I am Richard Rowe and I have, for the first time that I am aware of, valid and reliable evidence of substantial improvements in basic literacy in a developing country over a short period of time, at a scalable cost, directly related to the introduction of a technology-supported learning system.

I have in many ways been a techno-skeptic when it comes to the short-term potential of low-cost ICT to help basic education in developing countries. Looking for the evidence. But this is a case where it has been done right with surprising results.

Here is the story

Open Learning Exchange in Rwanda has been conducting a pilot study of the TeacherMate Differentiated Learning System with 620 students in one school. The project included setting up control groups and pre- and post-testing students employing the standardized test of English literacy developed by USAID/RTI for Rwanda. We have just received the project report.

The results are remarkable

The TeacherMate students had nearly triple the increases in literacy test scores compared with two different control groups (an average 36% increase in scores compared with 14% in each of the control groups). This is all the more impressive for a variety of reasons.

The TeacherMate students had roughly one quarter of the time with the TeacherMate devices that we had recommended – averaging only 40 minutes per week instead of the 100 minutes we had hoped for. In addition, the teachers had no previous experience with ICT and they used the TeacherMate system for less than the full school year.

The TeacherMate device we used is in the $50 range per unit. We have done a rough calculation of the amortized cost of the program and have estimated it as less than $5 per student per year. This begins to be an effective approach that can scale quickly to a great many places.

The TeacherMate Differentiated Learning System involves a total systems approach, not just one piece of the challenge. The Rwanda project included content aligned with the curriculum, high levels of interaction and frequent performance feedback for students, the Classroom Management System for teachers that supported their customizing the learning process of each student and the hardware that enabled this to happen.

The next steps

As a result of this success OLE is working with Innovations for Learning to expand the TeacherMate program in Africa. We are hoping to introduce pilots in Uganda and Ghana in addition to continuing in Rwanda. Kari Mruz, the Rwanda Project Manager, has agreed to continue as the director of this multi-national expansion so we will have continuity of management. This second stage pilot will involve using iPod touch devices for students and teachers in a school that has some access to the Internet. This will enable us to use the IFL Classroom Management System to track student progress wirelessly and to support from a distance the coaching of teachers throughout the school year. We will also be exploring the effects of increased home use. We are looking for financial support for this next stage.

Ringing the School BeLL

Aligned with this project, our School BeLL program (Basic e-Learning Library) is now being deployed in Rwanda, Uganda and Ghana. I keep thinking that such a low cost open digital library might be quite useful in some development programs that reach beyond basic education. We will be linking the BeLL to the TeacherMate in Ghana, using e-Grainery and other things to open up a much broader range of content for the students. You can see the “Dream” about how it can change lives and villages on our website.

Here is the full report for you to review and comments. Please feel free to circulate the report to those you believe will find it of interest and let me know of any suggestions you have about getting additional support for this approach.

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The greatest challenge with promoting literacy with ICT is that ICT may not be the most appropriate tool to promote literacy.

The issue here is that we are starting with the solution instead of the problem. We are asking: “How can ICT help address low literacy levels?” Instead of: “How can low literacy levels be addressed?”

This might seem like semantics at first, but there is a fundamental difference between those two questions:

• The former prescribes a solution: ICT.
• The latter does not.

This is significant because when we start with a solution already in mind, we tend to reduce the problem to only those factors that can be solved using that prescribed solution. In this case, we’ve been inundated with cheap hardware and e-content that hasn’t demonstrated a concrete ability to improve literacy.

But, perhaps more significantly, the factors that our prescribed solution can’t solve get left out as a result. This is particularly troubling in this case, because the low level of literacy in many developing country contexts is not a primarily technological problem.

There are bigger factors at play, such as:

• Teachers are inadequately trained and poorly compensated;
• Curriculum is outdated;
• Schools are poorly equipped and maintained;
• Students’ families cannot afford school fees.

ICT alone cannot fix a broken educational system or compensate for poor pedagogical practice. In a context where these issues exist, it is extremely difficult to improve literacy in a significant, sustainable way if you ignore them.

This isn’t much of a revelation. The ICT4E community has been aware of these facts for quite some time.

But, somehow, this knowledge still doesn’t seem to be manifesting itself in the way most ICT4E projects are designed. So, what do we do?

My suggestion is this:

1. Start with the problem.

This seems obvious, but it’s something many ICT4E projects aren’t doing. When we start with a particular technology—or even technology in general—we risk falling into the trap above.

So, we start with a problem. Whether it be literacy in primary-level students or poorly trained teachers or outdated teaching materials, the problem should be something concrete. A good indicator is to ask: is this an issue that we can measure progress towards solving?

For example, “education” is not a problem because we can’t measure progress towards education in any kind of tangible way—we need to be more specific (ie. define what we mean by education or literacy) in order to do that.

2. Brainstorm solutions to the problem. Pick the one that is most appropriate for your context.

Now that we have a problem—low levels of literacy, for instance—we can start to think about solutions. Different ICT interventions will probably be among them.

But then we need to look at the context where we want to implement this solution, which is where all of the other challenging factors identified in this month’s ETD discussion (technology restrictions, human constraints, market failure, language, total cost of ownership, etc) come into play.

Taking all this into account, we might find that the best approach to addressing low literacy levels (or solving educational problem X) doesn’t even involve technology.

Or maybe it involves ‘old’ media—like radios or feature phones—that can get overlooked in ICT4E because they are no longer ‘in fashion’.

This is unnerving for many of us ICT4E folks, because if we draw this conclusion then we potentially make our involvement in some projects obsolete. But if we’re serious about the “E” in “ICT4E” we’re more concerned with improving education than with promoting ICT as a solution. And if that means ICT isn’t the best way forward, we’re going to come to terms with that.

But to be honest, I don’t think this will happen. There are lots of contexts where ICT may very well be the most appropriate approach to improving literacy levels or addressing other educational challenges. In fact, I think that, given the right human and technical resources as well as the range of ICT available, ICT has the potential to be a powerful tool in this regard.

We just need to start with the problem and not the solution so that we know 1) what we want technology to help us do, and 2) pick the right technology to help us do it.

3. Evaluate, evaluate, evaluate

The third piece of this puzzle is figuring out how we know if technology is doing what we want it to do.

One of the big issues, which has already been flagged in this month’s discussion, is that we don’t have enough evidence to show a positive correlation between ICT interventions and improvements in literacy. In fact, there’s a troubling lack of monitoring and evaluation happening in the ICT4E field as a whole.

The only way to keep ourselves from repeating past mistakes is to know when we’re making a mistake.

But monitoring and evaluating a project is pretty hard if you don’t have a concrete goal to begin with—which, again, is why it’s so important to start with a problem that we can measure progress toward solving.

Now, I realize that’s easier said than done. Defining ‘success’ is a slippery topic that deserves its own discussion.

The challenge with defining ‘success’ in ICT4E is also a possible reason that some projects start with solutions as opposed to problems: it’s much more straightforward to measure ‘success’ when it’s defined by the saturation of laptop:child, for instance, than having to deal with pinning down what ‘success’ is in terms of improving something intangible, like literacy.

But skirting around this issue is leading us away from singling out the more effective uses of ICT to enhance education. If that’s really what we want to do—and we want to get better at doing it—we’ve got to figure out how we know when we’re doing it right.

The first step towards that is starting with a problem, not a solution. And accepting that the most appropriate solution to an educational problem, such as addressing low literacy levels in developing country contexts, may not be ICT.

I think that USAID’s recently announced Grand Challenge for Development: All Children Reading is a great step in this direction. It clearly starts with a problem–”793 million adults worldwide cannot read these words”–and is sourcing for solutions. From the information available right now, it looks like technologies (mobile ICT in particular) are going to be one of several focuses when looking at possible solutions.

I’m interested to see how this process pans out, and what kind of research emerges from the initiative.

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I’m not convinced that the challenge of promoting literacy ICT is a market failure, a human constraint, or a technological constraint. It’s a bit more nuanced than that. The tech capabilities are there, teachers will use good literacy tools, and the market exists. But what is lacking is the connection between all three of these things.

What I’ve observed during my short time in this whole ICT realm is that people who design ICT tools for literacy have never really gotten into the brain of a child learning to read and have probably never taught a child to read. I think what we need are more teacher-centered solutions in ICT. We need to mimic what REAL human beings already do well while teaching our children. And we need to make it as simple and as useful as possible.

Teaching a child to read is no easy task.

What continually amazes me is that the more years I spend teaching, the more styles of reading acquisition I see with children. One of the main reasons it is difficult to utilize ICT to teach children to read is because most ICT tools do not often differentiate between a child’s fluency and comprehension needs.

These two facets of reading adoption intertwine and are relevant the moment a child first opens a book, or is read a book. Some children are quick decoders, with the ability to grasp phonemic awareness and phonics almost instantly. In other words, they can sound things out, they can recognize sound patterns, and they can orally read what’s on the page. But that doesn’t mean a kid knows how to read.

The second part of reading gets even more complicated – comprehension. The way that I see basic comprehension is that a student can understand the essentials of what s/he’s reading, retelling the main parts with some important details. But…

• Can the student differentiate between what is relevant and irrelevant in a text?
• Can a student understand the use of different language tools an author uses in a specific type of text?
• Can a student grasp and utilize complex vocabulary words?
• Can a student identify a theme and analyze how an author utilizes that theme in a text?
• Can a student truly evaluate a text?

It’s hard for any type of tech tool to capture a student’s comprehension in these ways. Dang – it’s hard for a reading teacher to do that well!

My mythical ICT tool for literacy

Trying to think of a tool that would really and truly help with literacy, I concocted a mystical tool that mixes a bit of artificial intelligence, a computer adaptive-type learning system to do what reading intervention teachers do – figure out a student’s fluency level and comprehension level and adapt learning exercises based on this. (Great reading intervention tools like Reading Recovery do this. See Fountas and Pinnell also.)

A student would begin an initial fluency assessment based on phonemic awareness and phonics. It would detect the student’s ability to decode both simple letter sounds and complex letter combinations. (Found this and thought it was funny. Word to the wise, a kid learning CVC words can’t read the stuff on the left!)

This fluency assessment would also need to incorporate both voice and text. Questions would adapt according to the level of the student. At around the 10-15 question level, this adaptive test would determine a fluency level.

After this, the student receives a fluency score and is encouraged to continually practice to increase their level.

On the comprehension side, students would take a similar adaptive test that utilizes the most basic comprehension skills first (such as retelling), and then, it would gradually get more difficult or easier, depending on the student’s comprehension level. After about 10-15 questions, the student would get a comprehension score, like the fluency assessment. The student would then be encouraged to increase their mark.

The student would need to read short comprehension passages on a device, but if the comprehension level of the student is low enough, the system would adapt by voicing short reading passages and then asking questions via voice.

Next, the student encounters a series of practice exercises mixed with both fluency and comprehension, using reading passages of high interest. If a student’s decoding ability is very low, then most tasks are fluency work. However, they will also listen to stories and answer comprehension questions to those stories based on voiced questions.

For both fluency and comprehension, each time they answer a series of 5 questions correctly, their score goes up. (For the sake of student confidence, their scores can never go down from the initial score given.)

Ideally, this whole system would be utilized on existing class computers or at home. I think it would be really effective on the phone as well.

Let us not forget differences in language

One of the comments earlier brought up a good point about language. Any literacy tool should also incorporate other languages besides English, which I haven’t completely thought through yet. What I know from teaching ESL and managing ESL teachers through Teach For America is that the best ESL teachers just use really good reading tactics – phonemic awareness, sound patters, listening to others speak, hearing yourself speak, and comprehension strategies.

With a mixture of fluency, comprehension, and some simple artificial intelligence, students could learn to read much easier on their own and teachers would be happy to encourage students with a tech tool for something they already do. I’m no longer a teacher, but if I still were, I would definitely use this in my classroom.

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.

Building on last month’s Educational Technology Debate on the theme of What ICT can improve reading skills of learners in primary schools?, for this month, we will focus on why there are so few ICT tools available that promote and facilitate reading and literacy skills at the primary school level in educational systems of the developing world.

In this discussion, there are three categories of questions we ask you to respond to:

1. Technology Restrictions
   Is it a lack of appropriate hardware? Is the software not “smart” enough yet? Do we need more digital content? Is it the cost of the ICT? Do we need better ICT ecosystems?
2. Human Constraints
   Or are the restraining factors even technology-related? Could it be teachers, administrators or parents that hold back promising ICT-based reading solutions? Might there be solutions we just don’t know about or are not willing to try at scale?
3. Market Failure
   And this is the most worrisome; are there just not that many solutions because technologists are not focused on literacy and reading as problems? If so, is it a lack of visible profit or do they just not care?

Please join in this Educational Technology Debate by submitting your thoughts and ideas either as short comments on this post, or as longer independent Guest Posts. Please email Guest Posts to editors@edutechdebate.org. We will be publishing Guest Posts throughout the month to maintain the conversation.

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In April of this year, I wrote the following in the Educational technology Debate post eReaders will transform the developing world – in and outside the classroom:

“If Worldreader’s experience so far is any guide, e-readers are set to transform the developing world, both in – and outside the classroom. But this change won’t be driven by e-readers by themselves – it will be driven by human curiosity, ever-increasing connectivity, enlightened self-interest, and a gentle push from organizations like ours.”

Having just returned from visiting Worldreader’s program in Ghana, as well as looking at the recent trends in e-reader pricing, I believe this more strongly than I did six months ago. The planets are coming into alignment for a true revolution in the way the developing world reads, and consequently for the way students learn.

Worldreader’s impact

First, a bit of background. Worldreader is working to put books into the hands of one million children in the develop world by 2015. Working with USAID and a private aid agency in Ghana, we’ve put e-readers into the hands of hundreds of children, and then loaded them with local text- and story-books, as well as international fiction.

In total, we have distributed over 80,000 e-books in the past nine months. It’s worth thinking about that number for a second, because it’s staggering: it’s the equivalent of two-and-a-half shipping containers. In our case, they were all delivered wirelessly, using the same cell-phone infrastructure that is becoming more ubiquitous every day. (Ghana’s Daily Graphic reports that mobile phone penetration stands at 81%.)

What’s even more interesting is that number doesn’t count the thousands of books that the children and teachers have downloaded themselves over the same period. Just looking at the four-month period from May-August (much of which was over vacation), we logged downloads of 1,301 free book downloads and samples (one popular book: No Good Deed), 1,036 educational game downloads (including Thread Words— I played it with a few students while I was there), and 92 subscription downloads for free trials of newspapers and magazines.

Remember that all of this is against a context of a severe lack of books. According to SACMEQ, half of the classrooms across six countries studied in Sub-Saharan African have no textbooks at all, because of cost and logistical issues. And as Michael Trucano notes in his World Bank blog, ”Only 1 out of 19 countries studied (Botswana) ha[s] adequate textbook provision at close to a 1:1 ratio for all subjects and all grades.” Books just aren’t getting to Sub Saharan Africa.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that when we put books into students’ and teachers’ hands, they read them. Two weeks ago I met a girl named Patience who had read 90 books in the past six months, and she wasn’t alone: children across the classroom had devoured 50, 60, or 70 books. In fact, on average children are now spending 50% more time reading than those in control schools, and primary students’ test scores have increased some eight points more than those of students in comparable schools.

While everyone knows that test scores fluctuate wildly over the short-run, it’s clear that these children are reading more than ever before, and the effect is almost palpable. (The USAID observer who dropped in on our program admitted he’d never seen young children so engaged in reading… and he’d been a teacher for 10 years before joining USAID.)

Interestingly, the “reading effect” wasn’t limited to students. The English teacher at Adeiso Presbyterian Junior High School teaches one class with e-readers and one without. He admitted to me that he felt a bit lazy (his words) in the e-reader class, because the students had already competed all the reading. Cynthia, a primary-school teacher, proudly showed her collection of religious and inspirational book samples that she had collected. And parents we surveyed reported that their children were reading to their siblings after school.

Local publishers embrace e-readers

Equally interesting is how publishers are responding. Local publishes see this as an opportunity to expand their market dramatically, both within the developing world and outside. As Elliot Agyare of Ghana’s SMartlin Publishing has said, “I’d be more than happy to drop my prices to [50 cents] if I could sell on hundreds of thousands of e-readers.”

Meanwhile, international publishers have taken note: Worldreader has obtained the rights to use books from Random House (including the Magic Tree House series), Penguin (including four of Roald Dahl’s books), and more in our program for free. For international publishers, it’s an inexpensive way to help the developing world become active readers.

A selection of the 230 books in Worldreader’s program.

Overcoming issues – real and perceived

The other interesting news is what’s not happening: theft hasn’t been a problem. Of the 500+ e-readers in circulation in Ghana, we’ve lost a grand total of three over the past six months. And a boy came up to me while I was there and reported he thought he’d seen one of the missing units in town— we’re tracking it down. The communities have been magnificently unified in working with us to see our work together succeed.

Of course, there’s less-good news too: e-readers still break too often (though Amazon has done good analysis on why, and is helping with solutions, plus we’re now using different cases and rolling out an incentive program to keep the Kindles unbroken). It’s not always easy to keep up with the kids’ appetite for new local books: it takes a fair amount of effort to maintain momentum with local publishers who have lots of issues to juggle. But these issues get easier with scale, as we build demand for more hardware and books.

At this point, most observers will be thinking two things: the program, though early, seems to have some traction, but the cost must be high. And there’s no doubt that e-readers are still too expensive to catch on widely in the developing world. But recent evidence suggests convincingly that prices are coming down fast: Amazon’s least-expensive Kindle is now $79, as compared to $399 three years ago. Of course, that’s for an advertising-supported, WiFi only model.

Still, if you assume the existence of a $50 e-reader, and spread that cost over 5 years, you’re approaching costs that many parents and governments can bear. In fact, the enclosed picture of a receipt is for the purchase of a single math textbook that a headmaster purchased on behalf of one of his teachers. The cost of the book is 12 Ghanaian Cedis (about $8.00) for only one of about eight required textbooks across the curriculum.

Expanding past Ghana

But perhaps the success we have seen so far is specific to conditions in Ghana, or to the people involved in this pilot. Well, early indications from our work in East Africa suggest otherwise. This past weekend, Al Jazeera aired a piece on our work in Kenya’s Rift Valley, and the results are largely consistent with what we’ve seen in Ghana.

What’s remarkable is that after the initial set-up, content load, and training, much of the on-going work has been in the hands of local teachers. We believe this is a fundamental ingredient to the success of any ICT program: teachers have to embrace the program, and for that to happen, implementation needs to be easy. In the case of e-readers, this is the case: the technology is simple to use, and in the end, incorporating it into the classroom feels familiar. After all, they’re really just books.

Worldreader is just getting started. The technology we’re using is still early in its development, and prices are still high. But the trends are all headed in the right direction to allow us to achieve something unimaginable before, potentiall allowing entire countries to skip the paper stage of books in favor of e-books. If that happens, we’ll unleash a wave of creativity that’s unlike anything we’ve seen before.

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EGRA testing in Ethiopia

Experts agree that measuring reading progress early offers the benefits of informing remediation, taking a snapshot in time or showing progress over time of children’s reading abilities and informing stakeholders and policy makers about what programs or methods work.

Frequent diagnostic testing at national or classroom levels can serve to establish benchmarks; and monitoring progress against these benchmarks can be a key factor in motivating schools, teachers, students, and families (Davidson, Korda, & Collins, 2011).

The Education for All Fast Track Initiative recently set two indicators related to reading skills:

1. Proportion of students who, after two years of schooling, demonstrate sufficient reading fluency and comprehension to “read to learn”
2. Proportion of students who are able to read with comprehension, according to their countries’ curricular goals, by the end of primary school

These indicators are considered an effective measure of a school system’s overall health as well as a specific diagnosis of reading performance that can inform policy and implementation of curriculum and teacher training, among other things. According to Gove and Wetterberg (2011),

“The Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) is one tool used to measure students’ progress toward learning to read. It is a test that is administered orally, one student at a time. In about 15 minutes, it examines a student’s ability to perform fundamental prereading and reading skills” (p. 2).

Over the past five years, we at RTI International, various donors, and experts in the field of early reading have worked to “develop, pilot, and implement EGRA in more than 50 countries and 70 languages” (p. 2). Assessments like EGRA help teachers focus on results, by describing what children know or do not know, and where instruction must focus in order to change that. For example, in Egypt, the first Arabic EGRA survey showed very clearly that children who knew letter sounds performed better on reading a short passage than children who only knew letter names; yet 50% of children tested could not identify a single letter sound. These findings signaled that a fundamental shift in instructional methods was required, and after schools adopted a phonics-based approach using letter sounds, performance increased nearly 200% over baseline one year later (Cvelich, 2011).

That said, to measure for results, teachers and their supervisors must find the tools accessible and easy to use to inform their own instruction. It also helps if the results underpin communication with parents and communities, as well as national politicians. (Crouch, 2011). Too often, results from national standardized tests remain at the national level, with teachers rarely getting feedback on performance, much less feedback that is more specific than classroom averages. Furthermore, it can sometimes be months, if not years, before the results of large national assessments are made available, at which time it is too late to change instructional practices – at least for that set of children.

How can ICT play a role?

Systematic use of mobile devices to assess early literacy and numeracy, especially in developing countries, remains limited to date. Reasons include:

• Initial procurement cost of the devices and the necessity for specific training in their use;
• Lack of robust cost-benefit analyses to inform sustainability of this type of approach; and
• Limitations in local capacity to develop or manipulate the necessary data collection software.

As we state elsewhere (Pouezevara & Strigel, 2011), there are several ways in which information and communication technologies (ICT) may be applied to the assessment process to make implementation and use of the results more accessible:

• Creating or tailoring tests
• Training data collectors
• Collecting actual field data
• Manipulating and managing the data to extract and present the most significant findings.

Among these, the greatest added value is in using electronic devices for data collection and rapid analysis in place of paper-based assessments.

• Electronic devices can reduce the amount of paper needed, as well as the associated costs. Expenses dispensed with include the actual purchase of paper, clipboards, pencils, timers and so on, as well as the labor involved in the lengthy processes of checking student sheets for copy quality, stapling individual packets, counting instruments out by team and school in advance of data collection in the field, and distributing the packets. Paper-related costs such as printing, supplies, data entry, and data cleaning can make up 5%–15% of the entire budget of an EGRA implementation, according to an RTI internal review.
• Collecting data digitally means that it can move directly from a device into a database for analysis. This has several benefits in terms of efficiency: less time for data entry, lower data-entry costs, and less time to report out results. Quicker access can encourage stakeholders to do such assessments even when they need data rapidly to make important decisions based on results.
• Electronic means have the potential to reduce the number of points for human error in moving from paper to database to analysis software. As with most sophisticated survey software, programmers can build in checks or stops to help assessors recognize data-entry errors immediately, at the time of administration.
• Electronic media can be less physically challenging than dealing with paper-related administration: “An electronic solution may also reduce measurement errors arising from problems in handling the timers and other testing materials. Difficulties include forgetting to start the timer, setting the wrong amount of time on the timer, or leaving student prompt sheets with the student when they should have been taken away” (Pouezevara & Strigel, 2011, p. 188).

What solutions are available?

In theory, there are many potential ways to transform paper assessments into an electronic equivalent, but a custom solution is required because of differences between oral reading assessments like EGRA and other standard surveys. For example, data have to be entered at the child’s pace on the subtasks, not that of the assessor. Therefore, survey data collection applications on the market for phones, PDAs, or portable computers typically are not appropriate.

After investigating a wide range of potential hardware and software platforms, we developed Tangerine™, a digital assessment interface for touch-screen tablet computers running the Android operating system (see photographs). It can be used for the standard EGRA approach, or customized for other types of surveys such as early math diagnostics or school information surveys.

Other organizations are also exploring a variety of solutions. Prodigy Systems, an organization that has partnered with RTI in Yemen, successfully developed iProSurveyor for use with Arabic assessments on the iPad. Its first large-scale implementation in Yemen in early 2011 confirmed many of the benefits of the digital approach.

• The database output was easily readable by any data analysis program, avoiding time-consuming manual data transcription and recoding before statistical analysis.
• Administration errors, such as forgetting to start the timer or enter a response, were minimized through built-in error control.
• Significantly fewer materials had to be transported in challenging terrain and an environment unfavorable to printed materials.
• No issues arose linked to poor printing quality or stapling.
• Total administration time was quicker relative to paper assessment (comparison conducted over one assessment administrator).

Cost-Benefit Analysis

At RTI we recently conducted a preliminary cost-benefit analysis using approximate costs from recent EGRA implementations in four different African countries. The analysis aimed to identify the point of cost recovery at which the digital approach would actually yield cost savings. We modeled not one, but three data collection rounds for each country, because it is common to repeat assessments  - e.g., for program baseline, midterm, and post-intervention evaluation, or annual monitoring of student outcomes.

In our cost calculation for the digital approach, we assumed hardware costs of USD300/enumerator plus a 10% contingency for spares and accessories, such as a wireless access point for field-based data back-up for the first data collection (e.g., baseline). For the cost of a second digital data collection, we assumed re-use of the tablets from the first data collection, but factored in a 15% contingency just in case replacements are needed.

To calculate the cost of a second paper-based data collection we multiplied the paper-related costs by two, as the same costs for printing, data entry, and data cleaning would incur again. We followed the same process for adding a third data collection to the calculation (assuming baseline, mid-term, and post-intervention assessments).

As shown in Exhibit 1, for most small-sample data collections or one-time assessments, the cost of the hardware may not be offset by the eliminated paper-related costs. The return on investment in repeated implementations, however, is clear in terms of cumulative costs.

Exhibit 1: Cost of EGRA implementation, paper vs. electronic, for three administrations

In addition to making large national assessments more efficient, the same devices can be adapted for use as classroom-based continuous assessment tools, or as data entry interfaces for situations that still require paper-based tests. With such devices in their hands, teachers or school supervisors can do regular mastery checks more frequently, and capture the results at student and classroom levels.

The resulting data set is a rich one, and if it is supported by built-in computer-based analytics, it can be analyzed in multiple ways to indicate not only whether the methods in place are improving reading ability, but also what areas of the curriculum need more attention, and which children or groups of children are falling behind. For example, detailed item analysis at the classroom or individual level might show a recurring problem with vowel sounds, or decoding. This subsequently provides clear instructional recommendations to focus on.

Limitations and pitfalls

However, electronic administration is not necessarily a cure-all:

Obviously, using electronic data collection at either national or classroom levels does not solve all the limitations of print-based testing; indeed, doing so might introduce new challenges. For example, although a digital solution would eliminate the risk of environmental damage to paper forms during difficult transport situations, it might pose a great risk that all assessment data could be lost at once through loss, damage, or theft of a single device, if proper backup procedures were not in place. Likewise, handling of the new device might prove to be more challenging than handling the timer and all associated materials. […] Thus, strong electronic quality control and supportive supervision during data collection would be crucial. (Pouezevara & Strigel, 2011, p. 188)

Furthermore, the EGRA approach is intended to be a simple solution that can be adopted by countries with minimum technical assistance. An electronic solution should be flexible enough that it does not create dependency of users on software programmers or hardware technicians to change test items and configuration as needed.

In terms of costs, clearly, initial investment costs for specialized hardware may be prohibitive in some situations, but our preliminary cost-benefit analysis indicated that over time the investment will pay off if used for multiple large-scale implementations. Additionally, implementers can leverage the initial investment by choosing tools that can be used for other purposes when not in use for assessment—for example, by loading tablet computers with other instructional materials, training resources, or literacy materials.

We can also foresee assessment software being linked not only to automatically generated analysis of results, but also to suggested instructional resources tailored to those results and a record of day-to-day time on task. It is also possible, using the same technologies that power Tangerine™, to adapt the assessment methodology to more common and less expensive handheld devices, such as mobile phones. These smaller devices might be particularly useful for the most rapid types of literacy assessments, such as Pratham’s yearly literacy and numeracy surveys, which involve fewer subtasks than EGRA and fewer items per test.

Another potential pitfall related to making national or continuous assessments more readily accessible is that they could be used for excessive assessment, and focus on “teaching to the test” at the expense of other higher order or student-centered activities. Too much focus on averages or aggregated results can draw attention away from the achievement of specific subgroups. Additionally, care must be taken that classroom-level results are not misused by aggregating small samples and reporting them up to the national level or attempting to generalize them.

This is a rapidly evolving field, with new technologies arriving on the market almost daily, and prices falling significantly, so it is expected that it will become increasingly feasible to implement electronic methods for literacy assessments in developing countries. Meanwhile, we are piloting various solutions and collaborating with other institutions that have similar goals. Further interest and ideas from the international development community are welcome.

References

Crouch, L. (2011). Motivating early grade instruction and learning: Institutional issues. Ch. 7 in A. Gove & A. Wetterberg, The Early Grade Reading Assessment: Applications and interventions to improve basic literacy (pp. 227–250). Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI Press. Available from http://www.rti.org/pubs/bk-0007-1109-wetterberg.pdf

Cvelich, P. (2011, September/October). Egypt shakes up the classroom. Frontlines. Washington, DC: United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Available from http://www.usaid.gov/press/frontlines/fl_sep11/FL_sep11_EDU_EGYPT.html

Davidson, M., Korda, M., & White Collins, O. (2011). Teachers’ use of EGRA for continuous assessment: The case of EGRA Plus: Liberia. Ch. 4 in A. Gove & A. Wetterberg, The Early Grade Reading Assessment: Applications and interventions to improve basic literacy (pp. 113–138). Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI Press. Available from http://www.rti.org/pubs/bk-0007-1109-wetterberg.pdf

Gove, A., & Wetterberg, A. (2011). The Early Grade Reading Assessment: An introduction. Ch. 1 in A. Gove & A. Wetterberg, The Early Grade Reading Assessment: Applications and interventions to improve basic literacy (pp. 1–38). Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI Press. Available from http://www.rti.org/pubs/bk-0007-1109-wetterberg.pdf

Pouezevara, S., & Strigel, C. (2011). Using information and communication technologies to support EGRA. Ch. 6 in A. Gove & A. Wetterberg, The Early Grade Reading Assessment: Applications and interventions to improve basic literacy (pp. 183–226). Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI Press. Available from http://www.rti.org/pubs/bk-0007-1109-wetterberg.pdf

Many of us have witnessed firsthand this kind of wasted investment—i.e., underutilization of equipment—but how many of us are still around to see the long-term consequences of high-input ICT projects, such as those designed to give every child access to computers, either through large computing labs, mobile laptop stations, or one to one computing?

• What happens when those computers reach the end of their lifecycle?
• Who is responsible for disposing of them when the project that purchased them is no longer active?
• How many projects today are integrating this type of foresight into their design and costs?
• What donors are requiring that type of planning from their implementing partners?
• Which client governments are requiring such action as part of international aid programs?

For the past three years, the ICT for Education and Training group at RTI International has been looking at these questions, and developing strategies and protocols for approaching ICT in education interventions with a focus on realistic, effective inputs for the present, while planning for the effects of those interventions in the future.

Why? Because although some may argue that informal electronics recycling—i.e., picking and sorting through piles of electronics at the dump—provides a reasonable income for some people (for example, a Kenyan can earn up to $3/day; in Guiyu China, about $8/day—much more than farming), the question is whether or not it is safe and adequate. In most cases, it is not. When we don’t properly recycle, there is human and environmental damage from direct contact with toxic substances, inappropriate methods for extracting raw materials, hazardous working conditions, etc. Additionally, we are ignoring the market potential for additional sources of sustainable and safe livelihoods, while losing raw materials that will have to be re-extracted (with all of the associated environmental problems that come with that.) Thus, the idea of e-waste for us is more than just a by-product of development projects; instead, it can become “the development project”, led by countries in an effort to spark new, safe, and sustainable economies. It is a human as well as environmental concern, both of which have long-term impact on development and improving the human condition, our key mission.

What can be done?

Recycling is just one possible approach to e-waste management, and a broad one at that. The least desirable approach to e-waste management is no management at all, but rather the direct disposal of unwanted equipment and materials using environmentally unsound practices, such as dumping and incineration, and bypassing all efforts to reuse or recycle. We talk a lot about how to use ICT in education, for good reasons. But we don’t talk enough about how the principles of “Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle” should be integrated into ICT in education projects.

Reduce
Purchase smaller devices—tablet computers and mobile devices, for example; purchase more energy efficient devices; purchase fewer but sufficiently powerful devices (i.e., Thin Clients); extend the lifecycle of the equipment that you have through effective preventive maintenance, proper handling by users, and repairs–this also provides an opportunity for vocational and technical training within the school, organization, or community.

Reuse
In addition to the preventive maintenance described above, when equipment can truly no longer function as its original purpose, it can still be reused or repurposed. For example: refurbish one new device out of parts from other non-functional devices; use non-working devices in vocational and technical training courses to understand parts and how, for example, a computer is put together; repurpose devices into totally different objects, for example computer chips and circuit boards have been “upcycled” into luggage tags , jewelry or art.

Recycle
Despite best efforts, there will always be parts of equipment that cannot be reused or repurposed. The key is to ensure that prior to disposal one considers all responsible recycling options: plastics can be ground or shredded and sold back to plastics manufacturers; parts can be sorted and resold for refurbishing purposes; metals, primarily gold and silver, are recovered by commercial recyclers. The recycling option should aim to create new, viable and safe sources of livelihoods in the community, such as sourcing, separating and sorting parts and then reselling them to appropriate manufacturers.

Examples of Success

In Egypt’s Manshiyat Naser district, also known as “Garbage City”, girls come one day per week to learn how to turn trash into income. With the help of a trained teacher, the girls break down non-working computers collected by the Zabaleen (garbage collectors) or donated to the association, and rebuild them into working computers. Each working computer can be sold for approximately $300 on the local market, with half of the proceeds going directly to the girls, and half funding the warehouse facilities and trainer. The parts that can’t be repurposed into a new computer are sorted for recycling, including the valuable gold and silver of microprocessors, motherboards and circuit boards.

Kenya is emerging as one of the leaders in e-waste management, having convened The National Stakeholders Workshop on Waste of Electrical and Electronic Equipment (e-waste) Nairobi 2010. They are also one of the first African nations to have a comprehensive-government-led e-waste policy and strategy and there are recycling facilities set up to handle it. Computers for Schools Kenya (CFSK) a non-governmental organization, dismantles computers into metals, wires, plastic, aluminum, copper, monitors and electronic boards which are then sold separately. CFSK also converts the monitors into television sets by replacing its boards with those of televisions.

An eWaste “code of conduct” for development partners?

When engaging in development activities, particularly ICT in Education projects that aim to introduce considerable amounts of technology infrastructure, we must act responsibly with regards to e-waste. There are many opportunities, or “entry points” to integrate responsible e-waste management into our projects.

At the proposal stage:

• Build e-waste considerations into the proposal, with budget (for example, budget for responsible export of e-waste, local recycling if possible, for training and advocacy events, etc.)
• Integrate partnerships with IT companies, private sector partners, community-based organizations, and waste management facilities
• Budget for a rapid situation analysis of government policies and procedures surrounding e-waste management.

During project implementation:

• Require eco-friendly materials, or manufacturer take-back agreements (‘producer pays principle’) as part of hardware specifications and evaluation criteria for large procurement contracts.
• Include in training programs strategies to help extend the lifecycle of computers, and clear instructions for what to do with non-functional equipment.
• Conduct advocacy and policy support by work with government counterparts to advise them on long-term considerations and collaborate on developing appropriate actions and solutions

At project exit stage:

• Ensure proper handover of used equipment–including project office equipment–to local organizations that have the capacity to restore, refurbish and recycle it.
• Insist on transparency in reporting to project donors, stakeholders, clients, etc. on both successful and challenging aspects of electronics recycling and ensure that they have a road-map for the future based on project experience.

However, e-Waste management cannot be externally driven in the long term. Therefore, our most critical responsibility is to support national governments to address this issue and to increase their own capacity for end-of-life processing of e-waste. We can:

• promote and support the establishment of recycling facilities as part of economic growth and workforce development projects.
• participate in and foster effective environmental lobbies in countries where we work so that citizens also put pressure on governments to create such facilities and enforce appropriate legislation.
• encourage governments to develop appropriate legislation to protect themselves and promote development; for example, by outlawing the importation and dumping of foreign e-waste.
• encourage the re-use of electronics through social programs that donate equipment to schools or hospitals, and subsidize recycling of e-waste when reuse is not possible.

Further research needed

As a community, we can make a larger impact faster by working together. First, we need more information on who is doing what, which donors and which governments have policies and procedures related to e-waste, and where we can find common ground. Some important questions remain from an institutional perspective:

• What is our e-waste “tolerance”?
• At what point does this become a clear “hazard” that cannot be ignored?
• What constitutes a “significant” amount of technology input in a project?
• Is this only relevant to ICT in Education projects?
• What about our project offices?
• Do we practice what we preach in our institutions both at home and abroad?
• Do smaller devices necessarily contain less e-waste per unit?
• Are donors likely to view e-waste considerations as a positive or a negative contribution to projects where it is not expressly requested?
• What about the health and environmental effects of the use of electronic devices even before reaching the disposal phase (i.e., increased electricity consumption and hazards related to long-term exposure to cell phones, wireless internet, etc.).

We welcome your contribution to this ongoing research, by sharing your experiences, activities and opinions.

A version of this piece was previously presented to the 54th annual conference of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) in Chicago, March 3, 2010. Background research was commissioned by RTI and carried out by Amos Cruz, and submitted to RTI International as an unpublished research paper entitled “Electronic Waste: Considerations and Solutions for Integration of Information and Communications Technologies in the Developing World”, August 29, 2009. A multimedia version of the presentation is also available

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The Government has therefore outlined various policies that are aimed at creating an environment that will foster technology use and encourage investment in ICT , with the Education sector being one of the most critical areas. This is because narrowing the digital gap is more than just providing physical access to computers and the Internet; people must understand how to put it to good use. The ICT in Education Strategy comprises the following elements:

Focus on Professional Development

Policy makers within the Education sector recognized that – in order for the government to achieve its objectives – emphasis had to be placed on teacher professional development in the areas of ICT in education, and therefore looked at ways to contextualize and implement the process.

The National Centre for Educational Resource Development (NCERD) is the Department within the Ministry of Education tasked with delivering all Continuous Professional Development programmes for in-service teachers. The ICT Unit within NCERD, which is staffed by three people, is responsible for all teacher training projects. The mandate of the Unit is to:

• Train all teachers to the Basic Computer literacy level by 2012.
• Manage all schools with computer laboratories (65 Primary, 80 Secondary).
• Implement SuccessMaker Software into the 50 schools which includes training of 2,000 teachers in its use.
• Train all secondary school teachers to deliver the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) Information Technology and Electronic Document Preparation and Management Syllabi (109 teachers).
• Research and develop modules for all aspects of ICT training within the Education sector.
• Identify, train and implement low cost technologies with the schools system example (Jolly Phonics, Television, DVD’s, White Boards, etc).

The Unit was brought on stream in 2009 and a five-year work programme was prepared that outlined the rollout of the various tasks as outlined below:

• Contracted local experts in ICT from the University of Guyana (UG) and sought permission from Microsoft to use materials from them to create the first set of training manuals for the Basic Computer Literacy Level.
• Once the Manuals were completed, 20 Master Trainers were trained in the delivery of the content. These master trainers were senior IT teachers from the secondary level, with degrees in computer science from UG and Trained Teachers Certificates from the Cyril Potter College of Education (CPCE).
• On average, 15 training classes were held every week, all over the country and in Georgetown.
• The SuccessMaker Training Programme was ongoing in 14 primary schools and is being implemented in phases in additional 50 primary schools from October, 2011.
• A whole-schools approach to the training of the teachers in the Schools with IT Labs was adopted and training is being done in those schools in the afternoons by the resources persons. The training is a combination of the Basic Computer Literacy and the use of SuccessMaker.
• 109 secondary school teachers were trained in programming over a period of one year.

As part of the five-year work programme, it is expected that all 13,000 teachers in Guyana would be trained to at least a level of basic computer literacy.

To date:

• 3,500 teachers have been trained in Basic Computer Literacy;
• 30 schools are running SuccessMaker successfully;
• 109 Secondary School teachers are competent to deliver Computer Science syllabi and the number of students writing these subjects has tripled in 2 years.

The ICT unit has faced some challenges. The major ones were:

• Qualified personnel to help with module writing;
• Retention of resource personnel;
• Equipment – lack of computers for training programmes;
• Lack of financial resources for implementation of initiatives and associated travel requirements;
• Lack of connectivity.

After reviewing the options available and recognizing that there was a lack of direction, the Ministry decided to adopt the UNESCO ICT Competence Framework for Teacher in November, 2009. The Ministry then entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with the Commonwealth Secretariat (ComSec) and Commonwealth of Learning (COL) to secure their help in applying the Framework in such a way that it would suit the needs of Guyana. Based on this, an ICT Professional Development Strategy for Teachers in Guyana was developed in March, 2010, within the UNESCO Framework presented below.

The long-term outcomes of this strategy will be to ensure that all Ministry of Education officials, teacher development management and staff, school principals, and teachers are competent to harness ICT effectively to support high quality teaching and learning in Guyanese schools, with:

1. Most able to integrate the use of basic ICT tools into the standard school curriculum, pedagogy, and classroom structures, knowing how, where, and when (as well as when not) to use technology for classroom activities and presentations, for management tasks, and to acquire additional subject matter and pedagogical knowledge in support of their own professional development; and
2. A critical mass able to use more sophisticated methodologies and technologies with changes in the curriculum that emphasize depth of understanding and application of school knowledge to real world problems and pedagogy in which the teacher serves as a guide and manager of the learning environment and students are engaged in extended, collaborative project-based learning activities that can go beyond the classroom and may involve local or global collaborations.

Description of the Strategy

The ICT Professional Development Strategy for Teachers in Guyana will provide a comprehensive framework and learning pathway for Ministry of Education officials, school principals, administrators, and teachers to become competent to harness ICT effectively to support high quality teaching and learning. This learning pathway will use the UNESCO ICT CFT as its guiding framework. It will seek to develop core competences for the key intended audiences for a suite of professional development initiatives, as mapped out below.

Thus, the Guyana ICT Professional Development Framework for Teachers will incorporate the following initial professional development options.

1. ICT components in the revised CPCE programme (which, according to current plans, will be a two-year programme leading to a two-year Associate Degree in Education):
   • Two compulsory courses to introduce teachers to technology – electronic and otherwise – and then in more detail to ICT in education, equivalent to six semester credits (these courses are anticipated to focus on the level of ‘Technology Literacy’, in terms of the UNESCO ICT CFT);
   • A dedicated focus in secondary subject options to enable teachers to specialise in teaching IT as a subject;
   • Subject-specific ICT integration specializations (incorporated into subject-specific courses, not delivered as separate modules).
2. ICT components in the revised UG programme (a further two years of study, which will lead to a Bachelor of Education Degree):
   • Two further compulsory courses on ICT integration in education, again equivalent to six semester credits (anticipated to focus on the level of ‘Knowledge Deepening’, in terms of the UNESCO ICT CFT)
   • A dedicated focus in secondary subject options to enable teachers to specialize in teaching IT as a subject;
   • Subject-specific ICT integration specializations (again incorporated into existing modules, not delivered as separate modules).
3. A suite of courses to be offered by NCERD, with the possibility that some may, through a licensing agreement, be delivered by one or more suitable third-party suppliers and quality assured by NCERD. In the next five years, the objective will be to:
   • Create a dedicated module on ICT Integration for school principals, to be integrated into the 18-month course for school principals. In addition, it will be important to offer this module as a stand-alone course for people who have already successfully completed the course without the ICT Integration module. This module will include a specific focus on ‘Using ICT in school administration’.
   • Re-package the four ICT Integration modules being designed for the new CPCE and UG ADE and B. Ed. programmes as into two stand-alone courses for qualified teachers, as well as designing a stand-alone course for qualified teachers who are teaching IT as a subject, but are not formally qualified to do so.
   • Develop a stand-alone course on using Success Maker in schools. This short course will require two versions, one for teachers who are already ICT literate and one for those who are not.
   • Design of a course for ICT Coordinators at schools.
   • Design of a course for ICT maintenance and support personnel.

Implementation

The Innovative and Communication Unit within NCERD has worked closely with a consultant appointed by COL and ComSec on all aspects of the strategy and agreed upon the following principles and assumptions:

• Integration of the UNESCO ICT Competency Framework for Teachers into all ICT TD initiatives and the curriculum design of all courses;
• Focus on constructing clear learning pathways for Guyanese teachers aligned to the Framework;
• Use of appropriate technologies and online/offline applications – different models;
• Delivery of professional development will be timed to coincide with ICT infrastructure models and rollout into schools;
• Alignment of pre-service and in-service TD (CPD);
• Increase capacity to deliver and capacity building of all staff;
• Change management is central to the strategy;
• All courses will be competency-based and include appropriate blends of face-to-face and distance learning and use of e-learning/appropriate technologies;
• Seek international benchmarking for courses (e.g. submit relevant courses and modules that it designs to The Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth for formal approval when this becomes possible);
• Seek to build on and adapt existing national and international courses and modules wherever possible;
• Facilitate sharing of courses and materials by releasing them as Open Educational Resources (OER) on the Connected Classrooms Repository.

In addition, the World Bank, in collaboration with the Government of Guyana, has launched a project for the re-structuring of the CPCE and the UG Faculty Of Education and Humanities. The decision was taken that the UNESCO Framework would also be the basic for all ICT Courses offered by the two Institutions and that they would be aligned with what was offered at NCERD.

The COL/ComSec consultant, working very closely with the ICT Unit at NCERD, has:

• Designed an instrument that is being administered to all Guyanese teachers, as well as personnel at CPCE, UG, and NCERD. This instrument is a baseline study that will be used to determine the ICT capacity of the respondents. The data analysis and results will be used for decision making within the MOE, and this analysis will be repeated annually.
• Begun developing the Modules for Technology Literacy and Knowledge Deepening. The existing modules from all ICT courses offered at the three institutions will be reviewed and modified to meet the standards of the UNESCO Competency framework for Teacher Professional Development. The first set of modules is expected to be piloted in August, 2011.
• Several proposals for the improvement of the ICT Infrastructure within the three institutions have been tabled and procurement is on-going.

Conclusion

In conclusion, recognising that it is people that drive ICT use to create change in societies, the Ministry of Education is of the notion that the integration of ICT into the learning and teaching process through teacher training and professional development will become the backbone to creating a knowledge society that will have impact on the way ICT is used in the Country.

The plans and initiatives outlined in this document are aimed at:

• Changing the education culture of Guyana by addressing one of the critical needs within the system – stimulating and inculcating the use of ICT by all educator at all levels thus moving them from the analogue mode of thinking and moving them to the digital age, which will bridge the digital divide between teachers and their learners.
• Creating a society of responsible ICT users who can effect change in the way ICT is currently being used in Guyana – teachers and students can make decisions and choices that are based on a social and moral responsibility to the country.
• Preparing teachers with the fundamentals to be the driving force behind all of the initiatives that are being implemented by the Government of Guyana.

The conceptualization and implementation of the UNESCO competency framework will equip the teachers to face the growing demands for Guyana to join the rest of the Caribbean and world in creating a global Knowledge Society.

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Computer labs were established throughout the University to expand access to computers for students. There are just over 5,000 computers available for students in more than 100 computer labs, and this number is increasing annually. The ratio of computers to students is approximately 6:1.

Infrastructure was put in place, and training courses have been introduced to enable academics to optimise the opportunities that web-based learning can bring and to further enrich the learning environment. Infrastructure was also put in place for lecturers to communicate with their students via SMS technology.

The University also uses Blackboard as its learning management system (LMS). This system was specifically adapted to suit the needs of the University of Pretoria and is called ClickUP. All students receive an e-mail address by default when they enrol at the University, and can access the University’s online environment via their student number, not just on campus, but from wherever they are. All contact students must successfully complete a compulsory semester course in computer literacy in their first year of study.

The growth in the number of modules with online (Click UP) support has grown substantially in all faculties/schools since 2005. The total percentage of modules with web support grew from 37.7% in 2005 to more than 75% in 2010.

The table below provides an overview of the growth in e-teaching and learning at the University of Pretoria since 2002. In 2009, all academic departments at the University made use of online teaching and learning to a greater or lesser extent.

E-assessment has also developed momentum since 2002. More and more academics started to introduce e-assessment, with the result that more than 380,000 e-tests were conducted in 2009 and 405,877 in 2010.

The profile of the University of Pretoria, as described above, mirrors that of any good university in any developed context. The reason why the University embarked on this e-learning strategy is because the technology is available, affordable, and appropriate to use. Any university that ignores the enrichment that online programmes can bring is irresponsible. It is, however, also true that, universities that embark on IT-enabled learning that cannot be supported by the bandwidth, financial resources, adequate hardware and a target market that can access the technology can be described as irresponsible.

The problem in all developing contexts is that the distribution of ICT is limited to “developed” pockets in these countries. This is also true for South Africa, and is clearly evident in the distance programmes of the University of Pretoria.

In 2002, the Faculty of Education at the University of Pretoria established a Unit for Distance Education to manage the distance education initiative of the Faculty. The Faculty of Education is the only faculty at the University that also presents dedicated distance education programmes over and above the contact programmes. Thousands of teachers (specifically black teachers) were seriously disadvantaged in the apartheid era by inadequate and low-quality teacher training programmes at inferior teacher training colleges established specifically for black teachers.

These teachers teach predominantly in rural areas throughout South Africa. The only way that these teachers can improve their qualifications is through the mode of distance education. In order to play a constructive and significant role in the upgrading of teacher qualifications in South Africa, the Faculty developed distance education programmes in specific subject areas.

In 2002, the University recognised that the student population for distance education differs in many ways from that of contact students. It was therefore decided that the presentation of the distance programmes should predominantly be paper-based, with structured opportunities for face-to-face sessions and other student support services. It was decided that, once students enrolled, an analysis of the student profile would be done to direct the introduction of appropriate ICT to support and enhance learning. The LMS and necessary ICT infrastructure for contact students was available to deliver the distance education programmes online.

Since 2002, just over 39,000 students have enrolled in the distance education programme. Since then, almost 17,000 have graduated. At present, there are approximately 20,000 students in the programme. The distance education students at the University of Pretoria are all teachers with a minimum three-year qualification. Almost 80% of these students are women and more than 85% are older than 35. Just over 50% of the student population are graduate students. The majority, by far, lives and teaches in rural communities throughout South Africa. This profile differs fundamentally from the profile of the University’s contact students.

The technology profile of the distance education students in 2002 and 2003 showed that almost all students had access to or owned a mobile phone. Very few students indicated that they had an e-mail address. Fewer than 5% of the students indicated that they had access to a computer at home or at work. Only 1% indicated that they had access to the Internet.

Profile of students who enrolled for the first time: 2002 to 2003

The above statistics directed the University’s decision about whether or not to introduce the web based/online delivery mode for distance students. This profile also prompted the University to start exploring ways of using mobile phones in its distance programmes. A decision was taken to load all the programme material, with the exception of the textbooks, on the University’s LMS (ClickUP). It was, however, decided that this would not be an interactive site, but only a depository where distance students could access their learning material, as well as the latest tutorial letters and administrative information. Information on the availability of learning material on the website and how to access the site is continuously communicated to existing and new students. Almost no students have ever accessed the site over the years.

Profile of students who enrolled for the first time: 2004 to 2006

For the period 2004 to 2006, the mobile phone profile stayed the same. The number of students who have an e-mail address remained very low. This is also the case for Internet access.

For the period 2007 to 2009, a growth started to be observed in the percentage of students with both e-mail addresses and Internet access. The growth in Internet access rose annually from 2% in 2007 to 7% in 2009, while growth in e-mail use grew from 20% in 2007 to 35% in 2008. However, it declined again in 2009 to less than 20%.

Profile of students who enrolled for the first time: 2007 to 2009

There is, however, a noticeable growth in ownership or availability of computers for distance education students from 2002 to 2010. The figures below give a clear indication of this trend.

The technology profile of the distance education students at the University of Pretoria mirrors the reality of the broader technology profile in South Africa and also in Africa. There are those communities – especially in urban areas – that have comprehensive and adequate ICT connectivity, while the majority of the population living in rural areas have limited or no ICT connectivity.

It was mentioned earlier that, as early as 2003, the University accepted that the technology profile of distance education students differs significantly from that of students on campus and that the delivery of distance education programmes should reflect this reality. It was, therefore, decided that the University should continue to improve the quality of its paper-based learning material and expand and strengthen its student support services within the limitations of the technology profile of the students.

Over the years, the University carefully monitored the technology profile of its students and introduced – in a carefully planned manner – technologies that were accessible, dependable, and affordable to students. This included extensive use of SMSs and, because of the growth in ownership/access to computers, the inclusion of CDs in the learning material. However, because not all students have access to a computer, the information on the CDs is not compulsory content, but information that will enrich their studies, for example, an e-library with recommended readings.

Because a greater number of students have access to computers, more students are typing their assignments and the University has even experienced a rise in the number of students who submit their assignments via e-mail.

The University will continue to monitor the technology profile of its distance education students and introduce appropriate use of technologies to suit this profile. The University foresees a time when the distance education programmes will migrate from being predominantly paper-based to being predominantly delivered online. This is, however, not likely to happen in the near future.

In 2002, a decision was taken to develop a comprehensive and integrated SMS support service for distance students.

The table below provides an overview of the number of SMSs students receive in the course of a year.

In the first two years, students received a limited number of SMSs. These were mainly to remind them about due dates of assignments. From 2004, the student database was adjusted so that, when a parcel is sent to students, they receive an SMS with the tracking number of the parcel by default. The University also moved away from ad hoc SMSs to a structured SMS communication plan that was carefully designed to enhance and support learning.

It was clear from the start of the study that SMSs could not be used for in-depth academic conversations or to convey complex academic content. It is more about students’ perceptions and how they react when they receive an SMS from the University. In a study among 3,121 students conducted by the Unit for Distance Education (Hendrikz, Viljoen and Adams, 2006), students indicated that they like receiving SMSs from the University. They reported that the SMSs made them feel closer to the University, supported them in structuring their studies, and increased their level of motivation.

The University also embarked on a pilot project to use academic SMSs to support learning. The purpose of this was to try and mimic what a lecturer does in a classroom situation and to translate that into an SMS to support distance students academically.

Conclusion

The Internet and mobile phone penetration rate, as well as South Africa’s ICT development index (IDI), is reflected in the ICT profile of the University of Pretoria as a micro reflection of the reality of South Africa. The University is capable of delivering online distance education programmes, but that would have excluded thousands of students from continuing their studies.

Africa needs to guard against ignorance about the realities of the availability and use of ICT. It must not pretend that it is on par with the developed world and should avoid introducing strategies that are not in line with the realities and context of Africa. Millions of dollars have been wasted on poor ICT decisions in Africa because strategies are not aligned with the realities and context of this continent.

Africa can learn a very important lesson from the experience of the University of Pretoria. One could argue that, if the most advanced sub-Saharan country in Africa reflects this reality in its student population, this student population should be very similar to that of other African countries. We are challenged by the ICT realities in Africa to carefully plan and contextualise our e-learning strategies before introducing them.

In education, it should not be about technology, but rather about how we can expand access to study and how we can improve support to our students in a way that will at least give them a fair opportunity at success.

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