Such technology has the potential to offer educational planners quick and efficient access to important information – which is especially important in times of emergency.

Innovative programs are also available for collection and dissemination of crucial health, social and political data over mobile devices. One solution, writes Verclas (2009), is Mobile Researcher which allows long, complex surveys to be conducted. A web browser is used to design a survey questionnaire and analyse the data. Already, the application is being used for the collection of baseline data in household surveys, patient interviews and healthcare facility audits. Applications such as this can also be used in EMIS as its effectiveness is evidenced by the number of case studies where it has been used (such as the “Saving Newborn Lives” project in KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa; the Education Sector Support Programme in Kano, Nigeria; the Philani Mentor Mothers Project in the Western Cape, South Africa; Emergency Relief and Rehabilitation in Zimbabwe and the National Information System for Social Assistance initiative launched in 2011 by Lesotho’s Department of Health and Social Welfare).

Accompanying opportunities with mobile technologies, such as the ones highlighted above, are the challenges. These range from cost and complexity to dynamism, security and lack of adequate resources in the Ministries of Education, especially in the units where EMIS is anchored. For example, mobile handheld devices have limitations such as small bandwidth, small screen display, colour resolution and limited application capabilities.

Africa still lags behind when it comes to fixed (wired) broadband: although subscriptions are increasing, a penetration rate of less than 1% illustrates the challenges that persist in increasing access to high-speed, high-capacity Internet access in the region (ITU, 2010). The good news is that most of these are being overcome by improvements in technology (Vckovski, 1999), making collection, processing and dissemination of large amount of data increasingly possible (Kraak, 2002). With many offered open source solutions, the development of such mobile GIS platforms is also becoming more affordable. And there is also the issue of accuracy: a quantitative evaluation of the accuracy of data collection using mobile phones by Patnaik, Brunskill and Thies (2008) in India revealed error rates of 4.2% for electronic forms, 4.5% for SMS and 0.45% for voice.

Albeit with some limitations such as varied backgrounds and training of participants, the study suggests that some care is needed in deploying electronic interfaces in resource-poor settings. Further, it raises the possibility of using voice as a low-tech, high-accuracy, and cost-effective interface for mobile data collection. Other challenge considerations relate to compatibility, acceptance of electronic signatures and inefficiency in the entire statistical data chain – the latter being core to the quality of EMIS data and information being disseminated and used, whether using mobile technology or not.

However, individual organisational or institutional constraints are factors that are likely to ultimately influence the adoption, or not, of a given technology. Effective policies and legal frameworks, proper ICT infrastructure and equipment, financial and human resources, training, public-private-partnerships and joint collaboration with development partners are some of the critical factors that can bring success in unleashing the untapped but promising potential of mobile technologies in EMIS on the African continent.

Reflections based on experience

Results from surveys undertaken by the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) Working Group on Education Management and Policy Support (WGEMPS) on the status of EMIS in most sub-Saharan African countries indicate some progress towards the use of ICT in EMIS operations – e.g. the use of desktop computers and servers, email and internet, as well as availing EMIS data and information on the Ministry websites.

There are also innovative initiatives such the use of optical character recognition (OCR) and mobile laptops in the data collection and capturing processes in few countries such as Gambia and South Africa. Significant progress has been made in putting in place relevant national policies and frameworks that regulate the use of ICT in these countries. However, there is a general weakness in the flexibility of such policies to adapt to the changing environments that match the dynamism of technology – this affects their implementation and enforcement.

Apart from the use of SMS by EMIS personnel in following up on questionnaire returns, and by learners in finding out about their examination registration and performance, there appears to be little experience in the use of mobile and wireless technology within the realm of EMIS in the continent – a position that can be reversed with solid partnerships with the private sector and development partners.

Recommendations to policy makers, regulators and other stakeholders

Against the backdrop of constant evolution, mobile technologies are proving to be useful in EMIS operations, with advantages and limitations when compared to conventional methods. Therefore, even as the relevant stakeholders in the education sector grapple with how best to use these technologies, either to supplement or replace the conventional methods, they must not lose sight of issues such as the application development process, standards in data collection, database integration, accuracy, security and quality of data.

In anticipation of the large quantities of data from the EMIS census and surveys, it is crucial to ascertain the capability of the mobile technologies to be used. For Africa, a successful integration of mobile technologies with EMIS therefore necessitates putting in place effective policies and legal frameworks that are alive to the dynamic nature and yet-to-be-explored potential of these technologies. A robust ICT infrastructure and equipment, coupled with continual capacity building, adequate resourcing, solid partnerships between governments, the private sector and civil societies are also key ingredients, in addition to effective collaboration with funders and development partners, and networking with the rest of the world so as to be in synch with globally-set standards and benefit from global innovations.

References

Agile Learning Company, Inc. (2010). Agile Selected for Development and Implementation of Uganda Decentralized EMIS-GIS System. Agile Learning News. Retrieved from http://www.agilelearning.com/latest_news.aspx on 15 May 2011.

Barker, A., Krull, G. and Mallinson, B. (undated). A Proposed Theoretical Model for M-Learning Adoption in Developing Countries. Department of Information Systems. Rhodes University, South Africa.

Dias, B. et al. (2010). Using Mobile Phones and Open Source Tools to Empower Social Workers in Tanzania.

Ehow.com. (undated). Use of Mobile Technology in Information Dissemination. Retrieved on 17 May 2011 from http://www.ehow.com/way_5580231_use-mobile-technology-information-dissemination.html.

IIEP. (2009). Guidebook for planning education in emergencies and reconstruction. Chapter 2.8.

ITU. (2010). The World in 2010: The rise of 3G. ICT Facts and Figures. Geneva, Switzerland.

Johnson, L. et al. (2011). The 2011 Horizon Report. Austin, Texas. The New Media Consortium.

Kraak, M. J. (2002). Current trends in visualisation of geographic data with special reference to cartography. Invited paper in Proceedings of the XXIIth INCA Congress Indian National Cartographic Association: Convergence of Imagery Information and Maps. Vol. 22, pp. 319-324.

mobiles4dev. (undated). Education Management Information System (EMIS) School-based Data. Retrieved on 16 May 2011 from http://mobiles4dev.cto.int/areaofpractice/Education.

Patnaik, S., Brunskill, E. and Thies, W. (2008). Evaluating the Accuracy of Data Collection on Mobile Phones: A Study of Forms, SMS, and Voice. MIT and Microsoft Research India.

Tomlinson, M. et al. (2009). The use of mobile phones as a data collection tool: A report from a household survey in South Africa. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making. BioMed Central Ltd. Available from http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6947/9/51.

Traxler, J. and Dearden, P. (2005). The Potential for Using SMS to Support Learning and Organisation in Sub-Saharan Africa. London. Department for International Development.

Vckovski, A. (1999). Interoperability and spatial information theory: Interoperating Geographic Information Systems.

Verclas, K. (2009). Data collection using mobile phones. Retrieved on 14 May 2011 from http://ictupdate.cta.int/en/Regulars/Techtip/Data-collection-using-mobile-phones.

The opening statement of this Education Technology Debate was titled “Is ICT in education a revolution or a fool’s errand?“. This is a puzzling question. Over the last decades, there have been many studies on the introduction of ICT in education. So why is it that we can still have a debate about the usefulness of ICT in education? Why has the matter not been settled after three decades of debate?

I think the continuation of the debate is for a large part due to the fact that the question is stated wrong. ICT is not one simple “application” that can easily be evaluated once and for all. ICT is a huge and complex cluster of ever changing technologies that have extensions in almost every aspect of industry, commerce, and private life in the developed world. The question should not be “Whether ICT is useful in education?”, but “How can ICT be made useful in education?”. Not because ICT is some magic spell that will solve all problems, but because ICT is needed to provide the children of the world the education they so desperately need.

I would like to step back from the question of how to make specific ICT solutions useful in particular schools, to the question of what is required to give children the education they need. And then look into the matter of how this might be achievable by deploying the tools we have, mainly ICT.

A good overview of the scientific studies on the use of ICT in education was written by Magdalena Clara (2007) for the CERI-KERIS (2007) meeting and her paper can be seen as the background of my contribution to this debate. The other papers in this meeting give a nice overview of current thinking (CERI-KERIS, 2007)

The first question to target is what is the aim of education? It is not high grades on standardized tests. But what is it?

A global view: Wealth, health, and happiness

World wide, people spend trillions of dollars on education. Educational spending constitutes around 5% of global GDP. A “simple” question is now: Why do people spend so much money on educating children? And often other people’s children? What do they hope this money will achieve?

The aim of educational spending can be compressed into a sound bite: To improve the future Wealth, Health, and Happiness of the children.

Future income and prosperity is foremost in the mind of those who advocate education. Children that receive an education will be more productive as adults. Hence, they will be able to earn more income. This wealth will benefit the whole community.

Moreover, it is well known that both personal and family health improves with the level of education of the parents, especially the care giving parent. This health improvement comes over, and is independent of, the increase of socio-economic status that results from education (e.g., Yuyu Chen and Hongbin Li, 2006). All school curricula contain implicit and explicit health related components, like disease prevention and dietary advice. This way, schools provide a major contribution to public health.

The last item, happiness, might sound rather vague and “new-age”, but has been at the foundation of every educational system I have ever seen. A primary cause of preventable suffering is ignorance and social misadaptation. The common cure has been moral teachings. Children have been taught moral lessons under the guise of religious, political, or civic education since the dawn of civilization. To avoid the endless confusion about “morals”, “life-style”, “civic duty”, and “freedom”, I prefer to say that education promotes the future happiness of the child as a member of the community.

Globally, people consider these effects of education so important that they are willing to spend close to 5 cent per dollar earned on education. Do the educational systems of the world deliver? For many children of the world, they do. However, for far too many other children, they do not deliver on any scale of educational achievement. In the (very) long term, education worldwide could be improved to adequate levels by supplying more teachers and more resources. But in the long term, we are all dead, and these children out of school. In the short term, the only solution would be to dramatically increase teacher productivity. That is, to let each teacher educate more children better. A daunting task, indeed.

Increasing teacher productivity

Education is a service “industry”. Over human history, a single teacher has been able to handle around 30-60 pupils at a time, with no real increase of numbers over time. It should be understood that group sizes of 30 pupils and less are certainly preferable for the quality of education. The ideal seems to be adequate teacher quality (training), groups of 20-30 pupils, all at comparable educational level, with text books and some other materials available. Reality in many regions is, deficiencies in teacher training, up to 60 pupils of varying levels, and few or no text books or other materials. A description of such schools can be found in Oscar Becerra (2010).

The challenge is to improve educational quality in such schools without the ability to supply more teachers on short order. That is, to increase teacher productivity, defined as the cumulative increase per teacher of earning capacity, family health status, and happiness of the students. It is obvious that there are no practical ways to actually quantify “real” teacher productivity. Well-known proxy measures are increases in some skills, e.g., reading level and mastering of arithmetic. However, it must be remembered that these are just proxy measures.

So the challenges to improve teacher productivity are, in no particular order:

• Supply teaching materials
• Improve teacher’s mastering of the curriculum
• Improve teacher handling of groups larger than 30 pupils
• Improve teacher handling of diverse groups of pupils

The only two known ways to improve productivity in a service industry are education and ICT, i.e., networked computers. Education was the problem to begin with, so this leaves us with ICT as the only short term way to improve teacher productivity in the schools as described by Oscar Becerra (2010).

The question now that remains is, can it be done at all? Can teacher productivity be increased? Or are we forced to admit that there is only one solution: Supply more teachers? I sincerely believe that it is possible to improve teacher productivity in the short term and so improve education in disadvantaged communities at a reasonable cost.

The remainder of this contribution is an attempt to argue the possibilities of ICT4E for improving teacher productivity. As a model for this discussion, I take the OLPC 1:1 distribution model as described by Oscar Becerra (2010). In this model, every child and teacher has a personal laptop and there are network connections between the laptops, at least around the school building. There is a periodical update of library and software materials, possibly through an Internet connection of the school or by exchange of some storage medium, eg, a portable computer disk.

Teaching: drill and debate

Wayan Vota started his introduction with a reference to Plato. If we go back to classical Greece in his spirit, we can see two opposing approaches to teaching, which can be simplified as the Spartan and Athenian way. The Spartans raised their children to be good soldiers. The aim was to be practical and the tool was the drill. The Athenians raised their children to be good citizens. The aim was to become politically engaged and the tool was the intelligent conversation.

Very appropriate, the face of Spartan education is a mythical state reformer, Lycurgus, who organized all life in Sparta around military power. The face of Athenian education is a historical philosopher, Socrates, who taught by debate, or rather, guided conversation. Obviously, the above is a caricature of historical Greece. But the aim of these sketches is not historical accuracy, but to characterize archetypes floating around in the educational world.

The current debates between “traditionalist” and “constructivist” models of teaching are also debates between Spartan and Athenian models. In the end, we obviously need both. Some skills are better learned with practice, or drill. Other skills are best learned by guiding students to find their own solutions.

It is easy to envisage a hundred people doing drills in an exercise field but it is difficult to imagine more than a handful of people discussing a question at a market place in an orderly fashion. The same can be seen in a school. A classroom with sixty children can easily recite exercises together or all copy a lesson from the blackboard. However, it is difficult to see how a teacher can give personal attention and feedback on performance to all children individually in such a large group.

When teachers are strained due to large groups, little time, and few teaching materials, they will fall back to drills to get any teaching done. When the strain is relieved, it is natural that the balance will be shifted to more individual guiding at the expense of drill practice. Teachers, schools, and parents will have to adapt to this shift. There will be inertia against change as it will be initially difficult to evaluate the value of the new teaching against the known outcomes of the old methods. For instance, writing essays or organizational skills are more difficult to judge than correctly reciting lists of facts.

There is one thing missing in the above argument. That is the fact that all education requires motivation. Especially in children, the most important job of the teacher and the parents is to motivate the pupils (by stick and carrot) to learn, whether it be drill practice or not. The main motivating factor in education is relevance (e.g., Oscar Becerra, 2010).

Targeting teacher productivity: The role of ICT

The above global, birds-eye view of educational practices has been made to set the stage for a discussion on how to assist failing schools. Against this background, we can more easily discuss how ICT can be recruited to help increase teacher productivity. For simplicity, and a good sound-bite, think of ICT as the technology to deliver Information, Communication, and Tools to teachers and students.

As a starter, if there is one major role for ICT in education, it would be the distribution of Information in general, and teaching materials in particular. With current technology, it is possible to compile a mobile library that a child can take home. Electronic text books solve a lot of the production and distribution problems in teaching materials, as well as allowing easy updates. If every child has access to a computer in class and at home, it becomes very easy to supply every child with up-to-date text books and a portable library. And the library does not have to be limited to texts and pictures, but can include multi-media resources. This is an obvious application of ICT4E that has immediate effects.

Motivation
Motivation in education is to a large extend a matter of relevance of the curriculum and inter-personal relations at school and between school and parents. In general, more relevance and better contacts tends to result in better motivation and better educational results (e.g., Oscar Becerra 2010). The role of ICT is two-fold.

General office automation software can help with better student records and parent contacts. Moreover, with teaching materials and text books available in electronic form, they can be adapted more easily to local situations to make them more relevant to the children. There is a consistent trend that long term student motivation increases after the introduction of ICT in schools (Anja Balanskat, 2007; Oscar Becerra, 2010).

For a national supplier of teaching materials, it is relatively cheap to assemble additional, localized, information to supplement a standard electronic text. For instance, biology lessons could be supplemented by examples of local flora and fauna, instead of a single text with a national selection of plants and animals that might not be very relevant to the children. Such localization is expensive in the production of paper text books, but very cheap in electronic text books.

With electronic distribution and school based storage, it becomes much more practical to make teaching materials relevant and attractive to the children. Which will help improving motivation in school. Note that this distribution model also allows for easy distribution of supplementary materials for the teachers. Thus also allowing for better teacher preparation.

The Spartan model: Drill
It is a truism that to learn anything you have to practise. In martial terms, “an army fights as it trains”. In general, more practise is better to the extend that children that spend more time on a certain subject tend to master it better. This can be called the drill aspect of education. Often, it is not so important how a particular skill is practised, as that there is practise at all. There is a huge pitfall in relying on drills. The underlying assumption is that the drilled skills can be applied in real life. But any expectation that children can generalize and extrapolate from the classroom to the real world is at best a speculation waiting for proof.

The point of drill practice is that there is only a limited scope for supervision. The only condition is that the student performs the exercises correctly. If she does, no teacher or other supervisor is actually needed. So it is no surprise that “drill and test” practices were the most popular targets of educational software (e.g., Report to the Ministry of Education New-Zealand, 2000). Drill and test software comes closest to the “ideal” of relieving teachers from supervising children.

Drill and test software can generate unlimited numbers of exercise questions and track student performance. Progress of the children to the next level can be made conditional on performance at the current level, so students can progress at an optimal pace. Teachers can easily follow the progress of students from a distance and check whether they actually practice. Unsupervised practice might ideally free up teacher time for helping pupils that need personal attention, while not hampering the progress of those who do not need personal help. Such software is already in widespread use.

The next step in using drill and test software is to delegate it to times the students are not expected in class. If teacher supervision is not needed, the practice can be done at home or elsewhere. Class time can then be used for other purposes.

The Athenian model: Guided conversations
Education does not consist of poring a substance called “knowledge” into the heads of individual students. Teaching is a social interaction. Any attempt to structure education without social interactions between teacher and students is destined to fail. The social aspect of teaching is most clearly visible in the Athenian, or Socratic, model of educating by conversation.

In the Athenian model, students are taught to argue, debate, and find their own solutions. This prepares students to the real world, where they will have to collaborate with colleagues to face problems never encountered in school. The basic assumption behind this method is that the debating, researching, and learning skills can be applied to effectively master many relevant subjects.

ICT can still help in this phase of education. The crucial part of this guided conversation is that it is about communication between students and between students and teacher. And although we know there is nothing better than a face-to-face talk, other means of communication can substitute if face-to-face time is not available. Video conferencing, conference calls, Instant Messaging (or twitter), Wiki discussion platforms, school web-sites, and email correspondence are all useful ways to communicate at a distance.

Virtual Classrooms
It is possible to extend the classroom face-to-face conversations into electronic collaborations, with electronic conferencing as communication channels. It is well known that peer guidance is the second best thing after teacher guidance. The decoupling of group work and guidance from the classroom and school times to virtual groups, or virtual classrooms, would allow children’s supervision and guidance to be shared by different teachers (if available) and peers. If network connections are available, children could be working in peer groups that could span classes or even schools and supervision could be shared over teachers and (older) students.

The main advantage of such a virtual classroom set-up would be more efficient use of teacher time. With virtual classrooms, the teacher is not restricted to a particular place, and sometimes even a particular time, for teaching. Virtual classes do not have to demand all of a teacher’s time continuously, but she might be able to distribute attention over several tasks and virtual classrooms. In some situations supervision can be partially delegated to other students.

From the student’s view, virtual classrooms separate them (from the distractions of) other children that might be present physically, but do not partake in the same lessons. Virtual classrooms can allow children to be taught interactively while not actually, physically, present in the same classroom. Thereby giving children the benefits of the Athenian educational model, while not demanding everyone to be present at the same place at the same time.

Obviously, there is no point in trying to organize all teaching in virtual classrooms where children stay at home. This is not how education works. Certainly not with small children. But many aspects of normal classroom interactions, like group work and home work, can be made much more efficient using collaborative software and simple communication channels, like email or drop-boxes. These technologie becomes more relevant when coping with situations where children have only half day lessons due to a lack of teachers and classrooms.

An important criticism of the Athenian approach to education is that leaving the actual learning of subject matter out of the classroom leads to the pitfall of the sophists. People who could eloquently argue for or against any standpoint on any random subject without mastering even a single one themselves. The real strength of the Athenian method is that it teaches students to master skills and solve problems themselves in collaboration with peers. Lifelong learning might seem a mirage in schools struggling to provide for education now. But if there is one thing that we know for sure it is that children in school today will have to learn a new set of skills at various times in their working lives. School should prepare them for this re-education, if at all possible.

Criticism: Can ICT4E actually work in the developing world?

The above is all nice and well, looking at ICT4E as an option to improve education in less developed countries. But what if there is no alternative to more and better qualified teachers? What if we simply have to give up and wait for that (elusive) moment the required quality and quantity of education can be delivered to the children the old way? What if the current generation of children cannot be helped at all and are “lost”? This is more or less the position of Kentaro Toyama in his contribution to this debate and an earlier article (Kentaro Toyama, 2010, 2011).

Critics of investments in ICT4E can point to monumental failures in introducing technology to aid in development. In each individual case, the reasons for failure are complex and intricate. Generalizing, even over-generalizing, it can be said that all the really hard problems of humanity have at their root social problems. Economic, agricultural, industrial, and technological solutions are all only effective if they are also able to solve some of these social problems. The problems of under-development and failing education are not different.

The received opinion is that technology, like any other “solution”, will only work if it is integrated in the social structure. It must become an integral part of the lives of the people. There are remarkable exceptions to this rule. Few communities have had problems with embracing tele-communications technology, i.e., movies, radio, TV, or fixed and mobile phones. If you allow people a chance to hear, view, or speak other people, they will grab it with both hands. All these communication technologies have caused revolutions in the lives of people all over the world (e.g., Charles Kenny, 2009). But in general, it is true that an externally supplied solution only works if it can be integrated in the life of those who receive it.

Criticism is generally directed towards Educational Technology (Kentaro Toyama, 2010) which is treated as some field separated from general ICT. The conclusion then is that as delivering Educational Technology has failed to solve problems in X cases, it must be dismissed as a possible solution to the problems of the developing world. However, the fact that ICT can be used in education does not create a separate, isolated field of ICT4E.

In reality, ICT are a cluster of hard- and software technologies for the control, communication, and handling of information and multi-media. This cluster of technologies is more extensive, diverse, and volatile than anything produced by humans before. These technologies have changed the face of industry, commerce, and private life the world over, e.g., it allowed the economic rise of the BRIC countries. Deciding now that none of these technologies can be harnessed for education in poor communities seems at least premature.

The question Can technology benefit failing schools? is meaningless and cannot be answered with Yes or No. In my opinion, the only real question is How can technology benefit failing schools?

Discussion: [ICT4E] is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes (Adapted from Edsger Dijkstra)

The Spartan drill delivers skilled workers, the Athenian debate produces educated citizens. We want children to be educated to become both productive workers and engaged citizens. For such an education, students and teachers need good, up-to-date information and teaching materials, good tools to work and practice with these materials, and communication channels to collaborate and interact with peers and teacher.

In this context, ICT4E becomes Information, Communication, and Tools for Education. Every school will benefit from such ICT4E, but I expect that schools that are overstretched by the limitations of the resources of their country will benefit most.

Any improvement in the situation in schools, and the introduction of new tools and possibilities in general, will lead to changes in education itself. If the implementation works out well, the balance of teaching will move from drill practise towards more “Athenian” style teaching. Children will start to learn new things. New things that might not fit easily in the existing evaluation models. Schools should be prepared for such changes. And schools should prepare teachers and parents for such changes.

In light of the quote from Edsger Dijkstra, what part can the computer, or ICT in general, play in education? I think the analogy to the telescope is very apt. A telescope is a personal access point into astronomy. A computer is a personal access point into an educational world of tools, connections, collaborations, and information. Such a computerized environment can help to raise students and teachers above the isolation and resource limitations that hold back education in so many parts in the world.

What is exactly demanded from ICT4E, and how the demands should be prioritized, is a matter of local requirements. 1:1 Laptop programs, e.g., the OLPC program, are the most thorough of such applications of ICT4E. And the paper by Oscar Becerra (2010) illustrates such a program. Many more can be found at the official site of the OLPC program, or at the independent site, OLPC News.

1:1 Laptop programs tackle all problems at the same time: Dissemination of teaching materials, communication and collaboration, and both general and specific tools useful in school. So a 1:1 laptop program is very likely to solve those local problems that can indeed be solved with ICT. But such 1:1 programs are complex and costly and not the be all and end all of ICT4E, e.g., see Magdalena Clara (2007) and this debating site itself. For a large number of reasons, 1:1 programs might not fit the requirements of individual schools. In the end, it all depends on the needs and resources of the school (Michael Trucano, 2007; InfoDev.org).

Back to the original question “Are ICT investments in schools an education revolution or fool’s errand?“.

ICT in education can be a revolution, like text books or black boards once were. But just as some text books turn out to be useless, not all applications of ICT will be revolutionary or even useful. Every human endeavour can fail. And we know that ICT4E has had its share of failures. But as I argued above, the question is not whether, but how ICT can be useful in education. Because, short of “growing” teachers on trees, there seem to be no other option to improve education for the generation that is now entering schools in the developing nations.

References

Anja Balanskat (2007). “Comparative international evidence on the impact of digital technologies on learning outcomes: empirical studies”, CERI-KERIS 2007

Oscar Becerra (2010). “What is reasonable to expect from information and communication technologies in education?” Educational Technology Debate, Computer Configurations for Learning

CERI-KERIS (2007). International Expert Meeting on ICT and Educational Performance

Yuyu Chen, Hongbin Li (2006). “Mother’s Education and Child Health: Is There a Nurturing Effect?”

Magdalena Clara (2007). “OECD Background paper ‘Information and Communication Technologies and Educational Performance’“, CERI-KERIS International Expert Meeting on ICT and Educational Performance

ETD (2009). “Assessing ICT4E Evaluations”, Educational Technology Debate

InfoDev.org. “Quick guide: Monitoring and evaluation of ICT in education initiatives”, Web Site.

Charles Kenny (2009). “Revolution in a Box”, Foreign Policy November/December 2009

Report to the Ministry of Education New-Zealand (2000). “A Review of the Literature on Computer-Assisted Learning, Particularly Integrated Learning Systems, and Outcomes with Respect to Literacy and Numeracy”, UniServices Ltd

Kentaro Toyama (2010). “Can Technology End Poverty?“, Boston Review, November/December 2010. “Response” from KT:

Kentaro Toyama (2011). “There Are No Technology Shortcuts to Good Education“, Educational Technology Debate, ICT in Schools, January 2011.

Michael Trucano (2007). “What do we know about the effective uses of information and communication technologies in education in developing countries?”, CERI-KERIS 2007

(Caveat: Because this article was written for an audience most interested in government-funded primary and secondary education in developing countries, words like “wealthy,” “average,” and “typical” should be read with that context in mind. But, the conclusions are relevant for a broad class of primary and secondary schools in developed countries, as well.)

To back these assertions, I’ll draw on four different lines of evidence.

1. The history of electronic technologies in schools is fraught with failures.
2. Computers are no exception, and rigorous studies show that it is incredibly difficult to have positive educational impact with computers. Technology at best only amplifies the pedagogical capacity of educational systems; it can make good schools better, but it makes bad schools worse.
3. Technology has a huge opportunity cost in the form of more effective non-technology interventions.
4. Many good school systems excel without much technology.

The inescapable conclusion is that significant investments in computers, mobile phones, and other electronic gadgets in education are neither necessary nor warranted for most school systems. In particular, the attempt to use technology to fix underperforming classrooms (or to replace non-existent ones) is futile. And, for all but wealthy, well-run schools, one-to-one computer programs cannot be recommended in good conscience.

All of the evidence stands on its own, but I will tie them together with a single theory that explains why technology is unable to substitute for good teaching: Quality primary and secondary education is a multi-year commitment whose single bottleneck is the sustained motivation of the student to climb an intellectual Everest. Though children are naturally curious, they nevertheless require ongoing guidance and encouragement to persevere in the ascent. Caring supervision from human teachers, parents, and mentors is the only known way of generating motivation for the hours of a school day, to say nothing of eight to twelve school years.

While computers appear to engage students (which is exactly their appeal), the engagement swings between uselessly fleeting at best and addictively distractive at worst. No technology today or in the foreseeable future can provide the tailored attention, encouragement, inspiration, or even the occasional scolding for students that dedicated adults can, and thus, attempts to use technology as a stand-in for capable instruction are bound to fail.

With respect to sustaining directed motivation, even the much-maligned rote-focused drill-sergeant disciplinarian is superior to any electronic multimedia carnival. (In an October 2009 ETD article, James BonTempo also highlighted the importance of motivation. But, while BonTempo suggested that we should seek technologies that motivate both teachers and students, I believe today’s technology is not up to the task. [Note: The author retracts this statement and agrees with BonTempo, as his articles actually suggest that even this is not possible if neither teachers nor students are motivated to begin with.])

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The Repetitive Cycle of Technology

For anyone concerned with high-tech in schools, two books are required reading as histories of technology and education. The first is Larry Cuban’s Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920, which overviews the history of films, radio, television, and computers in American education up to the early 1980s. The second is Todd Oppenheimer’s The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology. Oppenheimer also focuses primarily on US education, but updates and expands on Cuban’s findings for computers in schools through the early 2000s. Both authors consider the record of technology in schools and find it wanting. They reveal that while technologies can have positive educational impact in restricted instances, successes pale in comparison to failures overall. By not knowing this past history, we seem condemned to repeat it over and over and over.

One point that both authors make is that there is a repetitive cycle of technology in education that goes through hype, investment, poor integration, and lack of educational outcomes. The cycle keeps spinning only because each new technology reinitiates the cycle. In 1922, Thomas Edison claimed that movies would “revolutionize our educational system.” In 1945, William Levenson, a Cleveland radio station director, suggested that portable radios in classrooms should be “integrated into school life” alongside blackboards. In the 1960s, governments under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson invested in classroom TV. In an irrational leap of reasoning that is symptomatic of technology in education, Johnson went from a valid lament, “Unhappily, the world has only a fraction of the teachers it needs,” to a non-solution… to meet the challenge “through educational television.”

The hubris and failures of technology projects are detailed by Cuban and Oppenheimer, but with hindsight available to all of us, we know that none of these technologies has delivered on their promises. If anything, we have become wary of their educational power. For example, on the one hand, television excels as a medium for delivering information. Seduced by this capacity in 1964, Wilbur Schramm, the father of communications studies, asked “What if the full power and vividness of television teaching were to be used to help the schools develop a country’s new educational pattern?” He was thinking, in particular, of mass media’s potential to transform education for developing countries.

The transformation never occurred, probably because as motivational as television can be, it still falls far short of generating the motivation required for education. For every person who falls prey to Madison Avenue’s latest advertisement, hundreds of others just ignore it or turn the channel – if that’s true of the most persuasive television commercials, why should we expect television to be able to regularly sustain the motivation (and not just the attention) of easily distracted children to do the cognitive push-ups that education demands?

In the meanwhile, many of us have come to sense television’s shortcomings. Educated parents restrict their children’s time in front of the TV, and many households ban television altogether – at its best, television is considered a cheap babysitter to hold a child’s attention when adult attention is scarce; at its worst, television caters to our weakest impulses, glamorizes materialism, desensitizes us to violence, and lulls us into a zombie-like trance. As a result, most people today would laugh at a school system based on watching broadcast television programs, however educational. Yet, that was exactly the idea behind an experiment in American Samoa in the mid-1960s, where the “education” of 80% of students was based on watching educational telecasts. The program was dismantled several years later as teachers, administrators, parents, and even students expressed dissatisfaction with the students’ academic performance.

Computers: The Latest Technology Cycle

Today, computers and mobile phones are the shiny new technologies, and they offer an even more seductive promise. One argument goes that it was the passiveness of older technologies that was the problem, so today’s interactive digital technologies are the perfect solution.

Patrick Suppes, a pioneer in computer-aided learning suggested in 1966 that computers can “adapt mechanical teaching routines to the needs and the past performance of the individual student.” But, neither interactivity nor adaptive capacity are sufficient – the key challenge in education remains the long-term, directed motivation of the student – something which no technology today can deliver on its own, but which good teachers deliver regularly.

Of course, computers are different from radio or television, so if they are able to prove themselves in education, we should use them. Alas, the research on computers in education consistently arrives at a single conclusion, which at its most optimistic could be stated as follows:

Computers can help good schools do some things better, but they do nothing positive for underperforming schools. This means, very specifically, that efforts to fix broken schools with technology or to substitute for missing teachers with technology invariably fail.

Mark Warschauer, the foremost authority on technology in American classrooms, has spent countless hours studying computer projects. He writes of underperforming US schools, “placing computers and Internet connections in low-[income] schools, in and of itself, does little to address the serious educational challenges faced by these schools. To the extent that an emphasis on provision of equipment draws attention away from other important resources and interventions, such an emphasis can in fact be counterproductive.”

And, as for technology’s capacity to even the playing field of education, he says, “the introduction of information and communication technologies in [...] schools serves to amplify existing forms of inequality.” This is a specific instance of a broader thesis I argued recently, of technology’s role as an amplifier of existing institutional forces.

In the international arena, and using experimental methodology, economists confirm these findings. In rigorous large-scale studies in both India and Colombia, Leigh Linden at Columbia University found that while PCs can supplement good instruction, PCs are a poor substitute for time with teachers. Furthermore, large-scale computer roll-outs in these countries showed no significant educational outcomes compared against students who didn’t receive computers. He suggests that one problem is that teachers don’t successfully incorporate computers into their curricula. (Nor are teachers to blame – technology programs routinely fail to account for teachers’ needs.)

Ana Santiago and her colleagues at the Inter-American Development Bank find a similar story for a Peruvian One Laptop Per Child program. Three months after a large-scale roll-out, and despite teacher, parent, and student excitement around the technology, students gained nothing in academic achievement. Santiago also notes that even during the initial three months, the novelty factor of the laptops appears to wane, with each week seeing less use of the devices.

None of these results run counter to the few research studies that show how computers can benefit education in limited ways. But, all positive instances of computers in schools are built on strong institutional foundations that are exactly what is deficient where technology is expected to save the day. Without the institutional base, technology’s impact is zero or negative. This should immediately cause anyone hoping to fix an underperforming classroom to cross off technology as any part of the “solution.”

As Wayan Vota notes in a May 2009 ETD article, unless the institutional foundation of teachers and administrators is built and funded properly, technology is pointless. With the lens of motivation, it’s easy to understand why. Bad schools are unable to direct student motivation towards educational goals. Since technology itself requires proper motivation for its benefits to accrue, any school that can’t direct student motivation capably will fail to do so with technology, as well (or worse, allow technology to distract students).

The Cost Implications of Technology Investments

Educators often parrot that “technology is not a panacea,” by which they mean either:

1. that technology doesn’t cure all educational ills or
2. that technology alone is insufficient as a solution.

Though these acknowledgments are far better than a blind faith in technology, they still belie hidden, unjustified expectations of technology. The first interpretation suggests that technology cures some maladies in education. But, this is exactly what doesn’t happen – the prevailing evidence shows that technology does not cure unhealthy educational systems; at best, it only augments healthy ones. The second belief is more dangerous because it is factually correct but misleading for policy. It implies that technology can be a good solution as long as other investments are also made; what it leaves out is that if alternate investments of the same magnitude were made to support education directly (and not indirectly to support technology), the educational results could be far greater.

The issues here are cost-effectiveness and opportunity cost. Of course, if the net impact of a technology solution is zero or negative, it’s pointless to implement it however low the cost. But because many educators are tempted by technology’s supposed ability to lower costs, it’s worthwhile to consider actual costs of well-implemented technology.

The most common error in computing costs is to assume that hardware and software are the dominant costs of technology. In reality, the total cost of ownership (TCO) for information technology is comfortably several times the cost of hardware, with a range of 5-10x being a good rule of thumb. Beyond hardware, necessary costs include costs of distribution, maintenance, power infrastructure, teacher training, repair and replacement, and curriculum integration. (In a May 2010 ETD article, Sam Carlson, who unlike me believes in technology for education, nevertheless highlights just how much of an investment teacher training requires.) Additional costs often include connectivity, software development, content production, and end-of-life costs. One analysis by Vital Wave Consulting shows the TCO of an ultra-low-cost PC to be in the $2000-3000 range for developing country schools. A similar analysis by OLPCnews suggests $972 over five years for OLPC (the very optimistic advertised lifespan of an OLPC laptop), and $753 for an OLPC implementation in Nepal (cf., OLPC’s current cost of $188). These figures are per unit, so a one-to-one laptop program would incur these costs per-student.

Though figures like the ones above show otherwise, technology providers eagerly feed technology-cost misconceptions. Nicholas Negroponte, founder of OLPC, has been recently touting a $1-per-week total cost for his laptops. But, a dollar a week doesn’t even pay for the device over three years, which many observers agree is a reasonable estimate of its lifetime. It appears his accounting skills are not on par with his salesmanship. Even at $1 a week, though, the price is out of proportion for many developing-country budgets. The government of India, for example, spends no more than $200 per student per year for primary and secondary school, and most of that expense goes to teacher salaries. And, while literacy rates in India are rising, they remain around 60%. Many other developing countries spend even less, with worse results. Does it make sense to take a quarter or more of a struggling school system’s budget and allocate it to technologies that haven’t even proven themselves?

With respect to costs, it’s worth keeping in mind the opportunity cost of technology. For example, research by economists Ted Miguel, Michael Kremer, and others has conclusively shown the value of 50-cent deworming pills for education. The pills free children of parasites and eliminate one of the dominant reasons for student absenteeism in many developing countries. At a cost of only $3.50 per student (over several years), countries with high incidences of parasites can effectively add the equivalent of an extra year of schooling. Similar results can be had from provision of midday meals, iron supplements, and teaching assistants, and all at a much lower cost than that of computing technology.

As for better teaching, educator Doug Lemov enumerates a series of instructional techniques in his book Teach Like a Champion. The techniques were compiled by Lemov after studying hours upon hours of video of teachers who systematically outperform their peers. Most of the techniques are conceptually simple, but have a dramatic impact on the teacher’s effect in the classroom. For example, when asking a question, Lemov’s recommendation to teachers is to pose the question to the class at large, allow some time to think, and then to randomly call on a student. The technique motivates all of the students to think, since any of them could be put on the spot. In contrast, calling only on students who raise their hand or calling on a student before asking the question allows other students to ignore the question entirely. Such techniques require no additional technology and could easily be incorporated into existing teacher training programs with marginal additional cost.

Speaking of teachers, it should be emphasized over and over that they are the primary agents of good formal education. Without good teachers, education fails; with good teachers, education succeeds. Technology is largely irrelevant to this equation. As evidence, we only need to consider world-class school systems that consistently churn out high-performing students. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is the OECD’s latest instrument to measure student performance across countries. 15-year olds are assessed on their reading, math, and science abilities, and the test attempts to measure not just rote learning but some degree of deeper comprehension and critical thinking ability.

Finland is among the countries that routinely perform at the top on PISA, and it is renowned for its low-tech, high-touch approach that emphasizes educational basics and relatively few hours of school or homework. There are also school systems like that of South Korea that use a lot of technology and also do well, but analysis of PISA results fails to show any meaningful correlation between technology use and student performance. (Tim Kelly attempts to use Korea as an argument for technology in schools in a May 2009 ETD article, but that seems an unfortunate confusion of correlation with cause.) Rather, PISA summary documents highlight that the best-performing nations have a political commitment to universal education, high standards for achievement, and quality teachers and principals. Notably absent is any mention of technology as a critical element of a good school system, even though the PISA survey includes data on computers and other educational resources.

None of this should be a surprise. The world had amply demonstrated well before the invention of the personal computer that good education is possible without information technology. Most people born in the 1975 or earlier had no computing in their classrooms, and it would be hard to argue that they suffered as a result; many now lead the world in their respective spheres. Are we to believe that today’s Nobel Laureates, heads of state, and business elite received an inferior education because they were without information technology when growing up?

When Technology in Education is Justified

In order to avoid misunderstanding, I should clarify that some uses of computers in education can be justified, although with the ever-applicable caution that while technology can augment good schools, it hurts poor schools.

• First, in those cases where directed student motivation is assured, technology may lessen the burden of teaching. Some cases of tertiary or adult education may fall into this category.
• Second, targeted use of computers in schools, for example, as an aid to teach computer literacy, computer programming, or video editing, etc., are important as long as those uses are incorporated only as a small part of a well-rounded curriculum.
• Third, technology can help with the administration of schools – record keeping, monitoring, evaluation, etc. – as long as the school system is able to fully support the technology.
• Fourth, in richer environments, where the cost of educated labor is relatively high, careful use of well-designed software may have value in fundamental education, particularly for remedial or drilling purposes. Solutions offered by, for example, Carnegie Learning fall into this category, although it should be noted again that effective use of these kinds of technologies must occur in the context of an otherwise well-run school system.
• Fifth, again in rich environments, where the basics of education are assured, where teachers are facile with technology, and where budgets are unconstrained, widespread use of technology, even in a one-to-one format, might benefit students. Warschauer does find that certain uses of computers enhance computer literacy and writing skills, but these outcomes are limited to well-run, well-funded schools; they are notably absent in underperforming schools, even in the United States.

I underscore that the last two cases are specific to very wealthy, well-run school systems (as a benchmark, the value is unlikely to emerge for school systems spending less than US$8,000 per student per year), and that none of the positive instances above pertain to underperforming schools or to broad dissemination of technology to students.

9 Myths of Technology in Education

I’ve so far argued that technology in education has a poor historical record; that computers in schools typically fail to have positive impact (with the rare exceptions occurring only in the context of competent, well-funded schools); that information technology is almost never worth its opportunity cost; and that quality education doesn’t require information technology.

Though I’ve only presented a smattering of the evidence above, the conclusions are clear. Put together, the strong recommendation is that underperforming school systems should keep their focus on improving teaching and administration, and that even good schools may want to consider more cost-effective alternatives to technology when making supplementary educational investments.

Unfortunately, all of this evidence doesn’t provide the gut intuition required to reject seductive rhetoric. So, I end with a point-by-point refutation of frequently heard sound bites extolling technology in schools.

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 1: 21st-century skills require 21st-century technologies. The modern world uses e-mail, PowerPoint, and filing systems. Computers teach you those skills.

Reality: This is bad reasoning of the kind that, hopefully, genuine 21st-century skills wouldn’t allow. What exactly are the “21st-century skills” that successful citizens need? Some people define them as the 3 Rs and the 4 Cs (critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity). But, aren’t these the same as 20th-century skills? The skills haven’t changed; only the proportion of people requiring them.

Of course, the tools that people use at work and at home have changed, but the use of these tools is easy to learn compared with the deep ability to think and work effectively. As far as I know, not in the 500+ years since Gutenberg invented the printing press did anyone suggest that every school, to say nothing of every student, needed a mini-printing press to learn printing skills. (From the 1960s through the 1990s, schools incorporated typing half-heartedly into their curricula, but even that was relegated to a one-year elective.)

Today, any idiot can learn to use Twitter. But, forming and articulating a cogent argument in any medium – SMS text messages, PowerPoint, e-mails, or otherwise – requires good thinking, writing, and communication skills. Those skills might be channeled through technology, but they hardly require technology to acquire. Similarly, any fool can learn to “use” a computer. But, the underlying math required to do financial accounting or engineering requires solid mathematical preparation that requires working through problem sets – Einstein didn’t grow up with computers, but modern physics would be delighted to have more Einsteins.

We need to distinguish between the need to learn the tools of modern life (easy to pick up, and getting easier by the day, thanks to better technology!) and learning the critical thinking skills that make a person productive in an information economy (hard to learn, and not really any easier with information technology). Based on my own experience trying to teach undereducated English-speaking adults how to use Google, I’m quite certain that what limited their ability to capitalize on the Internet was reading comprehension and critical thinking skills, not computer literacy skills.

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 2: Technology X allows interactive, adaptive, constructivist, student-centered, [insert educational flavor of the month (EFotM) here] learning.

Reality: All of that may be true, but without directed motivation of the student, no sustained learning actually happens, with or without technology. Good teachers are interactive, adaptive, constructivist, student-centered, and capable of EFotM, but on top of all of that, they are also capable of something that no technology for the foreseeable future can do: generate ongoing motivation in students. If education only required an interactive, adaptive, constructivist, student-centered, EFotM medium, then the combination of an Erector Set and an encyclopedia ought to be sufficient for education.

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 3: But, wait, it’s still easier for teachers to arouse interest with technology X than with textbooks.

Reality: Maybe a little bit at first. But, the novelty factor of most technologies quickly wears off, and those which don’t tend to turn viewers into zombies rather than engaged learners.
In addition, this comment is a real insult to good teachers everywhere. Good teachers are exactly those who can engage students creatively, regardless of the aids available to them. Technology might amplify the impact of good teachers, but it won’t fix bad teaching.

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 4: Teachers are expensive. It’s exactly because teachers are absent or poorly trained that low-cost technology is a good alternative.

Reality: Low-cost technologies are not so low cost when total cost of ownership is taken into account and put in the economic context of low-income schools. Furthermore, technology cannot fix broken educational systems. If teachers are absent or poorly trained, the only proper solution is to invest in better teachers, better training, and better administration… even if it’s expensive. As they say in KIPP schools, there are no shortcuts!

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 5: Textbooks are expensive. For the price of a couple of textbooks, you might as well get a low-cost PC.

Reality: Anyone who says this is using American predatory pricing of textbooks as a guide. In India, a typical text book costs 7.5-25 rupees, or 15-50 cents. For $1-3, you could buy all the textbooks a child will need for the year. It can be more expensive in other countries where printing costs are not as low as in India, but there is no reason why a textbook needs to cost more than a few dollars. Please, let’s stop propagating this myth.

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 6: We have been trying to improve education for many years without results. Thus, it’s time for something new: Technology X!

Reality: Technology has never fixed a broken educational system, so if anything is getting old, it’s the attempt to patch bad education with technology. If other efforts aren’t working, maybe the school system needs to be thrown out and rebuilt from the ground up, as Qatar recently did with its education ministry. There are plenty of new things to try that don’t require new technology. (Though, novelty for its own sake doesn’t make sense, either. There are plenty of old examples of good education, too.) It should be cautioned though, that efforts to improve teachers and administrators is itself a multi-year, if not multi-decade effort. Again, there are no shortcuts!

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 7: Study Z shows that technology is helpful.

Reality: Technology can be beneficial. But, it’s always worth looking at two things more carefully: First, how good was the educational environment in Study Z without the technology? Invariably, it will have been good; often, very good. This means it was secret-sauce + technology that caused the benefit, not technology by itself. Second, what was the total cost of the technology (including training, maintenance, curriculum, etc.)? Inevitably, it will be a factor of 5-10 more than the cost of hardware. Both issues suggest that for ailing schools, technology is not the answer.

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 8: Computer games, simulations, and other state-of-the-art technologies are really changing things.

Reality: This article was written with current and near-term technologies in mind. It’s possible that future technologies will not fit the theses. Certainly, a humanoid robot indistinguishable from a good teacher could work wonders! More realistically, it’s likely that sophisticated software could become richer in the range of things they can teach and the degree to which they sustain motivation. But, any such advances should pass lab trials, pilot runs, controlled experiments, and cost-effectiveness analyses before anyone starts advocating them for widespread use. So far, no technology has met this bar – computers running existing software certainly haven’t.

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 9: Technology is transformative, revolutionary, and otherwise stupendous! Therefore, it must be good for education.

Reality: This myth is pervasive because it is so easy to believe and because we want to believe it so badly. After all, with computers, we can publish our own newsletters, buy gifts in our pajamas, and find the best Italian restaurant in town. And, it would be nice if all we had to do was to sit every child in front of a computer for 6 hours a day to turn them into educated, upright citizens.

But, why do we believe this? It makes no sense. We don’t expect that playing football video games makes a child a great athlete. We don’t believe that watching YouTube will turn our kids into Steven Spielbergs. We don’t think that socializing on Facebook will turn people into electable government officials. And, if none of those things work, then why do we expect it of writing, history, science, or mathematics?

A good education is second only to parenting in the importance it has in raising capable, upright members of society. We would never think to replace parenting with technology (and when we do at times, we do it with shame, and only because we’re too damn tired to parent, not because gadgets are superior to us). Why do we keep trying to replace teachers?

Honesty in Technology Failure

As if to underscore these points, last month, the Azim Premji Foundation, a well-funded non-profit in India and arguably the world’s largest non-profit organization dedicated to working with computers in education, made a startling – and courageous – confession. They had worked for over half a decade with tens of thousands of schools, providing computers, training teachers, designing whole software libraries in 18 languages, and integrating material with state curricula. Aspects of their programs and their software could be criticized, but their methods were as thoughtful and as heartfelt as any technology-for-education effort I have witnessed, with frequent research and evaluations to confirm outcomes. Their conclusion?

“[W]hen we took stock at a fundamental level, we realized that [our whole effort in computer-aided learning] was at best a qualified failure… there was practically no impact in a sustained, systemic manner on learning.”

Anurag Behar, co-CEO of the foundation cited a number of issues (the full article is worth reading), but chief among the problems were that any deficiencies in administration and teaching were not overcome by technology. He notes: “At its best, the fascination with ICT as a solution distracts from the real issues. At its worst, ICT is suggested as substitute to solving the real problems, for example, ‘why bother about teachers, when ICT can be the teacher’. This perspective is lethal.” He concludes with a paraphrasing of what he learned from education leaders in Finland and Canada (two countries who consistently do well on PISA): “not a dollar will we invest in ICT, every dollar that we have will go to teacher and school leader capacity building.”

In short, there are no technology shortcuts to good education.

For further reading along these lines, see 10 Worst Practices in ICT for Education, by Michael Trucano, as well as education-focused posts by the ICT4D Jester.

References

Barrera-Osorio, Felipe and Linden, Leigh L. (2009) The Use and Misuse of Computers in Education : Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Colombia. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1344721, retrieved Dec. 28, 2010.

Behar, Anurag. (2010) Limits of ICT in Education. LiveMint.com. Dec. 16, 2010. http://www.livemint.com/2010/12/15201000/Limits-of-ICT-in-education.html, retrieved Dec. 28, 2010.

Camfield, Jon. (2006) What is the real cost of OLPC? http://www.olpcnews.com/sales_talk/price/the_real_cost_of_the.html, retrieved Dec. 28, 2010.

Camfield, Jon. (2010) Total cost of XO ownership for OLE Nepal. http://www.olpcnews.com/sales_talk/price/total_cost_of_xo_ownership_for.html, retrieved Dec. 28, 2010.

Cuban, Larry. (1986) Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology since 1920. Teachers College Press.

Lemov, Doug. (2010) Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College. Jossey-Bass.

Linden, Leigh L. (2008) Complement or Substitute? The Effect of Technology on Student Achievement in India. Jameel Poverty Action Lab Working Paper. http://www.columbia.edu/~ll2240/Gyan_Shala_CAL_2008-05-22.pdf, retrieved Jan. 4, 2011.

OECD (2010), PISA 2009 Results: What Makes a School Successful? — Resources, Policies and Practices (Volume IV). http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264091559-en, retrieved Dec. 28, 2010.

Oppenheimer, Todd. (2003) The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology. Random House.

Santiago, A., Severin, E., Cristia, J., Ibarrarán, P., Thompson, J., & Cueto, S. (2010). Evaluacíon experimental del programa “Una Laptop por Niño” en Perú. Washington, DC: Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo. http://www.iadb.org/document.cfm?id=35370099

Suppes, Patrick. (1966) The Uses of Computers in Education. Scientific American, 215(3):207-220.

Toyama, Kentaro. (2010) Can Technology End Poverty? Boston Review, 35(6):12-18,28-29. http://bostonreview.net/BR35.6/ndf_technology.php, retrieved Jan. 4, 2011.

Vital Wave Consulting. (2008) Affordable Computing for Schools in Developing Countries: A Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Model for Education Officials. http://www.vitalwaveconsulting.com/insights/articles/affordable-computing.htm, retrieved Dec. 28, 2010.

Warschauer, Mark, Michele Knobel, and LeeAnn Stone. (2004) Technology and equity in schooling: Deconstructing the digital divide. Educational Policy, 18(4):562-588. http://www.gse.uci.edu/person/warschauer_m/docs/tes.pdf, retrieved Jan. 4, 2011.

Warschauer, Mark. (2006) Laptops and Literacy: Learning in the Wireless Classroom. Teachers College Press.

The short answer is “very slowly”!

In spite of all the hype, the vast majority of students in the developing world cannot afford suitable ICT devices. And, while low-cost mobile phones are becoming more widespread, they are of limited value in terms of the creation and distribution of open content.

The second problem is connectivity. Most universities and schools either do not have broadband, or their bandwidth is inadequate. Also, the ratio of lab based computers to students is very low. The result is that internet access is painfully slow, and on-line reading of e-books is not an option.

The third problem is relevance. While much good work has been done to develop local context Open Education Resources (“OERs”), and to adapt internationally available resources, this has so far only scratched the surface. And local language resources are almost non-existent.

The fourth problem is culture. The scarcity and cost of physical books has led to a non-reading culture; it has also let to the prevalence of “content” teaching from photocopied extracts instead of “conceptual” teaching, in which students learn how to learn.

And the fifth problem is capacity. Most academic staff at universities are too busy to search for relevant OERs and proprietory e-books, let alone develop new OER content. Also, large numbers of teachers at primary, and to a lesser extent secondary, schools are not even computer literate.

The solutions to these problems are asymmetrical at each of the country, institution, and staff levels, and they include:

1. providing subsidized hire purchase facilities for students to acquire low-cost Notebook computers, or building the cost into the educational fee structure,
2. replacing the high-cost-low-volume model for e-books with a low-cost-high-volume model (the IADP has recently reached agreement on this with a core group of the world’s leading publishers),
3. downloading e-books and OERs onto ICT devices so that they can be viewed off-line,
4. giving academic staff who develop and/or adapt OERs institutional recognition and financial rewards in addition to the normal practice of attribution, and
5. developing sustainable communities of practice among “pioneering” academic staff, and extending their influence through the hub and spoke principle.

Question: will educational systems, and the stakeholders that support them, be able to adapt existing and new content onto these devices? Might this adaptation facilitate a more egalitarian content creation structure, challenging the existing pricing structures and vested interests of current curriculum production & dissemination models?

The short answers are “yes, and maybe”.

There are no technical reasons why OERs cannot be developed, adapted, and viewed on ICT devices – subject, of course, to system and format compatibility. The challenge is to make these resources mainstream, and integrate them into the curricula and pedagogy.

The first issue is quality and usefulness. Common standards and appropriate tagging of metadata are a given, but quality and usefulness require a review process. Committees usually don’t work because they create an obstacle and/or a bottle-neck. The best model is a periodic virtual peer group review, including a star rating system, in which individual and institutional reputations are placed on the line. Wikipedia has some of these elements, but in my view it doesn’t go far enough. A further point to emphasize is the importance of high quality abstracts.

The second issue is awareness. Busy academic staff do not have the time or inclination to search through the universe of OERs and e-books; equally, they don’t like the “all or nothing” approach of content aggregators. The best model is a well researched package of resources from which academic staff can choose, including the ability to step outside the package when desired.

The third issue is: who pays? The popular belief among some stakeholders is that OERs are, or should be, “free”. In reality, however, they are not. Quite apart from the fact that the platforms upon which they reside need to be maintained, most of the developers, editors, formatters, promoters, and reviewers of OERs are paid.

The only difference is that they are paid directly or indirectly by governments, universities, or NGOs, rather than by sales to the end users. It is therefore open to question as to whether authors and publishers of proprietory resources offer good value for money compared with those that produce OERs.

I personally believe that both proprietory resources and OERs will have a continuing place in the future, and that convenient and affordable access through the advent of ICT devices will improve the quality of selected resources and enhance competition.

Question: should this content focus on e-books and other electronic media that replicates existing content? Or is this an opportunity to change the way in which content is created, teachers educate, and students learn?

The short answer is “both”.

Much good work has been done to archive physical resources in a digital format. Also, publishers are beginning to make e-books available in developing countries at an affordable price. As a result, academic staff and school teachers are at last beginning to have affordable access to high quality educational resources. But much needs to be done to improve awareness and integrate this into curricula and pedagogy.

The advent of low-cost ICT devices is indeed a wonderful opportunity to change the educational landscape. Apart from teaching computer literacy, which is an essential component of education in today’s world, it brings the prospect of higher education and technical training closer to the millions of prospective students who cannot attend, or cannot afford to attend, campus.

It also facilitates the creative use of digital technology to make the content more compelling, and to enhance the learning experience by bringing an interactive and visual dimension to voice and text. The constraint, however, is the capacity of teachers to use the technology and to participate in the development of the resources, which points to the overriding need to improve standards through teacher education.

From this conversation came a very interesting question:

What is the impact of open access resources for primary schools on the current educational content creation models?

Now this question has many angles to it, but for the August Educational Technology Debate, let us focus on how low-cost ICT devices are transforming the creation and distribution of open content in the developing world.

Will educational systems, and the stakeholders that support them, be able to adapt existing and new content onto these devices? Might this adaptation facilitate a more egalitarian content creation structure, challenging the existing pricing structures and vested interests of current curriculum production & dissemination models?

In addition, should this content focus on ebooks and other electronic media that replicates existing content? Or is this an opportunity to change the way in which content is created, teacher’s educate, and students learn?

To lead us in this conversation will be two respected discussants:

• Richard Rowe
  Richard Rowe is the Chair and CEO of the Open Learning Exchange, a network of nation-based NGO’s committed to achieving Quality Universal Basic Education by 2015 . Dr. Rowe has served as Director of Test Development and Research for the West African Examinations Council, Associate Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Technology and Education.
• Angus Scrimgeour
  Angus Scrimgeour is the President of the International Association for Digital Publications, a program to provide university students and academic staff in developing countries with affordable access to e-books, and support for the identification, development, and effective use of open access e-learning resources. Mr. Scrimgeour is also a former Vice President of the World Bank Group a member of the Knowledge and Learning Council.

Please join us for what we all expect to be a lively and informative conversation – your input can start right now in the comments below, and Richard and Angus will post their opening remarks beginning Monday, August 10.