UNESCO has repeatedly argued that the number of places for post-secondary learners must increase from approximately 120 million to 240 million worldwide, with large-scale growth already having been documented over the past decade. In the emerging economic powerhouses of the world, increased access to knowledge and education is crucial to guarantee continued growth.

Yet, it is virtually impossible to build the number of traditional post-secondary institutions to keep up with the increase in demand. Traditional universities represent a tremendous ongoing financial commitment when physical campuses classrooms need to be built, maintained, heated, cooled and secured.

The Distance Learning Solution

In distance learning, these costs (and their environmental footprint) are significantly less. This translates to more resources being spent on course design, development and student support services. This in turn leads to better student outcomes linked to the higher quality of instruction. Distance learning is also uniquely flexible, allowing for studies to be combined with working and family life and to be taken at the correct pace for the student (and in tune with what they can afford). Distance learning has also proven itself able to react quickly to specific economic and societal needs.

Views of distance learning vary significantly from region to region throughout the world. In most countries and regions, distance learning is respected as an alternative to studying on campus. Here, distance education has demonstrated its capacity and quality, and in many countries programmes are accredited by the same agencies that govern campus based education. The fact that we experience convergence between campus based, blended, and distance learning is also a driver for increased understanding.

In some parts of the world, however, this is not the case. The regulatory framework might not recognize distance education, or quality assurance may be lacking, leading to confusion and mistrust. This digital divide is a global challenge, as is resistance to embrace technology, though there are countless examples of ingenuity and innovation which seek to combat this.

Distance Learning in BRIC Nations

It is now ten years since the term BRIC was coined to describe the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China. In distance education, there has been an explosion in student numbers in these countries. Indira Ghandi National Open University in India has the world’s largest student body with 1.8 million students, while The Open University of China’s spring 2011 enrolment saw a 9% year on year increase to 467,000 enrolments. Almost one in six students enrolled in undergraduate studies in Brazil enters into a distance learning course.

However, while each of these countries has experienced amazing progress in distance education, the obstacles that remain are very real: acceptance, regulation, infrastructure, and particularly the question of how to maintain quality at scale.

Please join this month’s Educational Technology Debate to define the problems, present solutions, and point a way forward for Open and Distance Learning in higher education.

About the Debate Coordinator

This debate is coordinated by the International Council for Open and Distance Education, the global membership organization for actors within open and distance learning. ICDE works towards the goals of Education for All through its status as an organization in formal consultative relations with UNESCO, and seeks to raise acceptance of open and distance learning at the government, institutional leadership, academic, and societal levels. The organization also seeks to facilitate dialogue between the developed and the developing world through its conferences, projects and information activity.

This inspiration for this debate came from a session organized by ICDE at the annual Online Educa Berlin conference in Germany in December. We look forward to the contributions from ICDE members representing the BRIC nations over the coming weeks, and to engaging with the ETD community.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top World Bank EduTech Blog Posts of 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Through a multi-year initiative called All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development (ACR), the Founding Partners will collaborate to achieve the goal of global action to improve child literacy.

While recognizing that there are many factors required to improve student learning outcomes in primary grade reading, the Founding Partners have established the All Children Reading Competition to focus on two needs that are both important and largely unmet in low- and lower- middle income countries: teaching and learning materials and education data.

The All Children Reading Competition will support innovative approaches that draw on current research findings related to effective instruction in primary grade reading as well as technology, information, and communication advances that may lead to substantial impact on student learning outcomes at scale. In this context, “innovation” refers to novel business or organizational models, operational or production processes, or products or services that lead to substantial and sustainable improvements in student reading in primary grades.

We seek innovations that produce development outcomes more effectively, cost efficiently, and that reach more beneficiaries. Innovative and potentially transformative solutions may be funded through grants to support new ideas as well as emergent practices, products, or programs.

The Founding Partners are calling on for-profit companies, non-governmental organizations and associations, academic/educational research institutions, faith-based organizations, civil society and foundations—together or in partnership—to take up this challenge. Applicants are encouraged to “think outside of the box,” using creative practices and methodologies to develop innovations clearly linked to improving student learning outcomes in primary grade reading.

Background

Over the past decade, governments in many countries and the international community have rallied around Millennium Development Goal 2: ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling.2 As a result, there have been significant increases in primary enrollment worldwide, particularly in low income countries.3 However, learning levels are very low. In Mali, Pakistan and Peru, for example, more than 70% of children in the primary grades could not read at grade level and many could not read a single word after two or more years of schooling.4 One major international assessment, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), found that the average student in low-income countries is performing at the fifth percentile of the OECD distribution worldwide an estimated 35 million girls remain out of school compared to 31 million boys.

USAID has been working to close the gap between boys and girls by assessing the degree of educational disadvantage that girls face, identifying gender-related obstacles, and implementing remedies to remove and overcome these obstacles.

Learning levels of a country’s population are directly correlated with rates of economic growth. A 10% increase in the proportion of the population with basic literacy skills translates into a 0.3 percentage point higher annual growth rate for that country. Other research has shown that early grade reading competency is critical for continued retention and success in future grades. Though it is clear that children’s futures are not solely dependent on reading instruction, reading is a critical and necessary precondition for skill development. Children who do not develop reading skills during the primary grades are on a lifetime trajectory of limited educational progress and therefore limited economic opportunities.

In recognition of the importance of basic literacy for individual and national development, the first goal of the new USAID Education Strategy: Opportunity Through Learning (2011-2015) is focused on improving the reading skills for 100 million children in primary grades by 2015 (See Appendix 1). USAID will measure the performance of its programs primarily through the improvement of reading skills for primary grade students after two years of schooling, consistent with international measures adopted by the Global Partnership for Education (GPE, formerly the Education for All-Fast Track Initiative).

The new Education Strategy also specifically states that USAID education programs will take measures to increase gender parity and improve gender equity at all levels of education, with gender-sensitive interventions tailored to the specific gender issues present in a country’s educational system. The importance of this for gender equality extends beyond any single project in that it sets a clear strategic directive: USAID education interventions that target girls or boys should be based on sound gender analysis, meet an identified need or demand, promote learning outcomes, bring about systemic change, and work to transform the power dynamics between the sexes.

World Vision invests more than US $250 million per year in education and focuses on impact for children and youth ages 3-18 through four strategic objectives that foster the development of functional literacy, math and essential life skills as key outcomes of education: 1) increase children’s access to equitable, quality and sustainable early childhood education and primary education, with special attention to the most vulnerable groups; 2) strengthen community involvement in the education for all children; 3) increase youth’s access to quality educational opportunities, with focus on out-of-school youth; and 4) foster enabling environment for learning through partnership and advocacy with communities, governments, private sector, universities, donors and civil society organizations.

Education is the flagship sector of the Australian aid program. Australia’s commitment to education access and quality includes a clear focus on improving the quality of learning. Australia has three pillars for its investments in education:

1. improving access to basic education opportunities for all so that children and youth complete a basic education;
2. improving learning outcomes so that children and youth achieve the basic skills necessary for productive lives; and
3. driving development through better governance and service delivery so that partner governments support quality education for all.

Objectives

The All Children Reading Competition will encourage innovative thinking and design to bring new knowledge to the challenge of improving primary grade reading rapidly and at scale in certain countries (see Appendix 2 for a list of Eligible Countries). Applications from and relating to low- and lower-middle income countries are particularly encouraged. While recognizing that there are many factors required to improve student learning outcomes in primary grade reading, the All Children Reading Competition seeks innovations in two areas that are both important and largely unmet in certain low- and lower middle income countries.

Innovations in Teaching and Learning Materials to Improve Student Reading

Teachers and children must have access to appropriate teaching and learning materials, respectively, for classroom instruction and reading practice. Children who report having textbooks score higher on reading tests and those who report having other books at home score even higher.8 Recently developed programs supporting the development of materials to schools, communities and homes are beginning to report impact on student learning.9 However, textbook provision in developing countries continues to be inadequate, let alone provision of supplemental reading materials.

Innovative and affordable approaches are needed to overcome barriers to the design, production, distribution/delivery, and use of high-quality durable and consumable materials (narrative, expository, and instructional) in appropriate languages for the primary grades in developing countries.

Innovations in Education Data to Improve Student Reading

Education data is necessary to support decision-making, incentives, transparency, and accountability needed to improve reading. A lack of quality data on student learning and related issues (e.g., teaching methods, student and teacher performance, absenteeism, and school-level financing) hinders the development and implementation of effective educational policies and supportive classroom/school-level/community action. The potential impact of data on student learning has been very visible over the past few years, with the development of Pratham’s Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) approach to data collection by civil society, now used in India, Kenya, Mali, Pakistan, Uganda and Tanzania as well as USAID-supported Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) which has now been used by governments, civil society and donors in more than 40 countries.

These assessments have created widespread awareness of student learning levels and some efforts to improve learning in the countries where they have been implemented. But much remains to be done to prioritize and collect performance data, disseminate the data to varied audiences and make it easier to identify and use key data for decision-making.

Innovative and affordable approaches are needed to improve efficiency and effectiveness in the collection and use of education data. A particular need is cost-effective and streamlined approaches for the measurement and reporting of student learning data (classroom-based and system-level testing) to inform instruction, policy development, and resource allocations in developing countries.

Illustrative Areas of Interest

We are interested in funding innovations that will result in (1) widespread access to improved teaching and learning materials and (2) better education data to support decision-making, transparency, incentives and accountability; both of which are essential to advance the goal of All Children Reading in the primary grades. In this context, “innovation” refers to novel business or organizational models, operational or production processes, or products or services that lead to substantial and sustainable improvements in student reading in primary grades.

The illustrative areas of interest listed below are not meant to be exhaustive or limiting in any way.

Innovations in Teaching and Learning Materials to Improve Student Learning

• Support the production of and/or access to language and level-appropriate narrative, expository and instructional materials for emerging and beginning readers and their teachers;
• Support the development/editing/printing of texts of similar difficulty in two or more languages/scripts;
• Address the challenges of materials distribution in developing country contexts;
• Benefit children with special needs and/or learning disabilities;
• Foster parent and community involvement in children reading;
• Support large numbers of teachers in remote locations in their effective and continuing use of new materials;
• Help students, teachers and communities develop high quality materials locally;
• Bridge gaps between school and home and support a community reading culture in contexts where family literacy and school involvement levels are low;
• Leverage existing learning resources such as community libraries, digital libraries and
  other learning platforms; and
• Create differentiated learning experiences and support individual student practice in low-resource classroom settings with high student : teacher ratios.

Innovations in Education Data to Improve Student Reading

• Develop simple approaches to allow school and local level managers to prioritize, collect, analyze and use key education-related data at the school level to improve instruction and learning outcomes;
• Improve school, regional and national level resource planning to improve learning outcomes;
• Consolidate and analyze disparate sources of education data at the local, regional, national and international level;
• Widely disseminate education-related data in easy-to-understand ways to a variety of audiences;
• Deliver data and information to improve teacher preparation and professional development;
• Assist teachers and education officials with rapid and efficient student assessments and teacher evaluations; and
• Provide data to support the development of appropriate incentive systems for teachers and officials based on teacher performance and student results.

What We Will Not Fund

• Applications that are not focused on improving student reading in the primary grades;
• Applications that do not present a coherent plan showing links between the proposed
  innovation and the education system context
• Applications that do not propose program in eligible countries (see Appendix 2 – Eligible Country List for the full list of eligible countries); and
• Solutions that are not applicable, affordable, sustainable, and scalable in eligible countries.

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If you looked at the buzz in ICT for education, you would think the solutions to problems of teaching literacy and reading are mainly around hardware price points. You have everyone talking endlessly about $100 laptops, $30 tablets, $15 teacher laptops and projectors, and $10 talking books. But all this is fluff. The sideshow to what is the real cost issue: how much everything else costs, how to raise funds for it all, and how to show the impact of the investments.

The Hardware Issue

In struggling to understand why there are so few literacy and reading interventions that use ICT, I thought long and hard around the hardware angle. Is there some inherent missing gadget that could increase the ability of educators to teach reading skills? Is there a gadget that can help a child write or a learner combine both reading and writing for true literacy in their native language?

Yes, it would be nice to have more interactive e-book readers or more intuitive electronic writing tablets, but that didn’t seem to be the real issue. We have an entire quiver of education tablets to choose from. What seems to be missing is not hardware, but a specific focus on literacy in education that incorporates information and communication technology. I posit there are three overarching reasons for this lack of ICT in literacy across the educational systems of the developing world:

How much everything else costs

In Vital Wave Consulting’s landmark study on the costs of ICT in education, they found that in ICT4E, its not the cost of the gadget that matters that much:

The quest for a $100 laptop and the subsequent development of low-cost and ultra low-cost computer categories have focused the discussion about computers in the education environment on the initial hardware cost. This focus is misplaced, as the initial hardware investment represents less than 28% of the total cost of ownership over a five-year period. In the case of ultra low-cost computers, the initial hardware investment is only 13% of the five-year TCO.

Where are the majority of ICT4E costs? In the technical support, training, connectivity, and electricity required to maintain the chosen solution over time. Oh, and the specific solution didn’t matter that much either – costs among different devices is about the same. Yet, VWC’s study didn’t even get tot the other two legs of the three-legged stool of educational technology: teacher professional development and content development.

I have yet to come across a comprehensive study of how much it costs a Ministry of Education to fully deploy and ICT4E intervention, especially one on a national scale. The best I’ve heard is this small mention in Miguel Brechner’sTEDxBuenosAires talk about Plan CEIBAL‘s XO laptop costs, but these seem like awfully low numbers:

How much did it cost us? We invested around one hundred million dollars. So that we do not delve too much into figures, each computer cost us around $188. Sixty dollars was the rest of the cost: servers, networks, antennas, tech support, parts, logistics, delivery… everything else. This was all accomplished with public funds, both domestic and foreign.

If we calculate four years of effective life per machine, it will cost us about $75 per year, of which $48 is the computer and $27 the rest of the servicing a project of this magnitude requires. To give you an idea: in the deployment phase that’s less than 5% of the educational budget, and less than one two-thousandth of the gross domestic product.

So if a country or a company wanted to invest in an ICT solution that could impact the literacy rates in a country, their first challenge would be to figure out how much such an investment would cost. I stand ready to help if needed – it’s a calculation that would be educational for everyone involved.

How to raise funds for it all

Getting people and donors excited for a new gadget is easy. Just show off a prototype, and even if it doesn’t work, or is just plain vaporware, you’ll have multiple press stories championing your achievement. From there, it’s slightly harder to get the money rolling in to fund a working prototype and pilot deployment.

What is hard is getting the funding to work on something as basic and un-sexy as teacher professional development or digital curriculums.

The net result is that we have great projects like Worldreader and CyberSmart Africa, which are at their heart about changing the way teachers educate to improve student literacy, but everyone else refers to them as the Kindle project or interactive whiteboard project.

Now there is hope. USAID and World Vision have a forthcoming All Children Reading Grand Challenge for Development that invites organizations to submit innovative ideas, practices, products, or programs for improving student reading in primary grades. Winning submissions will be provided seed funding from combined resources of USAID and World Vision. I have heard there will be an ICT component to the grand challenge as well but we’ll see if it also focuses on the learning ecosystem to make that ICT successful.

How to show the impact of the investments

What is “success” in reading, writing, and literacy? We have the Early Grade Reading Assessment which can be given and measured electronically, but even if a stated ICT intervention happens between two EGRA assessments, and there is a positive change over the assessment period, how can we know it was the iCT intervention that caused the change?

In other words, how do we prove causation not just correlation?

I believe this is the largest challenge in ICT interventions that propose to improve literacy in any educational system, not just those in the developing world. With ICT, it is easy to show a great excitement about school – everyone loves a new gadget – or even a greater usage of ICT via server logs and the like, but its much harder to show that excitement translating into greater scholastic achievement.

In fact, I challenge you dear reader, to find an ICT intervention in any aspect of the learning process, that can show that the ICT intervention itself is the primary cause for an increased learning outcome.

It is that fuzziness in impact that makes it so hard to raise funds for an ICT intervention in literacy. And without the money to get investors and school systems excited in the teacher professional development and the content creation required to augment a gadget purchase, we are stuck in a vicious cycle.

Cheaper and cheaper gadgets are showcased as the solutions to the woes of educational systems, while more and more of us come to the conclusion that technology should not be the focus of educational strategies. And the smart people who could be working on ICT for literacy choose to expend their efforts elsewhere.

Most of them are forever doomed to a subsistence existence below the poverty line in agricultural communities, or to eke out an existence in the mega-slums of our mega-cities. These people have been written off by some observers as a lost generation for whom there’s no hope.  It’s only a billion people.  Better luck next lifetime.  But we believe there is a way to change this through literacy.

History

Seven years ago I stood in a field in Punjab, India, listening to the District Health Officer tell me that my Health Education program to reduce child morbidity was doomed to failure because my target audience would never be able to read my leaflets and brochures.  “But the literacy rate here is 64%”, I protested.  He fell about laughing at my naïve faith in government statistics.

Success!

So I packed my bags and moved to Delhi and built a computerised literacy program called Tara Akshar.  We used a technique nobody had used before.  The outcome was that 60,000 completely illiterate women, aged 8 to 80, were taught to read and write in a 55 hour course.   The combined drop-out and failure rate was less than 5%.   I believe these kinds of numbers are unheard of in any voluntary Indian education program.

Why it works

The secret of our success was animated Laubach memory hooks embedded in a cartoon serial.  Let me explain. Laubach was a chap in the 1930s who said you should teach letter recognition by drawing pictures in which two things happen:

• The picture is of an object that begins with the letter you are trying to teach; for example, if you are trying to teach the letter S, then you could show a picture of a snake.
• The picture looks like the letter.  So make sure the snake is in an S shape:

The purpose of this is to give a great big clue to the reader as to what sound the letter represents so he/she does not have to remember it.

It’s an obvious, really.  So we have Ws that look like waves, and Bs that look like bats, and so on.  We cannot understand why all early learning systems don’t work like this. We teach completely illiterate tribal women in remote parts of India to recognize all 30+ consonants of the Hindi alphabet in only 10 hours using this method.

So we designed a picture using Laubach principles for each letter of the alphabet (all the consonants, plus both cases for the vowels).  Then we went one stage further and animated the letter morphing into the object and back again.  In other words, the letter S turns into a snake, and then back into an S.   Then we show the animation on a laptop.  We ended up with about 50 animations of the Hindi alphabet, and make each one a character in a multi-episode story.

Every day, our students come to class, and watch the latest episode of the story.  Then we test them using video-game style quizzes on the laptop, and then they do 20 minutes writing practice while the computer shows an animation of how to write the letter.   Then we show the episode again, and test again, and writing practice again – no activity takes more than 20 minutes.  And we use flash cards, and we use posters, and we use special playing cards, as well as writing books and reading books.

After each 100 minute lesson, we send them home.  They all turn up the next day because

• It’s easy, they don’t have to try to remember anything
• It’s fun
• It’s a social event

The Indian Government has now run very successful pilots of the program and recognized it as “best practice.”

Of course, letter recognition is only one of several facets of teaching reading and writing.  After letters, we go onto syllables, then words, then sentences, then onto our reading books.  Our English language version has a full-blown phonics section of course.

After Literacy

Literacy by itself makes a huge difference to self-esteem, the balance of power in the family, the length of time children stay in school, and almost certainly the birth-rate.   (And that’s why it’s probably an excellent way of reducing carbon emissions.)  But to be really successful, all the follow-on courses to bring people back into the learning mainstream are required.  We have now built courses for numeracy, ethics, how to eradicate shyness, how to participate in an organization, how to follow instructions, how to study, how to improve memory and many more besides.

English and other languages

The efficiency of this program is so high that it easily offsets the cost of the technology.  My ambition is to get it used in every country with a literacy problem.  Which is probably everywhere but about 3 countries, I believe.

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Calls are frequently heard for improving schooling by closing the gap between children’s life out-of-school and traditional learning styles, and by broadening the space and span for life-long learning opportunities. The Math4Mobile development endeavors to engage all students with mathematical ideas. It provides a collection of tools that could be included in a variety of activities to support students’ mathematical skills, conceptual understanding, and creative mathematical thinking.

Computerized tools have been shown to provide important support for achieving these goals. Three decades of using technology in mathematics education provide clear evidence that the tools designed to support a well-defined educational agenda were the most successful ones. In general, technology achieves its most important gains in settings in which it is available for long periods of time, and when it is designed to be incorporated regularly into the learning process. I suspect that an important reason for the slow pace of change in this area is that ubiquitous, long-term access to technology is yet to be achieved in most learning environments.

Given the high rate of increase in the number of mobile phone owners worldwide, the computational capability of most phones, and the widely available communication infrastructure, we have been looking for ways to turn the available and relatively cheap personal mobile technology into a relevant learning tool in and out of school.

Meeting the challenges of computation, communication, and usability

Understanding the computing potential: The Math4Mobile project has been developed based on VisualMath, which was found to be a successful technology-based curriculum for changing the ways students learn geometry, function-based school algebra, and calculus. The Math4Mobile project started as yet another cycle of development of already existing WEB tools, but working under the constraints of the new hardware and enablers has led us to ideas and challenges beyond hardware-related problems. To support cognitive empowerment for the learning of mathematical content, our first challenge was to plan a variety of well-recognized useful applications. Design decisions were to focus on:

1. Applications that have already been recognized as successful in using technology for learning: Graph2Go, a graphing calculator that serves a wide range of users at different levels and in various fields of learning; Quad2Go, a dynamic geometry environment that allows constructing and analyzing while dynamically changing the various available quadrilaterals, mostly supporting primary school geometry.
2. Applications that could be useful in motivating learning out of the classroom: Sketch2Go and Fit2Go, which support recording and mathematically analyzing temporal processes that students might face in a task out of class.
3. Design applications supporting scientific inquiry; all applications designed to include embedded feedback in a variety of representations, to encourage observation of multiple examples, and at the same time to support the development of mathematical skills through intensive practice (for example, Solve2Go).
4. Applications that first and foremost can be easily operated “on the go,” with a numeric keypad being the only necessary requirement, although navigation keys can also be used. Because typing mathematical signs and expressions can be extremely tedious, our design strategy is to provide ready to work but easy to alter mathematical objects such as expression or equation clusters, iconic graphs, geometric shapes, etc.
5. Applications that are appropriate to use by children and that comply with hardware, resources, and infrastructure constrains. Our intention is to develop for everyone, closing rather than widening the social gaps in the process. Thus, we plan for minimal air time and the lowest possible end, and for widely used hardware that does not require compromising on essential learning goals. We chose J2ME as the development language because it supports the visual mathematical representations assumed to be essential for conceptual learning and design that works for users of small screens.

Understanding the communication potential: According to social-cultural theories of learning, collaborative thinking is an essential component of scientific inquiry. Whereas the social studies and humanities are better known for providing opportunities for sharing, mathematics is assumed to be practiced and developed individually. The choice of mobile phones provides an opportunity to create incentives for collaboration that are authentic learning processes for a community of math learners at all levels. We examine designs of three types of communication:

1. Each Math4Mobile application includes Phone 2 Phone collaboration via SMS center. Students can use it to share their work, post it to receive critical comments from their peers, analyze and propose improvements of others’ work, and submit their work to the teacher.
2. We identified two challenges for our future development work: multi-user communication, where users can share their work interactively, and communication between phones and computers. Advancing in this direction, we developed the Click2Go Classroom Interaction System, currently piloted in schools. Click2Go allows students to use the local communication infrastructure to respond to teachers’ prompts and present the collated students’ responses to promote whole-group discussion.
3. Another channel of communication, the Augmented Textbook, works with the Math4Mobile application to augment paper textbooks with mobile applications that include interactive diagrams, a counterpart to printed diagrams.

Understanding the Usability Potential: Pilot experiments involving teachers in schools and pre-service teachers were part of our development work. In each experiment we designed activities relevant to the curricular agenda. The learning was recorded and analyzed, and usually the results showed the direction of required improvements of the application. After analyzing the learning and teaching opportunities, we design scenarios that can be relevant to the following pedagogical and technological variables:

• Space: activity suited for use in class, in and around school, or anywhere
• Size: to be used by an individual student, in collaboration in a small group, in the course of a whole-class discussion
• Learning mode: exploring, practicing skills, or solving problems
• Teacher’s role: teachers could use the tools and the activity to deliver instruction, moderate group collaboration, assess individual performance, or observe student activities out of the classroom
• Means of use: online, offline, asynchronous, synchronous
• Infrastructure media components available (ubiquity): the ideal setting for the activity also includes, in addition to the personal mobile phone, a “smart board,” a website, a desktop application, and an augmented textbook
• Phone resources: camera, calculator, stop watch, dedicated applications

Educational impact: Patterns, scalability, and sustainability

Since 2008/2009, downloads range from hundreds to thousands monthly, the more frequently downloaded being Graph2Go and Solve2Go. Most applications can be downloaded from the site free of charge. There are many options to download the applications from a variety of sites that adopted them as favorite educational resources. The applications also spread virally. We therefore assume that the above figures are only partial.

The geographic breadth spans the globe and includes India with thousands of downloads yearly, and African countries (Cote D’Ivoire, South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Mozambique), South American countries (Argentina, Mexico), and Asian countries (Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Philippines) with hundreds of downloads a year. Clearly, the development is attractive, sought after, and useful in rural locations and in less developed communities.

Users: We suspect that the applications are being used by students in a wide range of ages and settings. We learn from teachers around the globe who occasionally write to us about their use of the applications in their schools, from teachers’ centers using the applications for professional development at teachers’ workshops, from secondary and higher education students reporting and asking for further improvements, and from resources being created for Math4Mobile independently by users.

Development challenges

The lack of standards has been a major difficulty. Several years ago Symbian and J2ME were supported by the majority of mobile phones. This is not the case anymore, and since 2010 the market share of Android and iPhone systems keeps growing. This continuing fragmentation is a major obstacle for the scalability and sustainability of the development. It requires constant investment in parallel development (different languages and mathematical packages) for a variety of systems and hardware, that have different capabilities even when operating under similar system. It also requires software verifications and quality assurance that are not easy to do in educational environments.

Developing high-quality applications is relatively expensive. Math4Mobile, an innovative experiment, has been developed in an academic R&D center by faculty and students. To scale it up, it requires economical models that would support free personal use and also provide sustained support for further development and implementation.

Designing human-computer interfaces that take into account the yet unknown health effects of extensive use of mobiles by children. For example, current design is aimed at maximizing offline use.

Investing in a variety of application types such as games and location-based applications that have been shown to be important for learning.

Pedagogical challenges

At present, educational systems own the hardware and software required for learning. Mobile personal phones are a different ball park, in which the centralized models do not seem to work well.

Taking into account the new meaning of students working with their own personal tool is a challenge. A major threat to teachers is the misuse of the communication tools during school time. Another threat is use of applications that students upload to their mobiles (or of resources such as video clips) that interrupt class work. Yet another popular use that can be interpreted as misuse of a cell phone in a classroom setting is recording with the camera and mailing paper resources. It requires imagination and creativity to turn these affordances into constructive learning situations. Projects that involve children in the design could be important in establishing new learning norms.

Tools should support teachers in managing the load of students’ personal work. Following the first design experiment, a full archive system was developed for each application. It was required because the traffic of work sent by SMS between students and the teacher was enormous. The development of Click2Go, which collects and organizes personal data on a server that can be accessed by the teacher, is another model for organizing assessment. Further enhancement of ubiquity that would easily make the same applications work with a variety of media is essential.

Math4Mobile provides and updates activities and teaching ideas at its site. We hope to create professional development models using new means that assume the active involvement of such media as blogging, mobile communication, and sharing mLearning scenarios used around the world throughout social networks. We continue developing instructional materials to be used with existing curricular standards and platforms that allow phone users to communicate with colleagues and mentors worldwide, even when they have no access to computers (as we recently prototyped in India with www.mobilegurukul.org).

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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.

I have often been asked for insights into what would ensure the highest degree of quality integration of technology into the classroom. There are a number of compulsory components that must be effectively addressed if we are to truly observe the full benefits to learners and educators. The one area however that seems to consistently perform weakly is in the area of teacher professional development.

Why are most professional development (PD) approaches for teachers so poor?

Why are teachers so reluctant to invest in PD activities? What can be done to ensure that the professional development is meaningful, builds pedagogical capacity and truly creates the desired outcomes in the classroom?

These questions apply to any context in education and are not only limited to ICT. So here are my answers to these three questions. You may or may not agree, but since I try to support my answers on evidence and research, I can say with confidence that I have lived, read about, researched and observed for over 35 years in public education, the “Good” and the “Bad” teacher professional development events/approaches.

1. Why are most professional development approaches for teachers so poor?

Well, it starts with an Economy of Scale approach to professional development/learning, that is, trying to do the most with the least (highest impact with lowest investment). This might sound like good economic and fiscal thinking but it doesn’t work with learning and the mind. I affectionately called these professional development events the “Dog and Pony Show”, where groups of educators are invited to a session, sit in a hall or classroom, watch the presenter and ingest/digest the message.

If the presenter is entertaining and insightful, the workshop gets great feedback evaluations. If the presenter is dull and boring, the workshop gets poor feedback evaluations. However, it must be noted that in both cases, the odds that the new information is integrated into classroom practice is very, very remote. This format of teacher professional development is void of really addressing the major challenge that awaits the teacher upon the return to the classroom, that is, TIME TO IMPLEMENT. Sadly, it happens to be the most used PD format, regardless of where you are.

I have also observed an OLPC initiative that is hopeful that the introduction of the laptops will simply create some form of professional epiphany in the teacher’s behaviour and practice. We must realize that the vast majority of teachers base their instructional approach on replication and mirroring, not evidence or research-based practices. In my opinion, ministeries-state departments/faculties of education/school districts still do not inculcate into aspiring teachers the need for the extensive use of research and Best Practices approaches into regular classroom practice. As a result, simply showing teachers “how to” and not addressing “Time” and “Understanding”, will not work, plain and simple.

2. Why are teachers so reluctant to invest in such approaches?

Too often in the past, teachers have been left to their own “devices” when it comes to learning new practices. If it didn’t work in the past, why would they believe that anything has changed? Teachers don’t have time to waste attending PD sessions that don’t address the issues that they have, are and will live in the classroom.

3. What can be done to ensure that the professional development is meaningful, builds internal pedagogical capacity and truly creates the desired outcomes in the classroom?

At my former School Board, the Eastern Townships School Board, we began our 1:1 initiative in 2003, with the provision of over 210 PD days for 450 educators. It included a sharp focus on two domains: Use of technology and Integration of technology into the classroom.

In the first two years, we focused on the provision of professional development with small groups and in-class settings. This was more labour intensive, took longer amounts of time and ultimately greatly facilitated the entire process of integration. It worked!!

The subsequent years arrived and we then slipped back to old bad habits of larger scale professional development, in large-sized meeting rooms and crossed our fingers for good luck. Again, this was replicating very familiar PD models in use today. Why did we slip back? Old habits die hard!

My strong recommendations for effective Professional Development for Educators using ICT:

• Start with the end in mind: “Assessment Drives Instruction.”
  Design your assessment forms (aka reporting to parents and stakeholders: Report Card) before you commence your pedagogical professional development. This is the mantra that you should always remind yourself about, since teachers understand that the measurement of their success is based on how successful the students perform. If teachers clearly know what the assessment is to be, they have a much clearer idea of how to use the technology in the classroom. This will explain why so much is written about the poor usage of ICT in education. It actually has little to do with the technology and everything to do with the lack of clarity of the final assessments or the oversimplified “skills” contexts. This means that you must also involve the teachers in the design of the professional development and evaluation rubrics!
• You must include quality time in your teacher professional development sessions for meaningful exchange, for classroom trials and discussions.
  Your professional development should find a way to provide in-class time for teachers to use the new knowledge, to observe colleagues trying out the new methods. Build into your PD budget substitution costs for the teachers receiving this support. Stay out of the conference rooms and meeting halls and spend more PD time in classrooms.
• You should involve the students in the design of the professional development sessions.
  Since they are the recipients of these professional efforts, and are usually more at ease with the use of technology, hearing their input may provide better avenues for usage by teachers. (A cautionary notes: 1-Students know how to use technology but not necessarily for learning; 2-Younger teachers who use technology are not more apt to use the technology in the classroom since they are still trying to understand and develop their own pedagogical practices.) Visit What Did You Do In School Today? to discover how powerful the voices of students can be in the design of their own learning.
• Local Mid-adaptor educators can provide better and more meaningful professional development sessions than outside “experts” or “consultants”.
  I emphasize the local mid-adaptors since they are the ones who were not initially convinced that ICT was a suggested path to pedagogical improvement and are known/respected by their fellow teaching colleagues. Early adaptors don’t convince as well as mid-adaptors. When a teacher hears somebody whom he/she considers credible and supportive, the professional development sessions will much more meaningful.

In parts of the world that cannot afford such orientations, remember one thing: Traditional approaches have not worked and won’t work. As our motto at the Canadian Education Association states “Great minds don’t think alike.” Hope this helps and I look forward to hearing from you.

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

Let there be more teachers

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

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

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

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

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

A lot of numbers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can we really rely on training more teachers alone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technology to the rescue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An example of new technical gear: The OLPC XO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Example of a global problem and solution: Textbooks fantasies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teaching the teachers: A program fantasy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discussion and Conclusions

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

Creative Commons (2010). Open Textbook,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I think Sam Carlson expressed the best reason why this is happening during the Live Debate in India, where he successfully argued that There is Enormous Wastage in the Implementation of Education Technology for Schools:

The basic problem is that teachers are not given the incentives, the time, the encouragement, the opportunity to take advantage of the educational technology, which is made available to them.

And if the teachers are not given the incentives, the time and the opportunities in order to take advantage of this then the technology investment in the computers and the internet content activity, and the building of the computer lab and putting in the electricity and all of those activities will be wasted.

So if teachers are the key to getting better educational outcomes from our ICT investments, the first and most obvious way to support them is better teacher training on the use of ICT in the classroom. But is that really the answer? Do teachers really need more training? And if so, how should that training differ from existing training to get a better result?

For this month’s Educational Technology Debate, we’ll look at the state of teacher training and how changing or improving it could have a positive impact on the educational outcomes from the use of ICT in educational systems of the developing world. Please join us for what promises to be a lively conversation.

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