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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Let me begin by suggesting a different question than “Do Open Educational Resources actually increase the digital divide?” Instead, let me ask: How can OERs be used to reduce the digital divide? Or more importantly, how can OERs be used to increase the opportunities for everyone to maximize their potential? To me, that is the underlying criterion we should use to determine which innovations for learning are desirable, and which ones are not.

Let’s begin by stipulating that the deep divides that are increasing today throughout the world, between the “have’s and have not’s”, create dangerous instabilities that impact all of us. Let’s also stipulate that, as with free public education and free public libraries, OERs are, in and of themselves, a good thing. Widespread free access to basic information forms the foundation of a sustainable society. OERs may become a key driver for the next stage in the evolution of public knowledge and democracy.

However OERs require a delivery system and an environment that enables people to take advantage of them. To the extent these conditions are unevenly available, OERs can indeed increase the opportunity divide and destabilize societies.

To be effective, an educational system must involve a comprehensive, systemic approach. No one piece, by itself can do the job. First, we need learners who are fed, healthy, and safe. Then we need access to quality content that is aligned with the goals of the society’s educational system, including its examinations and certificates, plus teachers who are comfortable with and able to employ effective approaches to learning and the technical infrastructure required to sustain the physical and social learning system.

Let’s look at these three parts.

1. Content

Content can be divided into two categories: “Just in Case” –available in case you might want it, and “Just in Time” –available when you need it to learn something or do something. There are lots of “Just In Case” OERs in the Cloud. That is really nice to have.

Just in Time (JIT) materials, on the other hand, are scarce. They are essential for learning that is aligned with specific educational goals and outcomes. Materials that are engaging but lack such alignments are doomed to be ignored by everyone – except possibly the students. The development of JIT resources is inherently a local task that is difficult and expensive. In addition, such OERs conflict with the interests of for-profit publishers who traditionally have provided closed educational resources. Nevertheless, given the rapid global expansion of OERs in higher education, I believe there is a good chance that, in time, OERS will become the dominant mode for elementary, secondary and continuing education as well. We should strongly support the development of high quality JIT OERs for basic learning.

2. Teachers

There are simply not enough teachers, let alone effective ones, to meet the growing demand for them in the developing world. I recently heard of a region in Ghana where teachers may have over 100 students in their classes. Some elementary schools in Rwanda have two half-day sessions. Often the teachers have barely graduated from high school, frequently at the bottom of their class. Many require a second job because of their meager salaries. They tend to leave for a better job as soon as they can. However a quality educational experience requires teachers who are skilled at supporting learning, and who convey to their students that they are valued and are expected to do well.

To respond to this challenge, Open Learning Exchange Ghana is launching an innovative program for learning how to learn. The Ghana LITE program employs a low-cost multimedia digital library called a School BeLL (Basic e-Learning Library) containing videos and materials for coaching teachers and students together. The class will see videos of highly effective project-oriented learning and will be given the materials needed to try these new ways of learning. After practicing, they will video themselves trying it out and seeing the differences between their own efforts and the model. This is an example of how OERs using cost-effective ICT can improve teaching and learning.

3. Technology

Today the ICT systems needed for delivering OERs are not available to the vast majority of people throughout the world. Close to 90 percent of our world’s children have no access to OERs today. Most do not have electricity. So we have some work to do.

And it is not simply a matter of providing the hardware. Educational technology has a long history which is not that impressive. Many promises have been made but, so far, there is only scattered evidence of effectiveness. Teaching machines go back to Pavlov and the Skinner Box followed by a long list of mechanical and then computerized devices that were heralded as the “answer” to poor teaching and the different learning rates of students. I remember being entranced by the PLATO system developed in the 60s by the University of Illinois – a network of mainframes with dialup connections delivering elementary through graduate level course materials. Why did these approaches not survive? Because each of these innovations focused too narrowly on one piece of the puzzle rather than dealing with the whole learning system.

Yet many people persist in believing that technology pretty much by itself can be used to improve radically the quality of education. For many, ICT has become the “dream” solution. It has worked with telephones, why not education? Those “many” include people who manufacture ICT equipment, those who champion things like laptops for every child, and many frustrated public officials who eagerly grasp the lore of ICT as a way to leap frog traditional schooling and enable their students to develop “Twenty-First Century skills”. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent, believing in the ICT dream. This is despite the clear evidence that the hardware, by itself, comprises a small portion of the total cost of its effective use and, by itself, does not deliver on the dream.

The good news is that there are a few emerging examples where ICT, involving a more comprehensive systems approach are demonstrating significant improvements in basic learning. Innovation for Learning’s differentiated learning system, the TeacherMate, is one such example. In both the US and Africa the TeacherMate system has documented major increases in basic literacy over a short period of time using low-cost hand held devices. We need more such examples.

Nevertheless there is a real danger that the high cost and uneven availability of educational technologies will dangerously increase the opportunity gap among the most marginalized of our people.

A Challenge Prize

We don’t know how soon the prices of tablets and other devices that can be used for formal learning will come within reach of most children in developing nations. At today’s prices it is primarily those families and communities that do have reasonable incomes who have access to the hardware. Under these conditions, the opportunity divide will continue to increase.

But there may be another possibility.

We could create a Challenge Prize with specs for a $40 educational tablet that can be used, off the grid and the Internet, by poor children and their families to narrow their opportunity gap. That would address one of the requirements for enabling OERs to become gap-closers rather than gap-wideners. Who among us is interested in creating such a Challenge?

More than OER

In summary, I believe that OERs are a necessary and critical element for achieving our shared goal of ensuring every person on our small planet unfettered access to an ongoing high quality basic education. But, Tahrir Square not withstanding, there is no guarantee that a thoroughly digitized world infused with OER will increase meaningful opportunities for the 99% so long as the 1% are the sole deciders.

Thus, while dealing with some of the symptoms of unequal opportunity, we must also address their root causes by employing a total, democratic systems strategy – one that aligns the rules of our economies and our governments with our universal needs for food, health, a home and learning. Since everything is connected, only that will enable us to have the lives we want for ourselves and for the rest of us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Using Community Radio

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

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

Using Mobile Phones

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

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

No Standard Solution, Many Options

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

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

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

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

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

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Research and education networks (RENs) are dedicated networks for the research and education community. Unlike the “general” Internet, often referred to as commodity Internet, they carry only data related to education and research.

RENs were first established more than 20 years ago in developed countries in Europe and the Americas to support bandwidth-intensive applications in research, when it became evident that using the commodity Internet on demand for these applications, and for moving large quantities of data between institutions within a country, between countries, and between continents was not feasible. An example is the transport of data from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to various research centers worldwide.

RENs have also been places of innovation in networking technologies and have substantially fostered scientific collaboration at national, regional and international levels.

Why are research and education networks crucial for Africa?

RENs have a huge potential for improving the quality of education and research. The gain in productivity through access to high-speed networks for teaching, learning and research activities is obvious. For Africa, access to such networks through RENs is even more important for various reasons:

• African researchers are isolated. There are very few institutions that have the critical mass of researchers in any particular field to allow them to collaborate and carry out research activities with world standard outputs. Having an adequate NREN infrastructure can enable remote collaboration and the building of the needed critical masses;
• Resources are scarce in Africa, and some equipment and applications are too costly for single institutions: NREN infrastructure provides a means of sharing such resources. In fact, RENs can even provide a more efficient mean of sharing human resources by using video-conferencing tools for remote lecturing while at the same tile avoiding expensive and sometimes risky travel;
• Cutting-edge research is increasingly carried out by multiple, inter-disciplinary research teams located in various countries of the world: coordination, data exchange and even experiments are mostly done using the global REN infrastructure. Not being part of this global community means that African researchers cannot participate in such global research projects;
• In most African countries, higher education faces a big challenge called massification: due to lack of investment in infrastructure and equipment during the last two decades, universities and other higher education institutions cannot efficiently meet the high demand for access to higher education. Here again, REN infrastructure can support e-learning applications and blended learning models that can help reduce the pressure on the universities’ physical infrastructure and address the increasing legitimate demand for higher education.

The state of research and education networks in Africa

The first African RENs emerged in the early 2000s. Today, NRENs exist in all parts of Africa, with of course various levels of development. The existing NRENs can be categorized into the following groups:

1. Well established NRENs: these NRENs have an organizational structure, a legal status and a physical network, meaning that NREN member institutions are interconnected. Examples include TENET, KENET, SudREN, MARWAN and EUN;
2. Established NRENs: these NRENs have a legal status and an organizational structure; they are working on establishing physical connections between the member institutions. Examples include TERNET, RENU and GARNET;
3. NRENs in formation: these are initiatives in various countries where a process has started towards the establishment of an NREN. Such initiatives have been initiated in countries such as Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali and Togo.

Beside the establishment of NRENs, efforts have also been put into forming regional RENs. To-date, there are 3 RENs that can be considered as RRENs in Africa:

UbuntuNet Alliance: this is the first RREN that was established in Africa; from its initial founding members in November 2005, it has grown up to 13 member NRENs. It’s membership area is Eastern and Southern Africa;

WACREN: the West and Central African Research and Education Network was established in August 2010, but efforts to have it established go as far back as 2006; its membership potential (West and Central Africa) is 22 NRENs, although only 2 NRENs have been formally established in this area;

ASREN: the Arab States Research and Education Network was formally launched in December 2010. Although it embraces countries outside Africa, it is considered as one of the African RRENs. ASREN can be considered as an extension of the EUMedConnect Project network, an initiative funded by the European Union that connected Mediterranean countries to the pan-European network GEANT.

Lessons learned in the establishment of RENs in Africa

The REN Unit of the Association of African Universities has been involved in most of the initiatives that have been described above by providing support for the policy development processes at national or regional level, by providing support at the policy level, by facilitating the dialogue among stakeholders and through capacity building.

Many lessons have been learned in the various processes, among which the following are highlighted:

Establishing a research and education network (either national or regional) is about putting resources together in order to get more value for money and foster collaboration. Thus, trust matters a lot. Building trust among the stakeholders is key, not the needed resources. If resources are available and trust doesn’t exist among the stakeholders, the initiative won’t last long. One can say that 80% of the efforts have to be put into social engineering; it’s the key for success;

Not all potential members of an NREN or RREN will be ready to join at the same time. There are different reasons for that: lack of awareness, lack of adequate infrastructure (no campus network for example), lack of trust, etc. It’s important to start with those who are ready, but leave the door open for other to join later without discrimination, as and when they feel they are ready to do so. So, the motto should be: “start small, be open and scale up”;

Champions should be identified and supported: research and education networking is new, or even unknown to most of African higher education leaders. It is therefore important to support champions who understand the issues at stake, through provision of awareness raising material, capacity building, etc.;

End-users (researchers, teachers, students, and administration workers) should be involved in the early stage of the REN establishment process. Not only because they can constitute an important pressure community to move the REN agenda forward, but mainly because they must understand the advantage of RENs and be part of the driving force;

Inadequate telecommunication regulation can be a big barrier to the establishment of NRENs, and can even jeopardize the establishment of RRENs. It is therefore important to approach telecommunication regulatory authorities and establish strategic partnerships with them; experiences in West Africa have proven that this can help in removing barriers;

Government involvement: in Africa, RENs can hardly be sustained at the outset if not supported in any manner by government. Having the backing of government, especially the ministries in charge of higher education, research and telecommunications is crucial. Such support does need to translate, in the first instance, to financial support: the recognition of the importance of the establishment of RENs can in itself open many doors. There is enough evidence of this: the World Bank support to the governments of Kenya, Mozambique and Senegal (to name a few) for the support to the establishment/strengthening of the NRENs in these countries; the decision of the Agence de l’Informatique de l’Etat of Senegal and the National Information Technology Agency of Ghana, both managing government networks, to allocate capacity for the interconnection of universities in these two countries, are examples that could and will certainly will be emulated.

Best practices

Best practices are important to share among communities. In the field of research and education networking, the following practices (to name just a few) have proved to be strong factors for fostering the establishment of RENs:

• Setting up and managing a REN is a full-time job: RENs should appoint full-time CEO and CTO as well as full time support staff as early as possible;
• Member institutions should value the services of a REN and contribute from the beginning; not necessarily in cash, but alternatively in office and NOC space, staff (even part-time), etc.;
• Solidarity is a good, traditional REN practice; however, members should be ready and willing to pay for the service they receive;
• Openness is key for the successful establishment of RENs: all potential member institutions cannot be ready at the same time; in fact, some potential members do even not exist when a REN is established. A good and fundamental practice in the REN community is to be open to future memberships, without any discrimination.

Challenges and opportunities

The challenges for the establishment of RENs in Africa are well known, and won’t be developed here, but just to enumerate a few:

• Inadequate telecommunications regulatory environment in most countries;
• Misunderstanding by operators of what REN traffic is, in comparison to commodity Internet traffic;
• Near-monopoly position of operators in many countries; at continental level, 80% of international traffic is controlled by only 8 operators (need to diversify);
• Costly access ztechnology still used in many countries (VSAT), but this is changing;
• Lack of human resources with the requisite skills;
• Sustainable power supply.

However, there are many opportunities:

• The growth of sub-marine fibre cables capacity in the continent from 320 Gbs to more than 20,000 Gbs within two years;
• The development of country and country-to-country fibre backbones;
• The increasing commitment of governments;
• The “REN message” that is more and more receptive to governments and the private sector;
• The increasing support of the private sector;
• The existing strong African research and education networking community through the AfREN platform and meetings, convened by the Association of African Universities;
• The just started implementation of AfricaConnect, a joint European Union-African Union project.
• The support of friends of Africa worldwide.

What can the various stakeholders do?

Universities/Research centers: appoint full time campus network managers; allocate budget for running/expanding state of the art campus networks;

Governments and other political bodies: allocate capacity for universities/research centers interconnection on government backbones, where available; set establishment/strengthening of research and education networks as tool for the development of education and research and for social development as a priority when negotiating with development partners;

Development partners: recognize and support research and education research networks as essential tool for improving education and research and for promoting international collaboration and socio-economic development.

Conclusion

Research and Education Networks are being setting up throughout Africa. Despite the challenges champions are been facing these last years, there are clear signals that the main actors (higher education and research institutions, policy and decision makers, the private sector, especially telecom operators) have become more aware of the importance of RENs for African development. The global bandwidth to sub-Saharan African universities has gone up from less than 1Gbps three years to over 12Gbps now.

With the start of the implementation of AfricaConnect, a truly regional network will start rolling out. It is certain that African universities and research institutions will soon connect regionally and globally at a level that has never been experienced before, for the good of collaboration between Africa and the rest of the world and for the good of humanity and development.

Yet the fruits of this Information Age are still unevenly distributed. This gap threatens to continue to cut off some populations from new opportunities. Access to new forms of education, good jobs, medical and health information, communication, and the chance to participate in the affairs of the broader society may be denied to them. For some individuals, technology brings the promise of inclusion, education, opportunity, wealth, and better health; for others, greater isolation and continuing poverty. Many look to universities and K-12 schools to bridge this gap.

Meanwhile, today’s Internet—the commodity or commercial Internet—has recognized a number of limitations. At the same time numerous opportunities and new possibilities have emerged. Some challenges, like the inability to provide workable “quality of service” or end-to-end performance guarantees needed for demanding applications such as telepresence (the current state-of-the-art videoconferencing technology) were outside the scope of the Internet’s original design goals. Challenges, such as dealing with today’s gargantuan amounts of traffic, exploding number of users and sites, privacy and security needs of users and institutions, and requirements for Internet addresses, are the consequences of unanticipated success.

Many new but challenging opportunities, like the delivery on demand of real-time, movie-quality, high definition television (HDTV) or even films over the Internet, as well as many new and experimental approaches to health care, are the product of extraordinary progress in a wide array of technology industries that are now convergent with the Internet’s evolutionary path. Other new applications and capacities are outside the focus of the commercial Internet. These innovative activities are supported best by research test-beds, the international fabric of national research and education networks (NRENs), which focus on the development and deployment of the next generation of Internet technologies.

The regular or “commodity” Internet was not designed to handle the huge amount of data transfer, the explosive numbers of users, or the interactive, media-rich applications commonly used today. For applications where reliability is critical and delay is unacceptable – applications such as real-time streaming events, access to remote scientific instruments, high definition video-conferencing, online gaming, and interactive immersive worlds and simulations – the commodity Internet is inadequate. Research and education networks were purpose-built by the research and education community to offer the flexibility, performance, speed, and advanced services that allow these applications to evolve and thrive.

NRENs serve many functions. They create leading-edge network capability for the international research community; they enable revolutionary Internet applications; they ensure the rapid transfer of new network services and applications to the broader Internet community; they provide a platform for sharing scientific (and other) applications and resources; they aggregate demand for bandwidth and thereby create “buying clubs,” drive down the cost of bandwidth; and they create social value by including communities outside their primary research university constituencies, like primary and secondary schools, libraries, museums, scientific and cultural institutions. In order to flourish, NRENs must focus on the technical dimensions of data networks and they must also attend to the human dimension, the creation of shareable expertise for support and collaboration across many fields of research and education.

The African Context for NRENs

NRENs began in Africa about ten years ago, with Eastern and Southern Africa at the forefront. The availability of fiber and the high cost of bandwidth were, initially, limiting factors. Now, with several trans-oceanic submarine cable systems completed or near completion, and with a concurrent expansion of terrestrial fiber across Africa, access to fiber is within reach on most of the continent. Prices have dropped significantly, although bandwidth is still pricey when compared with rates in many other parts of the world. NRENs can help to address pricing inequities across countries by (a) aggregating demand among universities and, more broadly, within the school sector (more on this below); (b) architecting networks with points of presence across broad and complex geographies; and (c) and by working across national boundaries to create regional optical networks and, ultimately, a pan-African optical network.

Furthermore, African NRENs can leapfrog their counterpart NRENs elsewhere in the world and build networks without some of the inherent historical limitations of comparable networks, emphasizing collaboration and mass access to education and research applications across educational sectors. In addition, African NRENs can design their networks to combine the best of wireless and mobile technologies with optical networks. Inspiring leaders, ambitious goals, and imaginative and carefully crafted plans – these things (and more) will guarantee that African NRENs will flourish.

The continent has a firm foundation in place. There are NREN success stories such as KENET in Kenya, RENU in Uganda, TENET in South Africa, Xnet in Namibia, to name a few. And there are regional efforts, the most prominent of which is the UbuntuNet Alliance, which began as a regional bandwidth aggregator and now has created a very strong human network and an operational point-of-presence which can, over time, be the initial hub of a regional network. The UbuntuNet Alliance is, in fact, a model for subsequent developments in West Africa (WACREN) and North Africa and the Arab States (ASREN) – both of which are nascent regional networks, now human networks and, eventually optical networks.

The cornerstone of the R&E networking is the Local Area Network (LAN), which is the network serving a university, school, museum, or research institution, and the network closest to the end-user. In some instances, these LANs might connect to a municipal network or another Wide Area Network (WAN) and then to an NREN. In other instances, the LAN may connect directly to the NREN. Similarly, NRENs may connect to a multi-national regional network or directly to other international NRENs or, perhaps, to a pan-African R&E Network. Much will depend upon local conditions, regulatory structures, and geography. (In its ideal state, networking is a function of the best technological practices and geography, not politics.) Figure #1 below illustrates the various strata of networking.

NRENs: A Necessary Foundation for African e-Science

Advanced information, communication, computation and collaboration technologies – known as cyberinfrastructure – have become essential elements for education and for research in the 21st century. Of particular interest to many researchers and educators is the use of these tools for “e-science,” as computational discovery has emerged to complement the traditional practices of theory and experimentation. Examples abound across all scientific disciplines, as well as in the arts and humanities.

Explosive growth in the resolution of sensors and scientific instruments has led to unprecedented volumes of environmental and experimental data, which can be combined, compared, and correlated across time, place, and types of data. Computational science aids in modeling, simulation, and scenario assessment using data from diverse sources. Complex multidisciplinary problems – from health care and public policy to national security, scientific discovery, and economic competitiveness –complement the historical focus on single disciplines. And important multidisciplinary discoveries are now made by teams of experts spread around the world.

Advanced cyberinfrastructure, enabled by very high-speed research and education networks, is essential for participating in all these efforts. Those without access and the ability to participate will not have full participation in 21st century innovation.

Therefore, a major challenge confronting African nations today is how to ensure that all colleges and universities, including those that have not traditionally benefited from expensive research infrastructure, can participate seamlessly in national and multinational e-science efforts that are cyberinfrastructure-enabled. The challenge begins with the need for ubiquitous deployment of advanced research and education networks.

NREN Practices to Consider

Peering
As the Internet evolved from a US government funded network in the 1980s to a world-wide, market driven network in the 1990s and beyond, one organizing principle continues to endure – the settlement-free exchange of Internet traffic among independent networks. Often referred to as “peering” by the community of engineers and operators of networks, this seemingly contradictory notion of the free exchange of traffic among competitors as an economic benefit has become an important foundation in the growth of the network. Large centers of settlement-free peering have also resulted in greater network resiliency in light of geographic or systemic outages, and the promotion of fair and equitable access to the constantly evolving Internet marketplace.

There are a few key structural principles one may wish to consider when implementing settlement-free peering facilities in an emerging NREN or regional network:

• Geographic diversity. Internet routing decisions often follow the “first exit rule”. Thus, a network needing to pass data to another “peer” network will usually pass that traffic to its peer at the first opportunity. This often results in networks only agreeing to peer with one another if the peering facilities are distributed widely in a given geographic area.
• Resiliency. One should build a high degree of redundancy in all of the necessary components comprising a peering facility; electricity (i.e., multiple feeds with generator backup), diverse fiber paths in to and out of the facility, and “carrier class” environmentals such as HVAC, security, and fire-suppression.
• Open access. A peering facility should have equitable, open and easily understood criteria for all participants who wish to connect to the peering fabric (i.e., switches, routers, fiber-distribution panels). The more participation from networks in a peering facility, the higher the degree of usefulness to all concerned.
• Sustainability. The success of a peering facility itself becomes a potential service liability if the facility is underfunded or inadequately maintained. Early peering facilities in the US in the 1980s were sponsored and subsidized by the federal government, with commercially managed peering facilities quickly following once economies of scale were reached. Depending upon the financial realities of a nascent deployment of continental peering facilities, one may want to consider government subsidy and oversight of early peering facilities until an economy of scale is achieved to allow a more independent yet still reliable support model.

IPv6
Conventional computers have been joined on the Internet by a myriad of new devices, including iPads and smart phones, smart TV set-top boxes and videogames with integrated Web browsers, and embedded network components in equipment ranging from office copy machines to kitchen appliances to automobiles.

Internet Protocol version 6 is needed because the Web is running out of addresses. The current technology, known as Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), supports just 4 billion addresses, not nearly enough to cope with the new devices that connect to the Internet and need addresses and certainly not enough addresses to cope with the explosion of new devices across the African continent.

With the future in mind, IPv6 has been outfitted with an enormous address space that should provide globally unique addresses for every conceivable variety of network devices for the foreseeable future (i.e., decades).

But IPv6 is a complex structure and addressing is only the most visible component. IPv6 also attempts to deal with critical business requirements for more scalable network architectures, improved security and data integrity, auto configuration, mobile computing, data multicasting, and more efficient network route aggregation at the global backbone level.

Middleware: Access and Identity Management
The term “middleware” is used to cover a broad array of tools, information, and what programmers call “hooks” that help applications use advanced network resources and services. Middleware can be thought of as glue layers that provide reliable, standardized support services like authenticating users and authorizing them (or not) to use specific applications or have access to certain on-line resources. Indeed one common application of middleware is to provide the common services and information necessary to allow applications to restrict or enable access (“log on”) to certain resources.

Middleware such as authentication (are people or programs who they say they are?), authorization (what is he/she/it allowed to do?), and the directory services needed to keep track of users, resources, and any rules that may apply to them, comprise essential elements of any shared network computing infrastructure. Other middleware services, such as cooperative scheduling of networked resources, enabling secure multicast or interactive video or object brokering (matching requests with providers for relatively high level services, such as databases, format, or protocol conversion) are preconditions for many applications and services sought by the research and education communities. These include a number of innovative applications.

Broad adoption across education of certain standardized middleware fabric is a key requirement for addressing the needs of the education community for capabilities like user-friendly, but broadly shared and highly cost-effective access to libraries and other educational resource repositories, remote scientific tools, music repositories, and other intellectual property; for use of widely and safely shared interactive services; and for workable and properly protected wide-scale student records access and transmission. As such, middleware must be, as a practical matter, interoperable between applications, among campuses and other educational institutions, and the wider Internet. This effort will not be successful if individual groups or institutions build their own internal versions of middleware and then try to patch the pieces together. African NRENs are at a distinct advantage here as the compromises required to develop a common framework, standards, and protocols for attribute naming, storage, and exchange are easier to obtain when there are no existing use cases.

However, developing and managing the trust relationships necessary for the success of identity management can be tricky. The more diverse the groups, the more complex this becomes, particularly when the focus is inclusion of many educational sectors beyond universities. One should expect significant challenges as divergent interests and priorities will be even greater in this environment. The bottom line is that the technical issues are the least difficult to address. New policies specific to access identity management, and the operational issues caused by them, tend to be bigger hurdles. As with introduction of any new processes, effective change management will play a significant role in successful outcomes.

Some engagement of organizations like UbuntuNet and key leaders among existing African NRENs in international access and identity management federations like REFEDS would, ultimately, be extremely beneficial to successful implementation of middleware across diverse educational sectors among these NRENs.

Wireless Access
Given the prevalence of mobile and wireless technologies for mass access to education in African countries, careful attention to the integration of the various forms of wireless technologies – Microwave, Wi-Fi, WiMax, and cellular (3G, 3.5G and 4G) – is critical. These are all excellent ways to extend the reach of wired R&E networks. The best practices are dependent upon the environment, potential commercial partners, available spectrum, and other local conditions.

Wi-Fi is still the leader in terms of network speed. It is best suited for building or campus environments. The equipment is inexpensive and readily available. WiMax and cellular networks are usually deployed in connection with a wireless service provider, although there are several examples of communities and institutions deploying their own. The real differences between 3G/4G are data-rates and the amount of spectrum that is in use. For instance, 3G networks can exceed the speed of a T-1 line (a fiber optic line with a 1.5Mb/s speed). Second generation data networks (2G cellular) still have a place as they are widely deployed and their slower speeds often mean less cost.

Extending the Reach of African NRENs: Supporting Schools and SchoolNets

NRENs can provide significant social benefit by extending their reach to schools and other educational institutions (e.g., libraries, museums, scientific and cultural organizations). Such efforts can contribute to the development of prospective university students who can begin to develop fluency with information technologies while in primary and secondary schools. In addition, there are many compelling models of university students being trained to be both technology and content experts who intern at school sites and in doing so, enrich their own experiences as well as the students and teachers whom they support. It is a wonderful way to train students, particularly those in non-technical fields who may aspire to occupations where information technology is either at the center of their work or essential to it.

In the U.S., the K20 Initiative now engages schools in 43 of the 50 states, and over 70,000 schools and millions of students. It was not conceived at the outset of the creation of Internet2 but has become one of the hallmarks of the U.S.’s advanced R&E network initiatives. If African NRENs are essentially greenfield efforts, extending their reach to schools would have many benefits. By increasing the numbers of institutions participating, such an effort could have a positive impact financially by aggregating bandwidth costs across significantly more institutions.

Broadly stated, a schools initiative can have many goals, which may include the following: (1) to bring innovators in K-12, colleges, universities, libraries, and museums into appropriate regional, national, and international advanced networking efforts, creating new “workgroups” where warranted; (2) to develop mechanisms for enabling quick, pervasive technology diffusion and transfer; (3) to create mechanisms for timely communication across educational sectors and regions; (4) to leverage and propagate a culture of parallel independent efforts along with education, private sector, and government partnerships; (5) to get interested and capable schoolnets connected and properly engaged in existing workgroups and projects; and (6) where there is interest and realistic opportunity, to include appropriate experiments in learning and education and help enable experiments involving innovative deployments of advanced technologies in education at school sites.

Among the many activities of such an initiative, relevant local, provincial, and national special interest groups might be formed in some of the areas described below to pursue collaborative ventures:

• Digital learning resources, content repositories and open educational resources
• Learning management systems and education management systems
• Videoconferencing: H.323 and other interactive video and multimedia technologies, digital video, low- to high-end video multicast, and the convergence of on demand video and broadcast
• Access to scientific apparatus and other broad application areas which could be shared across educational communities
• Middleware, enhanced portal, and “relationship-ware” deployment and partnerships
• Advanced server technologies, caching, and co-location strategies
• IPv6 deployment
• “Buying clubs” to purchase access devices (computers, mobile devices, etc.)
• Cloud resources

Despite the many challenges and complexities ahead, African NRENs have innumerable opportunities to expand educational opportunities across the widest range of education sectors, to create a platform for African faculty and students to engage in research collaborations across the continent and the globe, and to support a rising generation of researchers, educators, professionals, and leaders who will contribute to a peaceful and prosperous Africa.

This discussion is part of the eTranform Africa initiative.

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

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

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

EMERGING TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICE EXAMPLES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REFLECTIONS

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

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

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

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

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

This discussion is part of the eTranform Africa initiative.

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National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) are gaining clout in Africa. At the last count, UbuntuNet reports 13 NREN members and 6 NRENs in development in East and Southern Africa, while WACREN reports 2 NREN members and 9 NRENs in development. UbuntuNet and WACREN are regional RENs for their respective regions.

This modest success has come with repeated failures, often after multiple attempts at forming an NREN within the same country. Many times, the failure has been the result of competition amongst member institutions or simply the perception that an NREN would favour a particular institution. The indifference of most national governments has also not helped.

Despite the challenges, Africa now has some NRENs to talk about outside of South Africa’s TENET. Emerging NRENs like Kenya’s KENET or Tanzania’s TERNET are already peering with their global counterparts via the UbuntuNet hub in London. The successful efforts emanate from recognition by a few local research and educational institutions that they stand to benefit more from working together, despite their competition, rather than alone as has been the norm in different African countries.

Luckily, early adopters tend to leave the door open for others to join when they come around, in true NREN-spirit. Emerging trends in Africa indicate that when Universities drive NREN formation without government intervention, the tendency is to work together to address a common problem—usually the high cost of bandwidth – by pooling resources like in the KENET example. Where governments intervene to start an NREN, they tend to provide basic infrastructure to interconnect members like in Sudan’s SUIN or even subsidise the cost of bandwidth like in Rwanda’s RwEdNet.

Opportunities and challenges

As more African countries embrace ICT as a tool that can be leveraged to improve their education systems, a number of opportunities are available for NRENS. Perhaps the biggest role NRENs can play is the development of the necessary technical human expertise to help sustain this drive. Many African countries are working towards getting access to international fibre optic cables in an effort to improve Internet connectivity.

With faster pipes to the Internet, also come digital espionage, hackers, malware and many of the other vices of the Internet realm. NRENs can become a valuable national asset that is independent and knowledgeable, helping nurture the requisite knowledge to not only appropriate the digital realm, but also secure networks in the national interest.

Examples might include coordinating a national Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), managing critical infrastructure like an Internet eXchange Point (IXP) or even the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) registry. Unfortunately, few if any African NRENs have so far gone down this route.

An NREN can help address various ICT divides that exist within a country. An access-divide might exist between institutions with Internet connectivity and those without because they cannot afford or are simply out of reach. Through the NREN, well-off institutions or even government can help subsidise poor institutions in the national interest.

A geographic-divide might exist between institutions near the capital city that pay much less for connectivity compared to their rural counterparts who pay much higher costs. Usually the NREN guarantees the same bandwidth cost irrespective of distance like the case of KENET in Kenya or TENET in South Africa.

Many more opportunities can emerge from institutions collectively working together through an NREN. These may include:

• Lobbying government departments and various regulators about issues that affect their functions;
• Leveraging the resultant network to offer distance courses that can be delivered over e-learning platforms;
• Working together to make portability of students and their records much easier
• Cost-sharing when it comes to the procurement of expensive information systems that support common functions

There are challenges that NRENs have to navigate before they can play a complementary role in the development of many African countries. Key amongst these is the lack of recognition by national governments of the critical role that NRENs could play in national development.

Thus, many have neither created an enabling environment with supportive policies nor provided the necessary funding for NRENs to thrive. Many national regulators do not quite understand the operations of NRENs and have no distinct license that can permit their full range of activities. Hence an NREN has to engage and educate a whole range of players across different levels of government in order to be able to operate.

There is also still a perception amongst some within the private sector, particularly the local telcos or Internet service providers (ISPs), that NRENs are their competition. This makes it harder to argue for special status or funding that is critical to get NRENs off the ground. Often, the commercial sector and indeed regulators argue that this special treatment might distort the local market.

These private sector players are usually more effective lobbyists and can severely hamper a nascent NREN’s activities or even kill it off, in circumstances where NREN members have not convalesced around a common problem. Given that many emerging NRENs do not own infrastructure and have to rely on the private sector, they have to walk a delicate path in the beginning to survive and thrive.

Sustainability of African NRENs is another significant challenge. Even in the rare case that capital costs are born by another party (government or development partner donation), recurrent costs tend to be a problem for most since network spares and maintenance are both costly. Good technical ICT expertise is difficult to nurture, but once developed, the NREN finds itself in competition with the private sector.

NRENs have to devise different motivational schemes to hold onto exceptional talent since they cannot match private sector salaries. Sometimes being on the cutting-edge of network technology can attract talent, but one wonders if African NRENs could collaborate more to attract and retain talent. Information and management systems are still costly, but while becoming increasingly critical for member operations, this is an area worthy of collaboration, but member institutions still seem unready to share despite overlapping functions.

Success factors and barriers to wider dissemination and take up

There are a number of critical success factors that can help NRENs navigate many of the challenges identified above: Key amongst these include:

• The need to identify and cultivate local champions, particularly within various arms of government and amongst member institutions. These can help push for the NREN cause and be advocates in places like the regulators, the Ministry of ICT (or telecommunications), the Ministry of Education, etc.
• Separating responsibilities and relationships between the provision of NREN services on one hand and ownership of the NREN on the other. At the service level, NREN management must nurture relationships with direct contacts at member institutions like the ICT director. At the ownership level, high-level executives from member institutions must develop a sense of commitment and shared ownership of the NREN so that there is shared vision despite institutional differences;
• For financial sustainability, an NREN should strive to recover operational costs from member institutions from the onset. This can help the NREN quickly focus on competitive service offerings on one hand and dissuade members from the “free-service” syndrome on the other hand. Third-party assistance should best be sought for capital expenditure and capacity development initiatives

There are still few barriers out there that most African NRENs still need to figure out how to mitigate

• Many potential NREN members tend to compete for the same students and/or research grants. This can make it difficult to see beyond short-term competition, to enable members explore avenues for collaboration that create a vibrant NREN useful to all in the long-term
• Many NRENs start life as bandwidth consortia, given the high cost of bandwidth in Africa. It is quite easy for commercial ISPs to offer such services at better prices in a bid to thwart an NREN and fend off perceived competition. How can nascent NRENs engage them can help address this threat?
• Member institutions need to put their money where their words are. If ICT investments are deemed critical to educate the new breed of workforce, then budget priorities within the institution should reflect this

Reflections

While NRENs in the developed world focus on next-generation challenges for research and higher education, in Africa NRENs must also worry about this and much more:

• How can NRENs nurture the human networks that provide a structure to enable Africans to produce and share knowledge more effectively? To increase research and academic collaboration? Such networks would form the core users of the underlying physical networks that NRENs seek to create.
• How can NRENs foster local content networks so that NREN network traffic is increasingly local or regional and not always destined to the west?
• How can NRENs help develop and support ICT capacity within member institutions in competition with the private sector that can pay much more for ICT talent than NRENs will ever afford?

This must all happen within the context of increasing student enrolment and dwindling support and investments in education from African governments. Higher education in Africa is becoming commercialised—as government owned institutions receive less funding and increasingly compete with commercial institutions or those funded from other sources.

Recommendations to policy makers, regulators and other stakeholders

I would like to make the following recommendations to various stakeholders:

• Policy makers in Africa should wake up to the potential role that NRENs can play within their national development plans. If developed countries, with much better digital infrastructure still continue to invest in their NRENs, how about us who are just barely getting started? They need to formulate policies and regulations that empower the national NREN to exist and thrive.
• Government should bestow formal recognition to the NRENs and facilitate them to acquire an appropriate legal status. In some countries, the legal recognition that NRENs can acquire might be in conflict with the international expectations and thus hinder the local NREN’s full participation in the global arena.
• Regulators need to grant NRENs appropriate licenses that permit them it to peer or transit network traffic with neighbouring NRENs. This is a prerequisite to full participation within the global NREN fraternity.
• Leaders of research and academic institutions need to figure out ways to better collaborate even if they compete for the same research grants and students. They face similar challenges when it comes to ICT integration within their core functions. How can they effectively work together to create more awareness about the potential role of ICT in education? Address the fear-of-change and mind-set issues that arise when people feel that their once-lifetime jobs are now threatened? Tackle the varying levels of ICT literacy both within their own and across institutions?
• Regional RENs need to engage regulators through regional fora and enlighten them about the potential of NRENs within a national context. In addition, they need to encourage African NRENs to peer locally on the continent. For while there might not be much to share for the moment, “one generation plants the seeds, another generation gets the shade” says an African proverb. The recently approved AfricaConnect project is a good start in this direction, but it is just that, a start!

This discussion is part of the eTranform Africa initiative.

the implementation of ‘one laptop per child’ strategy at the Eastern Townships School Board is a primary factor to explain its leap from 66th position in 2003 to 23rd in 2010 (out of 70 school boards), and why the student dropout rate has plunged from 39.4% in 2004–2005 to 22.7% in 2008–2009.

This progress, which we may at least partly attribute to the ‘one laptop per child’ strategy, would certainly never have been possible without the complete commitment and outstanding skills of the teachers, the school administrations and other education stakeholders at the Eastern Townships School Board.

Yet at the same time, even this very successful ICT deployment was not so successful in its teacher training. The following is an excerpt from that report that should give insight on how to improve teacher training around ICT deployments in education:

Excerpt from Benefits and challenges of using laptops in primary and secondary school: An investigation at the Eastern Townships School Board. Summary of main results, Karsenti, T., & Collin, S. (2011). Montreal, QC: CRIFPE.

4.3 Technological Skills

Figure 5. Impact of ICT training on the professional development of teachers who participated in the study (%).

From the teachers’ standpoint, the use of laptops is related more to the issue of training in the pedagogical integration of ICT. From the results obtained, the teachers who participated in the study did not seem to have received the ICT training that they needed. In fact, 69.4% of the teachers felt that their training had little or no impact on their teaching practices, versus 30.6% who felt that the impact on their pedagogical use of ICT ranged from slight to major (see Figure 5).

These results, derived from the closed questionnaire responses, are corroborated by the results on the interviews and the open questionnaire responses.

T. “I did not have a useful professional development course.”

More precisely, a number of participants reported that some of the suggested activities were not doable in their classrooms, and that their efforts were usually in vain. They also complained that their training was usually too intense, too short or redundant.

T. “I haven’t found any to be particularly helpful in that not enough time is given to learning how to use the technology efficiently and effectively enough to take it back to the classroom and use it right away.”

Consequently, the professional development of teachers in the pedagogical integration of ICT seemed to be largely trial and error

T. “I have learned mostly on my own, ‘playing around’ on my computer and with the various programs.”

Among the training needs mentioned by the teachers was the suggestion to better align the training with the realities of teaching and learning. To do so, they recommended that the training:

• Include time so that teachers could exchange experiences with their colleagues about ICT activities they had used;
• Be given in small groups of teachers who share something in common (cycle, subject, ICT experience(or)expertise);
• Involve the students, or hold the training in the classroom with the students. T. “I want to bring students with me, as they are excellent teaching assistants in the classroom.”

Thus, training the teachers and students at the same time, and in the classroom, would appear particularly useful.

Excerpt from Benefits and challenges of using laptops in primary and secondary school: An investigation at the Eastern Townships School Board. Summary of main results, Karsenti, T., & Collin, S. (2011). Montreal, QC: CRIFPE.

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

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

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

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

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

A global view: Wealth, health, and happiness

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

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

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

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

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

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

Increasing teacher productivity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teaching: drill and debate

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

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

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

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

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

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

Targeting teacher productivity: The role of ICT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Criticism: Can ICT4E actually work in the developing world?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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