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How Open Educational Resources Can Increase Opportunites for Everyone

wayan — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:48:10 +0000

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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We Need More Teacher-Centered Solutions in ICT for Literacy

wayan — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:10:20 +0000

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

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

Teaching a child to read is no easy task.

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

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

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

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

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

My mythical ICT tool for literacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let us not forget differences in language

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

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

Hardware Costs are not a Barrier for ICT Use in Literacy and Reading

wayan — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:10:02 +0000

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

The Hardware Issue

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

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

How much everything else costs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to raise funds for it all

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

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

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

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

How to show the impact of the investments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Worldreader is leading a reading revolution in the developing world

wayan — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 13:30:00 +0000

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

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

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

Worldreader’s impact

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Local publishers embrace e-readers

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

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

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

Overcoming issues – real and perceived

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

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

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

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

Expanding past Ghana

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

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

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

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The Bottom of the Pyramid needs Reading ICT Solutions too

wayan — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:31:29 +0000

While you stand there smugly surveying your sea of shiny computers in your state-of-the-art school computer centre, please spare a thought for the billion or so people who never made it to school, or who dropped out after a year or two or three, and never even learned to read and write.

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

History

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

Success!

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

Why it works

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After Literacy

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

English and other languages

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

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The eWaste of Development: What are the consequences of new technologies on the environment, and how can we act responsibly, starting now?

wayan — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:22:06 +0000

Over the past few years of activity on the ETD forum, we’ve read many examples of how ICT in education projects have improved and innovated practice, making access to education more modern and accessable. At the same time much criticism has been focused on projects that, despite best intentions, focus first on hardware provision without sufficient consideration of how it will be used to improve learning, effectively wasting the investment.

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

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

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

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

What can be done?

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

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

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

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

Examples of Success

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

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

An eWaste “code of conduct” for development partners?

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

At the proposal stage:

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

During project implementation:

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

At project exit stage:

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

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

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

Further research needed

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

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

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

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

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Towards Glocal Learning Communities

wayan — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:00:26 +0000

The phrase “Think Globally, Act Locally” is most often used in relation to environmental issues. We should consider the entire planet and take action in our own community. When applied to education, the phrase could mean attempt to act locally to increase local understanding on local issue in relation to, and by using access to global knowledge.

The expansion of digital information and communication technologies (ICT) providing seamless and always available access to large sum of human knowledge is challenging, not only our educational systems, but the whole epistemology on what most of them are based on. The euro-centric educational thinking relies on the importance to master reading and writing, basic math (calculation) as well as memorization of facts and procedures. These skills were crucial in the industrial society, global trade and politics of the time.

A New Approach is Needed

When approaching these skills from the point of view of learning theories — that includes classical conditioning and mechanical route memorizing but also processes of meaning making, creativity and achieving skills to create new knowledge — we may see that they do not reach far. Someone with the basic skills of reading, writing, basic math and ability to follow rules, may today complete our educational system. The requirement to understand or to create something new is very weakly in-build to the contemporary systems.

The conception of learning as memorization of facts and procedures is living strong in our educational thinking and system. The two main supporters of this simplified conception of learning are the industry producing mass products for consumer society and the military organizations training millions of individuals around the world. In both cases the aim is to train people to behave as reliable pieces of the system.

Knowledge is situated in the time and place where it is generated, modified, and exploited. In this way knowledge is local. We learn in time and place where we are collaborating with other people. Just like knowledge is local, so should be learning. If we are interested in to have citizens with higher mental abilities, meaning making skills, critical thinking skills and creativity we should let people to focus primary to and build on their local environment.

Unfortunately in education we too often pay most of our attention to such issues as curriculum, learning content, standards, management of learning and assessment. In education the focus should be on building communities, offering people spaces and facilitating their advances in the community’s area of interests.

Glocal Learning Communities

In Glocal Learning Communities digital ICT can be a powerful tool. The communities can build local wikis — a knowledge repositories on topics that are relevant and important for the local people. They may also have services in “the cloud” that will help people to find other people who are interested in to study same topics (the P2PU and Wikiversity style). The seamless, always on access to the Internet will provide content to discuss about.

What can do to advantage the founding of glocal learning communities? We should promote use of native languages and production of all kind of digital educational content from encyclopedias to documentary films in these languages. Provide affordable on-demand access to the services and the content with mobile Internet and mobile phones. A local library with free internet access would also be useful.

We could educated teachers to facilitate glocal learning communities. We could promote culture of open dialogue that tolerate critics, values transparency and respects individuals. Glocal learning communities will not only contribute to people knowledge and skills but will enhance respect for human rights.

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Creating Indigenous Language Content with Universal Design In Early Literacy

wayan — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 13:21:50 +0000

iLearn4Free Inc is a 501C3 non-profit, whose mission is to bridge the digital language divide and support cultural sustainability by creating digital educational applications in multiple languages for early literacy.

Current situation:

Despite the fact that 94% of the world’s children are not native English speakers, there is a shocking absence of digital educational tools for early literacy in languages other than English.
There is now overwhelming evidence that children benefit from receiving early education in their own language, known as mother tongue learning, as learning to read in a language they do not speak can be very discouraging.

Mother tongue learning also has many social benefits. In multilingual societies, all communities feel equally respected if their language is used in schools, and learning in their mother tongue fosters a child’s capacity to express cultural identity.

iLearn4Free believes all children should have access to digital learning games in their mother tongue, as digital learning is an engaging and efficient way for them to learn and remain motivated.

A Multicultural Approach:

To meet our objective, our main challenge was to create an application that is adaptable to—and accessible by—a multitude of languages and cultures, while keeping costs at a minimum to enable a sustainable deployment.

The development of the application template is the result of an international collaboration between writers, designers and educators from many different nationalities; most of the work was performed through online collaboration.

Leaders and project managers often fail to see cultural differences for what they truly are: engines for creativity and innovation, we believe that a truly diverse and multi-cultural team is an indispensible tool when trying to achieve a universal design in the field of education.

To enable a worldwide deployment, we have chosen to integrate cultural diversity within our application. Instead of being culturally contextualized, we have written six stories with six different international characters that integrate cultural specificities, while staying close to children’s usual concerns: nature, animals, friendship, family, and more. Providing the context for the educational games, these stories are the result of a collaborative creative writing project, which involved about 10 individuals from 5 different nationalities.

Education in Linguistic Context:

The educational content itself, on the other hand, is developed exclusively with reading specialists, linguists, teachers and writers natives to the specific language.

The building process is very structured to ensure that the educational content can be integrated within our template. This has enabled us to be very efficient, and it has provided the team with a sense of comfort and security, which is important in the context of total virtual teamwork.

For the languages, which already have a lot of existing material using a structured learning approach close to the phonemic/syllabic approach, the task of creating the educational content is fairly easy. We are currently well under way for English, French and Spanish. German and Portuguese should follow shortly.
For languages which are not systematically taught in schools—or for which the teaching method is not close to phonemic/syllabic approach—then creating content will require more expertise, and this will be the case of some of the developing world languages.

We are currently starting to work on Papiamento and Malagasy, two languages that are suitable for the interactive learning games, but which have a very different history in terms of their usage in education. We are hoping to set up a process enabling us to be efficient even in these fairly extreme cases.

Financial sustainability

The sustainability of the project is based on the assumption that the apps will be sold in countries where the population can afford it, and will be free in the developing world. Nevertheless, even if the population has the financial means and has access to the technology, if a small number of people speak the language, the development might not be sustainable. This is why we look at a global sustainable model. Common resources enable the cost reduction approach: graphics, app structure and educational games are used for all the languages.

The application has been initially developed for the iPod to ease the pilot phase, during which the educational content is to be validated, and then it will be deployed for other platforms including a web-based approach.

Conclusion

I believe that a global social enterprise approach is an interesting way to tackle the lack of educational content in languages other than English. While trying to create the equivalent of PBS Kids for non-English speakers is probably a far-reaching goal, I hope our application will encourage other educational content providers to take into account the entire population, and give the opportunity to learn through games to every child in their own language.

The Makerere E-Learning Experience Providing Professional Development to Academics

wayan — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 13:30:30 +0000

Technology has been a key driver to educational innovation in a number of Higher Educational Institutions. Makerere University in Uganda has been at the forefront of providing and implementing Online Learning through various initiatives it has undertaken since 1998.

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

Emerging trends and best practices

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

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

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

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

Opportunities and Challenges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Provision of Content

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflections

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

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

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

Recommendations

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

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

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

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

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Educational Technology Debate » Search Results » People

Top World Bank EduTech Blog Posts of 2011

How Open Educational Resources Can Increase Opportunites for Everyone

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We Need More Teacher-Centered Solutions in ICT for Literacy

Hardware Costs are not a Barrier for ICT Use in Literacy and Reading

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Worldreader is leading a reading revolution in the developing world

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The Bottom of the Pyramid needs Reading ICT Solutions too

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The eWaste of Development: What are the consequences of new technologies on the environment, and how can we act responsibly, starting now?

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Towards Glocal Learning Communities

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Creating Indigenous Language Content with Universal Design In Early Literacy

The Makerere E-Learning Experience Providing Professional Development to Academics

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