Mobile devices are at the centre of a revolution delivering platforms to achieve knowledge transfer and behaviour change in Africa. With the accelerating growth of mobile devices in Africa the past few years, unique solutions have been developed to address barriers to large-scale adoption of learning platforms. In particular, the specific challenges and unique problems faced in Africa have had a marked impact on the innovation in developing novel channels for providing information in a cost-effective manner.

A key barrier to successful adoption of learning platforms is mobile penetration. It is necessary to achieve at least a minimum percentage penetration amongst a community of users to exploit network effects and viral strategies which facilitate the building of vibrant communities. Africa’s recent rapid rise of mobile phones has seen mobile penetration grow in some markets to over 100% (South Africa) and to close to 500 million connections for the continent as a whole.

When evaluating markets for feasibility the following key measures of the penetration should be considered: absolute mobile phone penetration, mobile internet penetration, desktop internet penetration and Social Networking penetration.

Absolute phone penetration provides us with with a baseline measure of the lowest common denominator technologies that can be used to deliver basic information, such as Voice, SMS, USSD and Please Call MEs. Each of these channels has characteristics that make them usable for very large scale information delivery platforms, particularly the cost of usage. As is to be expected, mobile internet penetration far outstrips desktop internet penetration in African markets and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Social network penetration on mobile and desktop can be a particularly good proxy for pinpointing markets that have vibrant communities with high levels of interconnectedness. Facebook and MXit are currently the largest social networks in Africa, both of which are showing explosive growth on the continent. The launch of Facebook zero, Facebook has developed a particularly compelling offering that allows users to access a low-bandwidth version of the social network at no cost from their mobile phone. The rapid growth of Facebook in markets where it was able to negotiate a zero cost deal with network operators, proves how important cost of access is in developing markets.

Developing effective mobile learning platforms requires a deep understanding of the multiple modalities of interaction presented by mobile phones. Novel channels are viable alternatives to voice for delivering information, building communities and driving behaviour change. As part of our work in the Praekelt Foundation we explore the channels that can lower the cost of access whilst still providing enough information to enable learning experiences.

On of the least expensive, yet effective, means of large scale messaging for the base of the pyramid is Please Call Me Messages – an approach to free messaging developed in South Africa and utilised in Project Masiluleke. Most mobile users in developing countries are on pre-paid mobile packages. Pre-paid users often ran out of airtime, which can prevent them from making a call. Please Call MEs allow them to send a free message requesting a call back. Currently over 40million Please Call MEs are sent per day in South Africa alone. In Project Masiluleke, we have tagged critical information about health services and HIV/AIDS to over 1 billion messages over the last 2 years.

USSD – or unstructured supplementary data – provides a more interactive means to deliver information and learning services to low-end text-only phones. USSD was originally developed for use by mobile operators to communicate directly with subcribers and provide access to operator functionality, such as airtime updates, service status and requests. Most pre-paid subscribers access on USSD multiple times a day to obtain their account balances and to top-up airtime. USSD allows for the creation of decision trees which a user traverses to find relevant information. Typically, interaction over USSD is either free or extremely low in cost, making it possible for 3rd party developers to build rich applications that are highly interactive, yet can function on the most basic of phone. A further benefit is that the most of the interface is already well known to the many mobile network subscribers across developing markets.

Group messaging platforms like MXit and Blackberry Messenger, allow users to chat via text for very low cost or a flat rate per month (in the case of Blackberry messenger). It has enabled the development of number of mLearning innovations like Yoza, developed by Steve Vosloo with the support of the Shuttleworth Foundation in 2010. The project was launched for “book-poor, mobile phone-rich” teenagers in South Africa to see if they would read stories on their cell phones. Says Steve Vosloo of the project:

“Yoza stories aim to captivate teens and inspire them to enjoy well-written stories by good authors. The m-novels are written in conventional language, with txtspeak only used when a character is writing or reading SMSes or instant message chats. Also included is prescribed school reading that is in the public domain, for example, Macbeth. There is no charge for the actual stories, but users do pay their mobile network operator for mobile data traffic. Images have been kept to a minimum to keep the mobile data charges low.”

One of the benefits is promoting behaviour change through social networks is the power of having members of a peer group providing help and advice on important topics, such as health or education. Recognising this opportunity, the Praekelt Foundation launched YoungAfricaLive, a groundbreaking mobile platform where young people learn and talk about life issues, including love, sex, relationships and HIV/AIDS.

The portal features daily blogs by young South Africans sharing their journeys through the difficult terrain of love, sex and relationships in the time of HIV. Along with relationship advice, facts on HIV, STDs, Safe Sex and more, these stories have created a safe sex-savvy community that logs on daily to give and receive support and advice. Since it launch in December 2009, the network has signed up over 400,000 users. One of the reasons for its rapid growth and success has been the stickiness of the platform, over a 1,000,000 comments have been posted and an extremely lively community has spontaneously coalesced around the topics that are important to them.

Social platforms allow granular tracking of connections between users and identifying the most influential people in a network. Since all stories can be commented on, and users can “like” each others comments, it is possible to build a very detailed map of the connections between users and thereby identifying which users have the greatest impact on opinion in the network. We can then target influencers in the network with information that we wish to deliver and track the traversal of the message through the network.

Mobile penetration and cost of data and messaging remain the largest obstacles to large scale usage of mobile platforms to improve learning in Africa. Through the use of novel low-cost channels such as SMS, USSD, and Mobile Social Networks it is possible to build compelling platforms that are available to every user of a mobile phone in Africa, and that can have meaningful impact on our users lives.

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EMIS is a “system for the collection, integration, processing, maintenance and dissemination of data and information to support decision making, policy-analysis and formulation, planning, monitoring and management at all levels of an education system.”

This implies that EMIS does not only refer to the technology and database software needed for recruiting, hiring, placing, and supporting teachers and providing the necessary logistical support in terms of buildings, furniture, maintenance, instructional materials, training of staff, student demographics and placement but also the processes and culture that bind institutions together for using information for effective delivery of education at all levels.

Looking for more than statistics

EMIS is undergoing some transformation – at least at the technical levels. The original notion of EMIS that was based on the creation of educational statistics for planning at the central level is being replaced with the decentralization of educational data at school, district, regional levels.

The more schools, colleges and universities are empowered in handling and using their own data and the more these institutions adopt open standards and harmonized coding system, the better for data integration, control and usage at national levels.

However, while the technology and tools are improving, the use of EMIS for planning and decision making has not changed much due to lack of ownership, information seeking and use culture and other factors such as over dependence on external consultants. Other challenges range from lack of capacity at school levels, inadequate communications infrastructure and lack of resources to scale up successful EMIS programmes.

We intend to explore some of these issues including trends and best practices with five experts in the field – reviewing the opportunities, challenges and success factors of EMIS to developing countries with specific focus on Africa. They will analyze emerging trends and best practices based on field experience. The discussion that follows the essays is intended to provide recommendations to policy makers and other stakeholders in order to improve the status of EMIS in Africa.

Some of the key questions we will be addressing include:

1. What are the major trends in the EMIS environment in terms of adopting tools and technologies such as mobile and wireless platforms and distributed databases?
2. What were the key challenges in implementing an integrated and decentralized Education Management Information System?
3. What were the most critical success factors of the implementation of EMIS so far?
4. What should policy makers and donors do over the next ten years to improve the collection, organization and use of educational data and information at all levels?

Your active participation and commentary on these questions and the issues they raise is very much appreciated.

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

Let there be more teachers

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

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

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

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

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

A lot of numbers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can we really rely on training more teachers alone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technology to the rescue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An example of new technical gear: The OLPC XO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Example of a global problem and solution: Textbooks fantasies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teaching the teachers: A program fantasy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discussion and Conclusions

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

Creative Commons (2010). Open Textbook,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

After providing an overview of OLPC in South America as well as compiling in-depth articles about the current status of the projects in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru it’s now time to wrap things up.

Hence the 5th and last article this month will look beyond the three countries I described in the past few weeks to see what other OLPC initiatives are doing when it comes to the six criteria for successful implementations of ICT for Education projects in developing countries which have guided this article series. Additionally I will also highlight some lessons for other ICT4E projects which can be extracted from the South American OLPC experiences.

What seems worth pointing out is that the three countries I visited cover a significant range of the broad variety of different approaches, contexts, and projects which can be found around the world under the unifying “One Laptop Per Child” name.

With the project in Paraguay being run by an NGO and the ones in Uruguay and Peru by governments the two most widespread organizational models found in OLPC implementations were covered. In terms of scale the spectrum also goes from Paraguay’s current 4,000 (soon to be 9,000) XO laptops all the way up to the 300,000 respectively 400,000 machines which have so far been distributed in Peru and Uruguay.

When it comes to the context such as infrastructure and current status quo of the education system there are also significant differences between for example Peru – where only a single digit percentage of the OLPC schools have Internet access and literacy in rural areas is estimated to be around 80% – and Uruguay – where 98% of the primary schools now have Internet connectivity and literacy is also around 98%~99%.

Similarly Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal, ParaguayEduca, and Peru’s Una laptop por niño have also taken a variety of different approaches when it comes to aspects such as maintenance, community involvement, educational content and materials, teacher training, and evaluations. To me personally seeing this range of ways and solutions to address challenges and issues was one of the most interesting aspects of my journey.

A brief look at other OLPC efforts

However of course people and organizations working on OLPC efforts in other countries and contexts are coming up with yet different approaches in every area of their project. Therefore in this section I’d like to briefly highlight some examples of countries which are taking different routes than the ones described in this article series.

Afghanistan

In Afghanistan the OLPC project is the result of a cooperation between OLPC, the IT company PAIWASTOON, the Afghani Ministry of Education, Ministry of Communication and IT and USAID’s Afghanistan Small and Medium Enterprise Development. So far the consortium has distributed approximately 5,000 XOs and is actively seeking to significantly increase the project’s size in the forseeable future.

Two key components of the Afghani OLPC efforts are content and evaluations.

On the content side PAIWASTOON is working hard on improving and adapting eXeLearning an open-source authoring tool originally developed in New Zealand. The goal of eXeLearning is to provide a simple tool which allows teachers and educators to quickly and easily develop interactive lessons based on wide-spread Web technologies such as HTML and JavaScript. Apart from making modifications to adapt the resulting content to the XO hardware and Sugar software PAIWASTOON is also adding new templates which can be used by teachers and educators. It is also important to point out that PAIWASTOON wants to go beyond traditional subject materials and school-focused content and also enable the creation of materials related to health, personal finances, or related matters which are deemed important within the Afghani context.

When it comes to evaluation the Afghani OLPC project isn’t just interested in evaluating the educational and social impacts but also comparing these impacts against what the result provided by other, potentially non-technical, interventions in the education system. To that end people have also closely looked at the current status quo of education in Afghanistan and subsequently try to address what are perceived to be particular deficits with specific approaches based around the XO laptops. The results of these efforts are then planned to be compared to (a) schools without any interventions and (b) schools where other projects unrelated to OLPC are taking place.

While it’s early days for OLPC in Afghanistan it seems clear that the people and organizations involved in it are taking some interesting approaches to content creation and evaluation. The experiences and knowledge collected in the process could certainly prove to be very useful for other OLPC initiatives as well ICT4E in general.

Nepal

If one had to describe the OLPC project in Nepal in a single word then “content” is probably the best choice. It’s safe to say that similarly to the efforts in Afghanistan the Nepali project is very much driven by developing high quality interactive learning content.

For context let’s take a step back for a quick overview of the Nepali OLPC efforts. First of all it’s important to point out that they’re run by an NGO called OLE Nepal (Open Learning Exchange Nepal) which was started in 2007 and currently has approximately 40 employees. The organization’s goal is to

…improve the quality and access in Nepal’s public education system. It seeks to fulfill this mission by developing and disseminating high quality open-source Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-based educational teaching-learning materials that are accessible and available free of cost to all.

To date OLE Nepal has distributed roughly 2200 XO laptops in 26 schools across 6 different provinces of Nepal.

The two content components which sit at the heart of OLE Nepal’s efforts are called E-Paath and E-Pustakalaya.

E-Paath is a collection of interactive learning materials which currently consists of more than 200 units in the subjects of English, Mathematics, and Nepali. The individual learning units are developed to align with Nepal’s national curriculum and learning objectives and the development process is driven and led by education specialists and former teachers in collaboration with programmers and designers. Additionally all of these learning units come with support materials and guides for teachers which contain information on how to integrate them in the classroom, ideas for homework built around them, and laying out what the specific learning goals for each interactive lesson are.

The second component, E-Pustakalaya, is an education focused digital library which currently contains more than 1,200 materials in categories such as children’s books, classic and contemporary literature, newspapers, maps, and photos. Not all of the schools have yet been connected to the Internet thereby making it impossible for pupils, teachers, and other to access the online version of E-Pustakalaya. As an intermediary step until Internet connectivity is possible each school has been equipped with a server which contains a copy of the digital library which is regularly updated via USB flash drives.

Given the relatively small size of its team the amount of high quality content and materials that OLE Nepal has created and curated in the past three years is nothing short of impressive. By combining the content itself with support documentation for teachers it also facilitates the in-classroom use of the XO laptops as a learning tool.

It’s clear that content and materials are only one component of a successful ICT4E initiative and their relative importance will also depend on a projects educational approach. However I do believe that many efforts within the OLPC or larger ICT4E context can learn a lot from OLE Nepal’s work in this area.

Nicaragua / Nigeria

In most countries it’s either the government and its respective institutions, such as Uruguay’s CITS, or an independent NGO, such as OLE Nepal or ParaguayEduca, which is implementing an OLPC project. What is interesting about Nicaragua and Nigeria it’s non-profit entities started by large companies which have initiated the respective OLPC projects in these two countries.

In Nicaragua the LAFISE BANCENTRO Financial Group and its owners decided to create the Zamora Terán foundation to kickstart the OLPC project. On top of the initial seed-funding of US$1,000,000 the foundation is reporting having collected an additional US$4,000,000 from other companies, organizations, and governments since its launch in early 2009.

These external donations are partially the result of a “give a school” model which Daniel Drake, who among many other OLPC projects has also volunteered with Zamora Terán, describes like this:

The foundation has a significant stock of laptops in the country and other organisations can make a donation to cause the project to land in a specific school; the donor covers the cost of the equipment and infrastructure, and the foundation does the rest (logistics, connectivity, laptop handout, teacher training, followup and repairs, etc.).

Somewhat similarly Nigeria’s OLPC project is run by Schlumberger Excellence in Educational Development (SEED). Schlumberger is the world’s largest oilfield services provider and describes SEED as:

…a volunteer-based, nonprofit education program focused on underserved communities where Schlumberger people live and work.

At the moment both projects are of similar size – roughly 7,500 XOs in Nicaragua and 6,000 XOs in Nigeria – and it will be interesting to see how they develop over the coming months and years. Particularly when it comes to scaling it will be worthwhile observing if and how these organizations operate compared to the OLPC projects run by more “traditional” NGOs.

Closing thoughts

Last but not least here are some closing thoughts and possible things to consider for ICT4E projects in general.

ICT4E in developing countries is here to stay

One of the things that I’m convinced of is that as a topic ICT4E in developing countries isn’t going to go away anytime soon. While I previously saw a slight chance for the development of somewhat of a hype – followed by a significant decrease – in the interest of implementing ICT4E solutions in developing countries I now believe that it is here to stay. Five years from now we’re going to see more people, groups, organizations, and governments wanting to work in this space.

One of the strongest indicators of that development is that the broader discussion within academia as well as the media, NGOs, and communities of practice about ICT4E in developing countries has shifted from “should it be done” to “how should it be done” in the more recent past. In parallel the discussion also seems to have moved beyond the previously hotly debated question of “which ICT should be used” to the more interesting (and more difficult) point of “how do can whatever ICT is available be used”.

Additionally, and I strongly believe this is a factor which mustn’t be underestimated, the implemention of large-scale ICT4E projects such as Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal also creates somewhat of a pull-factor for these kinds of initiatives. Particularly within South America we are starting to see local and regional authorities approaching entities such as Plan Ceibal to see how similar efforts can be implemented in their respectives areas.

It’s within this context that I recently wrote an article explaining why I think that “Montevideo will be the OLPC capital of the world“. In the past where it was often organizations such as One Laptop per Child itself or other NGOs which were the driving forces behind ICT4E projects. However now it increasingly seems to be local, regional or national entities interested in ICT4E who are approaching organizations and countries such as Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal to learn about their experiences.

The hard part of ICT4E is the “for education“

Especially for someone with a technology background, like yours truly, it’s often easy to overly focus on the “ICT” part of ICT4E. However I strongly believe that the significantly harder as well as interesting part of the equation is the “for education” aspect. Hence the broader question is how to effectively and efficiently integrate technology, and not just laptops, in the teaching and learning processes taking place inside as well as outside school.

At the moment it seems like many ICT4E projects are primarily technology-driven rather than focusing on the education part. As a result technical challenges often receive more attention and resources than education ones. Yet given that the primary purpose of ICT in ICT4E is to serve as a tool to improve learning rather than as a goal in itself, I think that in many cases more resources and people need to be dedicated to the education side of things.

You can only learn so much from a pilot

Another lesson from the South American OLPC projects, particularly the large ones in Uruguay and Peru, is that there’s only so much one can learn from a 200 XO pilot project. In general within ICT4E small pilots often only seem to be regarded as a way to learn about the biggest mistakes early on before significantly increasing the size of an initiative. However there’s a broad variety of issues which will only appear once a project reaches a certain size and hence scaling a project such as Plan Ceibal from 200 to 400,000 XOs within 2 1/2 years leaves relatively little time to address deficits in the planning or implementation. This then results in problems being amplified by the sheer size of a project, and regardless of how tiny it may seem at first most things become difficult to address once you multiply them by 400,000.

Hence what I would suggest is more of a staged and iterative approach. So instead of going from several hundred straight to several hundred thousand devices and participants one could imagine a project starting with 100 machines, then being increased to 1,000 or 5,000, up to 50,000 or 100,000 in the next stage before finally reaching an even bigger scale. Given enough time each of these iterations will yield interesting results and insights which will in turn help improve the next iteration. In combination with extensive monitoring and evaluation this approach could help detect and subsequently address issues which only start appearing once a project reaches a certain size.

However I do realize that such an approach, a saner approach as one could call it, will often run into political realities such as elections and people going out of office. In Uruguay for example then-president Tabaré Vázquez who had initiated Plan Ceibal wanted the program to be his legacy hence the distribution of the laptops had to be completed before he left office.

Context matters

More often than not information on paper and in databases is a simplified representation of the real thing. As a result two schools which might both be considered to be “rural schools” could differ significantly and in fact require quite different resources and approaches to successfully implement an ICT4E project such as OLPC.

An example here are two schools which I visited during my time in Peru. They looked sufficiently similar on paper however in key areas such as size, electrical infrastructure, or availability of a teacher with extensive knowledge about computers the differences were quite significant. The first school had a sufficient number of power outlets the electricity itself wasn’t very reliable whereas in the second school very few power outlets were available in the classrooms yet the electricity was generally reliable. Of course these issues require different solutions catered to the specific requirements so a one size fits all approach for “rural schools” might actually miss addressing the specific problems.

Details, details, details

Similarly to what I wrote above I strongly believe that details really matter. It’s not just about the broader context of a school but also about things such as the number of power outlets which are available in a classroom. While this might seem hardly worthwhile thinking about at first it actually has a lot of impact on aspects such as the seating arrangements in a classroom, how often pupils can use the laptops, and whether they can consistently use the laptops.

In my mind this also aligns well with the staged approach implementation mentioned above. It is impossible to draw up the perfect plan on day one and ICT4E projects are very likely to run into issues that the people behind it, who often don’t have a clear understanding of realities on the ground, never even considered. So one way to address this is to have extensive on the ground and first-hand experience about the specific environment and its characteristics an ICT4E project will be implemented in. An alternative here is to have close feedback loops with a project’s stakeholders, in the case of OLPC for example pupils, teachers, parents, principals, and administrators.

Don’t reinvent the flat tire

It was Alan Kay who used the expression “reinventing the flat tire” within the context of computers and education in an e-mail discussion within the OLPC and Sugar communities and I think it really hits the nail on the head.

In my mind one way to avoid reinventing the flat tire is to learn from mistakes which others previously made. Therefore I think it’s important to point out that on top of a lot of information about best practices there’s also a wealth of knowledge about worst practices out there which ICT4E projects should take into account. Michael Trucano’s Worst practice in ICT use in education can be considered a must-read in this area. Particularly given that ICT4E is supposedly about learning, it never ceases to amaze me how little many individuals, organizations, and projects learn from what is already out there.

Though it may sometimes seem like it’s a brand-new thing ICT4E and the whole concept of using computers in education and learning has actually been around for quite awhile. There’s a wealth of information out there about things that don’t work at all or don’t work well within a certain context so there’s really no excuse for often making the same mistakes over and over again.

In the end I hope that you found this 5-part article series as well as the resulting discussions interesting and relevant to your own involvement in OLPC and ICT4E. I’m looking forward to your comments, critique, questions, and feedback below.

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In many ways the OLPC project in Paraguay is radically different to Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal which I described in-depth last week and Peru’s Una laptop por niño which I’ll dive into next week.

As already indicated in the introduction of this article series in terms of scale it’s significantly smaller than the efforts in Uruguay and Peru. Whereas these countries have so far distributed 400,000 and 300,000 XOs respectively – and are already in the process of ordering more laptops – Paraguay currently has approximately 4,000 children with XOs. With an additional 5,000 pupils receiving XOs over the coming months the total reach of the project will increase to 9,000 which means that every child enrolled in primary school in the city of Caacupé, the project’s main site, will have received a laptop.

Another major distinction between Paraguay and the other two countries is that an NGO rather than the government is the main driver of the OLPC project. These two different approaches can be found both in the particular context of OLPC as well as ICT for Education projects in general. There’s no doubt that these different starting points often have significant impacts on projects’ approaches, goals, an developments. Some of these differences will be discussed when we explore the six criteria this series is loosely based around later in this article.

In any case, Paraguay’s OLPC project was initiated by ParaguayEduca, an NGO that was started in 2007 out of a group of people’s desire to bring One Laptop per Child to their country. The organization’s main objective is:

“To promote a system of teaching that utilizes ICT as a tool oriented towards collaborative learning which is centered on pupils and integrates the different educational stakeholders found both inside as well as outside the classroom.”

The first step to achieve these goals was the start of a pilot project with 200 XOs in 2008. As mentioned above the program has since been expanded to 4,000 pupils and is scheduled to achieve full saturation in the city it works in over the coming months.

On a personal note it’s worth mentioning that already well before I went to Paraguay I heard a lot about the efforts there and was very intrigued by what seemed to be a very well run project. The reason I heard so much about the project was that during the three months I volunteered with OLE Nepal in Kathmandu in 2009 I shared an apartment with long-term OLPC contributor and volunteer Daniel Drake. Daniel was and is one of the most experienced people when it comes to OLPC implementations given that he has supported in-country teams in many different places around the world: Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Nepal, Nigeria, Peru, Argentina, and of course also Paraguay.

Combined with the information I got from other people who worked in Paraguay and who I met at conferences in Austria and on the U.S. Virgin Islands my expectations were certainly high when I arrived in Paraguay’s capital Asunción in late July 2010.

Just like with my earlier article about Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal I’ll again be using the previously introduced six criteria for successful implementations of ICT for Education projects in developing countries as a guidance for this report.

1. Infrastructure

Similarly to Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal, ParaguayEduca spent a lot of time and resources in the past two years on getting the underlying technical and logistical infrastructure for its project right.

All of the schools which have received XO laptops to date are connected to the country’s electricity grid so there was no need to use alternative power solutions. However the classrooms themselves generally only provide a handful of power outlets so multiple power strips have to be used to enable all the XOs to be charged simultaneously.

WiMAX antenna at a school

When it comes to connectivity ParaguayEduca is cooperating with Personal, one of the largest telecommunications providers in Paraguay, to connect all of the schools where it distributes XOs to the Internet. Since the schools are in or close to the city of Caacupé a wireless WiMAX backbone was installed which connects them to a central 14MBit Internet connection that is shared between all the schools.

On top of that Personal is supporting ParaguayEduca’s efforts by providing this connectivity for free for the first two years after which it’s likely that the schools themselves will have to pay for the connection. Additionally ParaguayEduca has installed a server at every school which so far is mainly used as a storage medium for automated backups of the XOs and as a content repository but could take on additional tasks in the future.

To tie these efforts together and enable monitoring of the network components’ operation, keep track of XOs undergoing repairs and its stock of spare parts as well as other operations related to logistics ParaguayEduca developed its own backend software solution called Inventario which it has released as open-source software. Apart from simplifying as well as facilitating many processes the data the system collects also provides a basis for analysis of factors such as common hardware and software issues or the reliability of different WiFi equipment.

Last but not least ParaguayEduca has also built up significant capabilities when it comes to improving the Sugar software that’s running on OLPC’s XO laptops. Unlike some other OLPC projects the Paraguayan software team has gone beyond just fixing bugs and adapting the software to local requirements. Based on work done by other Sugar developers and partially in collaboration with Uruguayan developers from Plan Ceibal, ParaguayEduca’s team has enhanced Sugar by adding several new features related to accessibility, data backup, 3G connectivity, and system monitoring, releasing them as Sugar 0.88 Dextrose.

There’s no doubt that ParaguayEduca’s team has done an excellent job of establishing the required infrastructure for implementing a successful and potentially large-scale ICT4E project. At the same time it’s great to see them sharing their software and knowledge and collaborating with Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal which enables the wider OLPC community to benefit from their efforts.

2. Maintenance

Repair team’s DIY charger for multiple XOs

To address the challenges related to maintenance ParaguayEduca has built up CATS (Centro de Asistencia Técnica y Soporte – Center for Technical Assistance and Support), a small repair team based in Caacupé. As of July 2010 the team consisted of one full-time employee, a half-time employee and several interns.

Currently the repair team visits each of the 10 schools which have received laptops so far on a weekly basis. Laptops with minor issues are repaired on the spot while the remaining ones are taken back to the repair team’s office. Before any repairs are undertaken a laptop’s issues are entered into the Inventario system mentioned earlier which enables both ParaguayEduca’s team in Asunción as well as the CATS team itself to accurately track which kind of issues are regularly encountered in the field.

Not surprisingly the issues encountered in Paraguay are relatively similar to the ones being observed in Uruguay. Software and problems with the activation system are the most common issues that the repair team has to deal with. In terms of the hardware broken chargers, displays, and keyboards are at the top of Inventario’s “failure by cause” chart.

When it comes to the hardware failures efforts are currently underway at OLPC to redesign the chargers that XOs are shipped with in order to address the issues encountered with them. Similarly the next batch of 5,000 XOs should have significantly less keyboard issues due to the fact that upon receiving reports from Uruguay of them regularly being broken OLPC increased the thickness of the keyboard’s membrane to make it more robust

One important difference is that unlike in Uruguay where a warranty covers some types of breakages in Paraguay spare parts needed for repairs currently have to be paid for by the pupils’ parents who often can’t afford the cost. In combination with difficulties PraguayEduca encountered when purchasing spare parts this has led to a number of cases where broken XOs simply haven’t been repaired. Obviously this is less of an issue with chargers which can be borrowed from other people but leads to an unusable laptop when the display is concerned. As a result an estimated 20% of the pupils are currently without a working XO which results in laptop-based classroom activities being more difficult for teachers.

Poster on “How I take care of my XO”

Overall maintenance is proving to be an area which creates significant challenges for the OLPC deployment in Paraguay. The current approach with having the repair team based in the same city where the pilot project is taking place definitely has a lot of advantages. The regular visits by the repair team combined with the intensive in-classroom support provided by ParaguayEduca (more on that under “teacher training”) significantly lowers the barrier to entry to the maintenance and repair process. This results in basically all breakages being reported and subsequently addressed within a week which is a stark contrast to Uruguay where up to two thirds of XO breakages seem to be going unreported.

Now the question is just how scalable the current process will turn out to be once the next 5,000 XOs are delivered. Given that some of the schools involved in that upcoming stage are further away from Caacupé it will be interesting to see whether the repair team’s weekly-visit schedule can be kept going or if the frequency of these visits will decrease. Similarly ParaguayEduca needs to find ways to ensure the availability of a steady stock of spare parts to enable the repair team to repair hardware breakages. Last but not least the organization needs to come up with ways to allow children of families who can’t afford expensive spare parts to still be able to use fully functioning XO laptops in class. Whether this can be best achieved via subsidized repairs, external sponsoring for spare parts, making short-term loans of XOs available or a different measure remains to be seen.

Similarly to my thoughts about maintenance in Uruguay I believe that the issues described above can and will be adequately addressed by ParaguayEduca over the coming months. However it again shows that even with seemingly robust devices such as the XO laptop maintenance must be a key consideration for any ICT4E project.

3. Contents and materials

Teacher blogging about her pupils’ work

Given its strong focus on constructionist learning ParaguayEduca education team is working hard on developing ways in which teachers can effectively leverage the various Activities and capabilities of the XO and the Sugar software platform. Therefore the educational content they provide teachers with is guidance on how to use the laptops within the school context rather than developing new digital learning objects such as games or other interactive media.

A lot of the education efforts revolve around the use of Scratch, a powerful and versatile programming environment specifically developed for use in education. Examples of the use of Scratch in Caacupé range from simple animations over interactive story-books to extensive games with multiple levels and the integration of environmental sensors. Extensive support for this approach has been given to ParguayEduca by Claudia Urrea who works for OLPC’s education team.

Additionally teachers are also encouraged to use the photo capabilities of the XO as well as other standard Activities such as the Web browser or text processor. This has resulted in a broad range of interesting projects developed by individual teachers. One that I particularly liked was based around homework where pupils were asked to take a photo of a tree at home or on their way to school. The resulting photos were then compared and the trees individual parts subsequently labeled by the pupils.

In the future I also expect to see more use of Sugar Turtle Blocks Activity (which is similar to Logo) given that Walter Bender of Sugar Labs and OLPC led a workshops about its use in Paraguay in June which sparked the education team’s interest. Similarly the education team also expressed an interest in learning more about eToys, another powerful media authoring and programming tool.

Pointing teachers to OLPC Peru materials

Similar to Plan Ceibal and other OLPC projects ParaguayEduca has also established an online library where it shares content and materials ranging from handbooks on how to use certain Activities over works of literature to a broad selection of audio, images, and videos. Given that all the project schools have Internet access this portal is a valuable resource to both teachers and pupils.

Additionally teachers in Caacupé are also encouraged to look at and use materials created by the OLPC projects in Peru and Uruguay therefore enabling them to benefit and be inspired from work done by fellow teachers in these countries.

Overall ParaguayEduca’s educational approach is closely aligned with constructionism that OLPC and Sugar Labs are also very strongly associated with. The education team in Asunción has followed this approach all the way through and built up some great capabilities and knowledge about the use of tools like Scratch in education. Combined with what is apparently a relatively constructionist national curriculum this approach and its strong teacher support component (see the “teacher training” section for further information) has a good chance of having a solid impact on how pupils in Caacupé are being taught with the XOs.

4. Community inclusion

Given its history of being started by a small group of engaged individuals it shouldn’t come as a surprise that ParaguayEduca has been working closely with a variety of different groups and communities in Caacupé to ensure broad support for its project. In many ways, particularly when it comes to local administrators, this process has been facilitated by the fact that Caacupé has been the site of a variety of innovative educational programs in the past which results in people being more open and accustomed to new things being tried out in schools.

Thanks to its formadores (see the “teacher training” section for more information), the repair team, and frequent visits by staff from Asunción ParaguayEduca has managed to establish a strong and continued presence in the local community and the education system. Recruiting people from Caacupé who are part of the community rather than relying on outsiders has been a key component in creating a high level of trust between the various stakeholders and the organization.

A meeting with principals and formadores

One example of the resulting collaboration between ParaguayEduca and other local organizations was a joint event that took place during Día Del Niño (Children’s Day). At the event ParaguayEduca wanted to demonstrate its project as well as highlight some of things that pupils and teachers had created on their XOs. So in preparation for Día Del Niño it organized meetings with other organizations to coordinate several activities such as a booth on Caacupé’s main square. It’s thanks to this kind of approach that ParaguayEduca generally seems to be considered a part of the local community rather than an outsider trying to force its own agenda on the schools.

Apart from this type of work in Caacupé, ParaguayEduca has also been working with the computer science faculty at Paraguay’s largest university, Universidad Nacional de Asunción, to teach students how to get involved in contributing to its project. Its efforts in that area range from offering internships – which are also open to students from other countries – to courses for teaching the basics of programming for the XO.

To sum up it’s safe to say that ParaguayEduca has done a great job in reaching out to various stakeholders within the context of its pilot project in Caacupé and that this will prove to be a solid foundation for continued collaboration in the future.

5. Teacher training

Teachers during a training session

One area where ParaguayEduca’s efforts are a class of their own is teacher training which in other projects unfortunately often doesn’t seem to receive the attention it deserves.

An interesting aspect here is that ParaguayEduca’s education team doesn’t train the teachers directly anymore like it did early on. Rather at the end of 2009 the organization decided to hire people who had previously worked as teachers or trainers themselves and in turn trained them to become “formadores” (teacher trainers). These formadores – currently ParaguayEduca employs 15 of them – are subsequently in charge of the training sessions for teachers before XOs are distributed in their respective schools.

While I was in Paraguay a large number of teachers received training sessions in anticipation for the arrival of the next 5,000 XO laptops and so I had a chance to observe some sessions myself. The teacher training always takes place during vacations when Paraguayan teachers generally seem to be expected to attend courses for their continued education. It’s also the only suitable timeframe to accommodate the 150 hours of training sessions that the teachers participate in.

Just to give you a reference: the most extensive teacher training at any OLPC project that I had been aware of before is provided by Open Learning Exchange Nepal and consists of roughly 80 hours of training over 10 days. In other countries teacher training generally seems to hover around the 40 hours mark.

Of course the effectiveness of teacher training doesn’t just depend on its quantity but also its quality. While it’s impossible to thoroughly assess quality from a few short observations the impression I got was definitely a very favorable one. The training sessions I attended generally focused on how to use the laptop for learning related activities, rather than learning how to use a particular program. Too often the opposite is the case which tends to result in teachers not knowing how to integrate new devices into the classroom routine.

Scratch demo on formadora’s laptop

To complement this training the formadores also spend a significant amount of time supporting the teachers in-class once the XOs have been distributed in the schools. The focus there is to help with the integration of the XOs in the teaching process. Additionally it’s no secret that having a helping hand in the classroom makes a lot of difference and facilitates the teaching process.

One simple example is when a pupil runs into an issue – be it a program not starting or the mouse not behaving as expected – a single teacher can normally either interrupt the class to attend to that one pupil or continue the class which results in that pupil falling behind and not being able to participate. In such a scenario a formador being present in the classroom can simply help individual pupils having issues while the teacher continues the normal class.

So overall it’s easy to see that I was thoroughly impressed by the teacher training and support that ParaguayEduca has established. These teacher-centric efforts have really been at the heart of the organization’s work rather than an after-thought as it’s often the case.

Going forward it will be interesting to see how ParaguayEduca can scale the approach to teacher training to potentially include the whole country. In that area the project can definitely benefit from some of the Uruguayan experiences in this context.

6. Evaluation

This is an area which turned out to be significantly harder to investigate than I had anticipated. Before arriving in Asunción I had heard about an evaluation by the Inter-American Development Bank which had also contributed some funding to the first phase of the project in Caacupé. I now found out that this evaluation is still ongoing hence no reports or results are available just yet.

Similarly the Paraguayan alda foundation was involved in early monitoring and evaluation work in 2008 yet again I wasn’t able to obtain a copy of any resulting reports.

A third and still ongoing effort in this area is a PhD thesis by Morgan Ames from Stanford’s Department of Communication. Her work is focused on exploring the educational and social impacts of the OLPC projects in Paraguay and Uruguay on pupils, parents, and teachers. To that end she has conducted more than 130 interviews to date and once completed her thesis is almost bound to become a must-read for people working within the OLPC and larger ICT4E context.

Last but not least and more on a monitoring rather than evaluation level there are also efforts under way to gather data about the usage of the Activities that are available for the XO laptops. This is meant to be a first step to address questions such as which Activities are popular, which ones are used inside and outside school, whether there are differences between how boys and girls use the laptops, etc.

To sum up: There are a variety of evaluations which have taken or are taking place within the context of ParaguayEduca’s project. However the fact that the results of these evaluations don’t seem to be readily accessible – unless I totally missed something – is quite a major let-down in my opinion.

Having said that I feel it is worth mentioning that given its limited resources it’s partially understandable that ParaguayEduca has focused the majority of its energy on building up what I believe to be a solid foundation and infrastructure for its project. Yet it seems necessary for in-depth evaluations to receive significantly more attention in the future, particularly since ParaguayEduca hopes to expand the OLPC project beyond Caacupé which will likely require solid evidence about its impact.

Summary and Outlook

The OLPC project led by ParaguayEduca is without a doubt a very impressive and effective operation. The organization’s focus on getting the infrastructure right in combination with their extensive teacher training and support as well as their knowledge about the effective use of the XOs in the broader learning context makes for a very strong project. In all of these areas other organizations and projects – regardless of whether they’re using OLPC XOs or other devices – can definitely learn a lot from ParaguayEduca’s experiences. Hence it’s great to see them already collaborating and sharing with Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal and the larger OLPC and Sugar communities.

The core question over the next year or two will now be whether the current approaches, processes, and structures can be made to scale efficiently. The upcoming increase from the current 4,000 to a total of 9,000 XOs will likely require some changes in how ParaguayEduca works in areas such as maintenance, ensuring consistent quality of teacher training, and ensuring the long-term sustainability of aspects such as the Internet access. So the organizational challenge will be how to turn what is a relatively small effective project into one that is also efficient on a larger, potentially nation-wide, scale.

Given ParaguayEduca’s track record and status quo I’m convinced that it is in a very good position to run and expand its successful OLPC project over the coming years. Other OLPC and ICT4E initiatives should definitely watch this one closely over the coming months and years!

OLPC in Paraguay is part of an overview of OLPC in South America, a first-hand report of XO laptop deployments in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru by Christoph Derndorfer.

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If there’s one country that has taken the notion of “one laptop per child” very seriously then it’s Uruguay.

As mentioned in the OLPC in South America introduction to date the country has distributed approximately 400,000 of OLPC’s XO-1 laptops, thereby equipping every single pupil and 18,000 teachers of its public primary education system with a laptop. Not stopping there, the country is now in the process of rolling out 100,000 laptops – 90,000 of them being OLPC XO-1.5 HS machines, with the remaining 10,000 being Intel Classmates – in its secondary education system.

Switzerland of South America

It’s not hard to argue that in many ways Uruguay presented the perfect environment for a country-wide 1-to-1 computing in education project. Pretty much regardless of which metric one looks at, Uruguay is always in the upper segments, particularly within the South American context:

• Literacy Rate: 98%
• Human Development Index (HDI): 0.865
• GDP per capita: $10,079 (2009)
• Internet users: 40 per 100 (2008)

Especially when it comes to primary education, Uruguay provided a stable foundation to build on given that practically every pupil finishes the six years of primary school and as a result literacy levels are very high. At the same time the physical infrastructure in terms of reliable access to electricity and the Internet also existed in many parts of the country.

It’s within this context that then-president Tabaré Vázquez first announced “Plan Ceibal” – Ceibal being both the acronym for Conectividad Educativa de Informática Básica para el Aprendizaje en Línea – Basic educational connectivity for online learning as well as being an emblematic Uruguayan plant. The corresponding presidential decree was signed in mid-April 2007 and in then-president Vázquez’s own words:

“[Plan Ceibal's] longer-term objective is to promote social justice by promoting equal access to information and communication tools for all our people.”

Distributing the aforementioned 400,000 XO-1 laptops was thereby the first step of a larger process, and that ambitious first goal was completed at the end of 2009. Hence Uruguay is the first country to achieve full device saturation in its public primary school system. This makes the county and excellent example of having transitioned from the “should we do it” and “which technology do we use” stage to the more important, and more complicated, question of “how do we do it”?

Status quo

Now as indicated in the introduction the main indicators of Plan Ceibal I was looking at during the two weeks I spent in Uruguay in July are what I call the six criteria for successful implementations of ICT for Education projects in developing countries.

1. Infrastructure

Laboratorio Tecnológico del Uruguay

On a logistical side it is impressive to see how approximately 400,000 OLPC XO-1 laptops were distributed within 24 months. An interesting side-effect of that distribution was that the country discovered several thousand children which previously hadn’t been officially registered. Registering the children included them and their families in social services and support.

Almost all of the schools are connected to the country’s electricity network. The few remaining schools are planned to receive solar panels over the coming months with 10 schools currently being part of a pilot project to get the details right.

In terms of Internet connectivity, 98% of the primary schools involved with the program now have Internet access and 150,000 children can walk less than 300m to the next public WiFi hotspot. Additionally various community and youth centers, cooperatives, and other organizations have started providing public WiFi hotspots in many cities and towns across the country. An important note to make, is that Plan Ceibal closely collaborated with ANTEL, Uruguay’s largest telecommunications company which is government-owned, to provide this high degree of connectivity at a subsidized price.

Canal Ceibal TV studio

Going a step further, Plan Ceibal also developed Canal Ceibal which is a special television program that is focused on presenting various ways and methods of how the XOs can be used for learning. The program is broadcast over the cable network and more recently the various segments have also been uploaded to YouTube.

As of early October more than 200 videos had been made available and Uruguayan volunteers recently compiled a detailed overview of approximately 50 videos that show which subject, grade, and software is being demonstrated.

All of these activities are coordinated by approximately 180 people who work at a newly created organizational unit called CITS (Centro para la Inclusión Tecnológica y Social – Center for Technological and Social Inclusion) within LATU (Laboratorio Tecnológico del Uruguay – Technology Laboratory of Uruguay). LATU is the organization that then-president Vázquez had tasked with executing the technical and operational implemention of Plan Ceibal. This is an interesting decision given that in most cases it’s the Ministry of Education itself which runs ICT4E projects.

So in terms of the infrastructure it has built up Plan Ceibal is undoubtedly very impressive and will greatly benefit from this solid foundation in the future.

2. Maintenance

One of the biggest issues that Plan Ceibal has encountered so far is extensive breakage of the XO-1 laptops it has distributed. An official survey earlier this year found that 14,2% of the laptops were broken in one way or another and that an another 13,2% were in an “unusable state” due to currently undergoing a repair process, being locked down by the country’s XO security system or a variety of other issues.

Assuming that the results of the survey are representative for the whole country this means that in total 27,4% of the laptops – more than 100,000 in total – weren’t usable as of April 2010. Similarly an independent report by volunteers of the RAP Ceibal San Jose group that was released in August 2010 indicated that only 68,3% of the XOs in the surveyed homes were working without any issues.

Plan Ceibal has since been working hard to adapt and improve its maintenance system in order to deal with this issue. Originally all of the broken laptops were repaired in a central facility in Montevideo. This required parents to contact a call-center, receive a shipping number, and then go to a post-office from where the XO was sent in free of charge. The repair center then evaluated whether the breakage was covered by the warranty provided by the government or whether the parents had to pay a fee for the repair.

This approach proved to have some limitations as people didn’t know the phone number of the call center, were reluctant to call it due to fear of an expensive phone call, weren’t willing to send their children’s XOs away via the post office, and had a variety of other concerns. This lead to the situation where only a third (official survey) or fourth (RAP Ceibal survey) of the broken machines had actually been sent in for repair.

A common sight: a broken XO keyboard

In the recent months Plan Ceibal has expanded its repair process via several significant steps. The first one was to establish about a dozen mobile repair teams which go out and visit schools, particularly in rural areas. As many laptops as possible are fixed on-site with the remaining ones being entered into the repair system.

Secondly the project has started partnerships with already existing computer-repair shops and businesses across the country. They are taught how to repair XO laptops and then serve as local repair facilities in their respective cities and regions.

Additionally Plan Ceibal has built up significant capabilities when it comes to being able to deal with complex breakages. Previously these would have meant that an XO or its motherboard would have to be discarded. Thanks to investing in special equipment and training staff they can now do a lot complex repairs – such as ones of broken motherboard chips – in-country. Similarly Plan Ceibal has closely collaborated with OLPC’s engineering team to work on improvements of the XO laptops to address certain weaknesses. One example is the thickness of the XO-1’s keyboard membrane which was increased after reports of keys frequently ripping off after a few months of use.

All of these measures however only cover scenarios where the laptops are already broken. An equally important area to focus on is the mitigation of these breakages. To that end some volunteers in Montevideo as well as other cities have started organizing parent information events before the laptops are handed out in the first grades. While no evaluation has been done to record the effects of these meetings, many volunteers agreed that they’ve seen significant drops in the number of broken machines in schools where parents were told that the XO is an important learning tool for their children and not, as it is often perceived, a toy.

Overall I believe that Plan Ceibal will soon be able to address the high breakage rates they’re currently seeing. This process could likely be both accelerated as well as improved by dedicating more resources to mitigation-strategies as well as extensive outreach to schools and communities in critical urban and rural contexts.

If you’re interested in more information about this topic then I’d recommend reading the article XO Breakage Rates and Mitigation Strategies in Uruguay which I published on OLPC News back in July.

3. Contents and materials

A basic manual for eToys

One of the key components of any ICT4E initiative is the educational content and materials that pupils as well as teachers use for learning and teaching. Now an interesting aspect here is that people define “educational content” in many different ways.

Some argue that a country’s curriculum is that educational content since it contains a list of all the things pupils should know and be able to do at a certain age. Hence the argument goes that the only question that needs to be worked on is how this content will be taught with the help of new tools such as the XO laptops.

On the other hand there are people who strongly believe that the use of technology enables new forms of content, and this content needs to be specifically developed. Current content is seen as only making use of the benefits provided by current tools such as chalkboards, books, pens and paper.

Plan Ceibal in many ways tries to embrace both approaches. Ceibal’s teacher training (see the corresponding section below for more details) has generally been focused on how to use the existing Activities that the XO laptops are shipped with for different subject areas and grades. At the same time Plan Ceibal has supported the development of new educational software and content in a variety of ways and helps distribute it via Plan Ceibal’s Educational Portal.

One example of new content creation are idea competitions where teachers can submit their own visions of educational content or software. The best submissions are selected by a jury and subsequently funding is made available to turn the initial idea into a digital learning object.

A second approach are open competitions for companies or organizations. CITS basically puts out a call for these entities to submit their software or content for review with the goal to obtain limited rights to distribute the best submissions on the XOs in its school system.

National game competition poster

A third model is when CITS asks companies for bids to write a specific type of software such as for example a system which helps teachers keep track of pupils’ attendance.

Last but not least there are also external competitions which are run by other organizations or companies. The resulting software and content are vetted by CITS before they’re distributed via inclusion in the standard software release or Plan Ceibal’s Educational Portal. One example of this model was used for a game which resulted from a competition originally organized by the Ministry of Tourism.

The result of all these efforts is a collection of content and materials which is mainly made available via the aforementioned Plan Ceibal Educational Portal. This collection of approximately 500 different objects includes a broad variety of media such as online resources, games, videos, tutorials, guides, as well as links to other Web sites. In terms of subject areas it covers arts, language, mathematics, natural sciences, social sciences, and foreign languages. There are also a number of materials with a health-related focus such as Dengue fever and the dangers of smoking.

The impression I got after speaking to a variety of people in Uruguay is that although these materials exist and are available to pupils and teachers – thanks to the near ubiquity of Internet access in schools – there’s a lack of knowledge of how to actually use and integrate them in the classroom context. Additionally some teachers mentioned being overwhelmed by the broad variety of choices with a subject area rather than being able to rely on a single text book as it’s generally been the case up to now.

This impression might be related to teacher training, yet it shows that simply making content available isn’t enough to ensure that it’s being (effectively) used for learning. One way to approach this issue could be to include guides and support materials for teachers – and possibly also parents – which help them understand how to use each content object with the pupils.

At the end of the day it seems to be clear that digital learning content and materials will need additional support as they’re being phased into the education system in order to convince teachers to use them rather than tried and trusted tools such as text books.

4. Community inclusion

Volunteers of RAP Ceibal in Montevideo

Due to both its vision and its size Plan Ceibal has attracted a variety of entities outside of the official implementation organization CITS who are contributing to the project with a variety of efforts. These initiatives and groups of people play a key role in reaching out to a variety of stakeholders, such as parents, teachers, and school administrators and generally addressing what they perceive to be gaps in the official initiative.

Three initiatives are particularly noteworthy in this context:

Flor de Ceibo is a community outreach project that was started at Universidad de la República – Uruguay’s largest university – in 2008. The program’s three main goals are:

• To create an enabling space for participation in the ongoing and interdisciplinary national effort that is Plan Ceibal.
• To contribute to the closing of the digital divide by involving university students in Plan Ceibal.
• To enable new forms of collaboration between the university and the broader society.

In order to achieve these goals both professors as well as several hundred students are working on a broad variety of projects, e.g. special programs for single-mothers, in this area.

ceibalJAM mascot

ceibalJAM is an independent NGO that is focused on developing high-quality software and content for learning. Some examples of work ceibalJAM has supported are:

• Conozco Uruguay, a Sugar Activity for learning about Uruguay’s geography.
• JAMedia which turns every XO into a TV and radio tuned to Uruguayan online channels as well as being a versatile video- and audio-player.

Additionally ceibalJAM is regularly organizing events and meetings in Montevideo that bring together teachers, parents, students, artists, and other people who are interested in learning more about Plan Ceibal and how to contribute to the project.

Last but not least RAP Ceibal (Red de Apoyo al Plan Ceibal – Support Network for Plan Ceibal) is a volunteer network of individuals and groups of people supporting Plan Ceibal in many different ways. These cover basic activities such as handing out and repairing XOs as well as the previously mentioned compiling of surveys about the state and use of the XOs or introducing parents to Plan Ceibal in general and the XOs in particular.

At one point, 50,000 XOs across the country refused to boot due to a software issue and only the large-scale participation of RAP Ceibal volunteers enabled the issue to be resolved in a relatively short period of time. (More information about RAP Ceibal can be found in the RAP Ceibal – Uruguay’s volunteer network article on OLPC News.)

Additionally some groups and organizations are working on more temporary efforts within the context of Plan Ceibal. One example is eXpO fotos: an exhibition based on photos taken by pupils with their XOs during a series of photography workshops run by a museum in Montevideo.

The situation in Uruguay offers interesting insights into the role the various groups mentioned above as well as others play in ensuring the sustainability of a project such as Plan Ceibal. The case of the 50,000 disabled XOs is an important example that shows how informal communities or independent NGOs can often address needs and situations that more traditional organizations and hierarchies such as Ministries of Education – or in Uruguay’s case CITS – aren’t well equipped to deal with. Similarly these entities can provide grassroots, community, and service components that are often underestimated key factor in ensuring the support and buy-in of stakeholders such as parents, teachers, and school administrators.

5. Teacher training

Teacher training within the context of Plan Ceibal has undergone a number of iterations over the past three years. With the pilot project in 2007 no teacher training took place before the laptops were handed out which led to a variety of issues.

In 2008 the training was focused on building capacity of regional inspectors as well as informatics teachers who were in turn supposed to train all the other teachers in their region or school. This approach combined with a broader lack of understanding of the laptop’s abilities and potential resulted in the training being too focused on how to use the machine itself, and not focused on how to use it in the learning process.

In 2009 the concept of champion teachers and “formadores” (teacher trainers) who were meant to lead and inspire by example was introduced. It turned out that the several dozen people in these roles, in combination with a revamped training program that focused on learning how to use individual applications, also didn’t have the desired large-scale impact.

Using XOs to learn about the environment

Now in 2010 the training program was again radically redesigned. This process was still in somewhat of a limited pilot phase when I visited Uruguay in July, and it is supposed to be introduced nation-wide towards the end of the year. So it remains to be seen how things will work out over the next 12 to 18 months. In any case some key components of this new model are:

• The introduction of support roles such as “maestros de apoyo Ceibal” (Ceibal support teachers) and “amigo Ceibal” (Ceibal friend) who train and help teachers both inside as well as outside the classroom
• The creation of groups and meetings in and between schools to facilitate the exchange of experiences
• The start of the television program Canal Ceibal
• The inclusion of distance learning via a learning platform built around Moodle
• A redesign of Plan Ceibal’s Educational Portal
• Separate training sessions for teachers working in special schools

Given the large scale and long-term vision of Plan Ceibal another important component are efforts to better integrate the knowledge about the educational use of technology in the education and career paths for future teachers. While some ideas and initiatives in this area were discussed, to me it seems like there’s a lack of a comprehensive plan which ensures that the next generation of teachers is well versed in the tools they will encounter in the classrooms.

Overall I would argue that teacher training efforts within Plan Ceibal are still in an early experimental stage. Different approaches have been tried out over the past three years but it seems like none of them managed to meet the required combination of effectiveness and efficiency. As a result the 18,000 teachers aren’t utilizing the laptops as extensively and effectively as envisioned.

There’s no doubt that good teacher training is one of the most important, complex, and expensive parts of any ICT for Education project. While not having been able to completely solve this puzzle yet Uruguay’s experiences do point to what a suitable solution could look like:

• Training that takes place before the laptops are handed out combined with in-service training and in-classroom support
• Training components that take place in both physical and virtual environments
• Training that is really focused on how to use the laptop for learning rather than spending too much time on simply learning how to use a particular application
• Creating suitable spaces for teachers to exchange ideas, experiences, and materials they made while using the laptops
• Inclusion of training of methods and abilities required for using connected digital tools in schools in the education of future generations of teachers

6. Evaluation

Downloading new Activities from the web

Given that Uruguay is the first major country to actually have given a laptop to every child in its primary school system there’s of course a significant amount of interest – both inside as well as outside the country – in seeing what the results and impacts of Plan Ceibal are.

In broad terms there are two different categories of impacts that are being evaluated in ICT4E projects, and Plan Ceibal is no different here:

Educational impacts can cover a broad variety of topics such as school attendance rates, attitudes towards school and learning, grades, cognitive skills, acquisition of ICT abilities and many other metrics.

Social impacts can include looking at secondary users and potential beneficiaries of ICT4E projects, the reduction of the digital divide, use of the Internet outside of school, use of Internet based communication services such as e-mail and other aspects concerning the use and impacts of laptops outside the education setting.

An interesting development in Uruguay is that there several evaluation efforts are underway in parallel. CITS itself has a small team of pedagogists and sociologists whose work encompasses both the educational and the social dimension. Additionally an independent project called ILATIS is evaluating Plan Ceibal as part of a larger effort to compare four different ICT4E projects in Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Uruguay. Most recently a local sub-chapter of the previously mentioned RAP Ceibal volunteer network has undertaken its own study to get a better understanding of how the laptops are being used.

It’s important to note that the majority of the evaluations are still in relatively early stages given that the distribution of the XOs was only completed in late 2009, and hence many schools have barely had them for a year.

Yet when looking at evaluations as a tool for continually monitoring developments it becomes clear that even though in many cases it’s too early to draw any final conclusions there are some trends which can already be observed.

One important comment at this point is that CITS isn’t particularly interested in measuring the impact on traditional achievements such as test results or grades. This is mainly due to Plan Ceibal being primarily meant to be a social equity project which uses the education system as its catalyst. Hence the focus is firmly set on exploring impacts such as ICT skills, collaboration between students, group learning, critical thinking, and autonomous learning.

One fairly simple metric that is gathered is how often teachers plan to use the XOs in class. According to this early CITY evaluation report from December 2009 a bit more than half of the teachers were planning on using the XOs once or twice a week for individual or group activities during class with 12% and 21% using them for these activities on an (almost) daily basis. Tasks to be completed on the XO at home were significantly less frequent with 33% doing this once or twice a week and only 3% on a more regular basis. These numbers also align quite well with the results from the more recent RAP Ceibal San Jose study mentioned earlier.

Looking at use outside the education context it is interesting that early results from 2009 indicate that on average children use the XOs for 10 hours and 20 minutes outside of school with the median being approximately 7 hours. During that time a broad variety of use can be observed which include

Playing a Plan Ceibal detective game

• playing games
• taking photos and videos
• writing
• painting
• looking for school-related information
• downloading videos and music
• composing music
• sending e-mails
• writing blogs

The earlier mentioned broad availability of Internet in schools is the basis for the popularity of the many online services. This applies to both the pupils themselves as well as secondary users such as siblings or other family members. In some cases the desire to be online has also increased the importance of the schools as community gathering centers outside normal school hours. Similarly, another data point which I consider to be interesting is that mothers often seem to use their child’s XOs to search for health-related information online.

Overall it seems clear that many more in-depth evaluations are needed to be able to assess the short- and long-term impact of Plan Ceibal. I believe this is both necessary and beneficiary for Plan Ceibal itself as well as the larger ICT4E community. Such an understanding of the variety of educational and social impacts, both expected as well as unexpected ones, can likely best be achieved via the efforts of different organizations and entities coming at evaluation from different angles.

Summary and Outlook

There’s no doubt that Plan Ceibal has managed to build a solid foundation in terms of technology, logistics, capacity and infrastructure. However in order to utilize the full potential of that basis it now needs to focus significantly more attention and resources on crucial factors such as maintenance, teacher training, and the usage of educational content and materials. At the same time it needs to provide continued support for community initiatives as well as ensuring that internal as well as external monitoring and evaluation efforts receive the resources and attention they require. These are all crucial challenges which mustn’t be underestimated and will require the aforementioned attention and resources to be properly addressed.

Finally, given that Plan Ceibal is the first 1-to-1 computing in education project to reach full saturation there’s no doubt in my mind that it is one of the most interesting ICT4E initiatives at the moment. It is only a slight overstatement to say that the whole world is watching Uruguay closely to see what’s happening, Montevideo will be the OLPC capital of the world, and experiences there will have a large impact on how the whole notion of 1-to-1 computing in education develops over the years to come.

OLPC in Uruguay is part of an overview of OLPC in South America, a first-hand report of XO laptop deployments in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru by Christoph Derndorfer.

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With more than 800,000 XO laptops having been distributed on the continent so far, South America represent the largest concentration of active OLPC projects in the world.

• Uruguay is the first major country to achieve full 1-to-1 saturation after having finished the distribution of approximately 400,000 XO laptops to every primary school pupil and teacher in late 2009.
• Paraguay currently has 4,000 XOs on the ground and will receive another 5,000 over the coming months
• Peru is close to finishing the process of distributing 300,000 XO laptops and recently purchased another 300,000.

Looking at these figures it quickly becomes obvious that South America is the place to be when it comes to understanding what the true status quo of OLPC on the ground is today. In July and August I was able to spend more than six weeks traveling through Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru to get a hands-on impression of how things were going in these three countries. Over the next month, I’ll present my findings as the October Educational Technology Debate.

Background on OLPC in South America Review

Two weeks per country isn’t a whole lot of time but thankfully I could rely on an extensive network of people who helped me in many ways to get a broader and deeper understanding of the situations in their respective countries.

I built this network through the experiences of being involved in the global OLPC community in the past four years:

• I am the editor of OLPC News, the premier independent community of OLPC supporters
• I’ve given numerous talks about OLPC at community gatherings, open-source conferences, universities, and recently presented the OLPC in South America review at The World Bank
• I’ve been coordinating the efforts of the Austrian OLPC pilot project since 2008
• I volunteered for three months with OLE Nepal in Kathmandu in 2009

Being fluent in Spanish and having spent a year living and going to school in Trujillo, Peru also helps when talking to pupils, teachers, principals, regional administrators, national coordinators, students, university professors, independent researchers, community members, and other people involved in the projects.

As the sentence above already indicates a lot of my impressions are based on interviews and talks with a broad variety of people. Additionally I visited schools as well as teacher training sessions in all three countries. One of my core realizations was that although all three countries use OLPC’s XO laptops the respective projects vary significantly when it comes to their goals, the implementing organization, and their current size. As I wrote back in August:

“What has become clear over the past two or three years is that while “one laptop per child” might be the ultimate goal for the majority of the initiatives associated with OLPC, the paths choose and reasons why they’re chosen are often quite different. Hence it’s no longer sufficient to talk about OLPC as opposed to other projects in the information and communication technology for education (ICT4E) space. Yes, the XO might be a common denominator but in almost every other aspect you’ll find different approaches and I for one am excited to see how the various projects pan out over the coming months and years.”

So what I was mainly looking for in my observations is what I’ve come to call the “six criteria for successful implementations of ICT for Education projects in developing countries”. They are based on a literature review as well as hands-on experiences and were compiled by Tanja Kohn, a PhD researcher at University of Innsbruck, and me in early 2010.
.

What 40,000 XO laptops look like in a Peruvian wharehouse

6 criteria for successful implementations of ICT for Education projects in developing countries

1. Infrastructure: ICT4E projects require a significant infrastructure in order to run effectively. This infrastructure need doesn’t just include technical aspects such as the availability of electricity and Internet access but also logistical aspects such as how to efficiently and reliably distribute hundreds of thousands of laptops in some of the remotest regions of the world.

2. Maintenance: Regardless of how robust an ICT device or software solution is there will always be issues with a certain percentage of them. This is especially true in the context of OLPC where the XO laptops are used in environments which are dusty, hot, and humid and the main users are young children. However variations of these challenges will also be encountered by other ICT4E projects in developing nations. As a result processes and solutions need to be developed to address how to repair broken equipment.

3. Contents and materials: One of the core requirements for ICT4E projects are appropriate contents and materials that enable the technology to be used as a tool for learning. Simply scanning in existing books and making them available digitally doesn’t come close to utilizing the full potential of a digital and connected device such as a laptop or mobile phone. Hence interactive learning contents as well as materials such as digital multimedia libraries need to be developed according to the particular needs of a project.

4. Community inclusion: One component that often seems to be underestimated in ICT4E projects is the importance of community inclusion and the buy-in from key stakeholders such as teachers, parents, principals and administrators. This is key requirement for enabling long-term sustainability of projects and adequate support from all sides.

5. Teacher training: Using a new tool and approach is always hard, particularly when we’re talking about something as complex as learning and education. Hence it’s vital that teachers receive adequate training on how to efficiently and effectively use ICT tools such as laptops within the school context. Training people is both very resource-intensive and complex, yet without it ICT4E projects are very likely to fail.

6. Evaluation: Last but not least evaluation of the impacts an ICT4E project has on learning as well as the broader society is a key criterion. Unfortunately in many cases the main difficulty is a lack of appropriate baseline data that a project’s impact can be evaluated against. Additionally evaluation is often an afterthought that only receives attention once a project has been started which means it’s often too late to gather aforementioned baseline data. Ideally evaluation is part of very early project stages as well as a continually used toolset to refine and improve a project.

I’ll leave it at this for now and look forward to reading your comments, thoughts, and questions on this initial post and the forthcoming OLPC in South America articles. Over the coming weeks, I will provide in-depth looks at the projects in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru, and put them in context to other OLPC deployments worldwide.

We’re also focusing on OLPC in South America this month on OLPC News. Be sure to join in that conversation as well.

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From the onset, my assumptions were proven wrong. As Rob van Son stated in his opening post:

However, the most remarkable thing about any ICT4E assessments to decide on the introduction of ICT in education would be their uniqueness in history. One reason such assessments are so scarce is that there are few (if any) historical examples of assessments of any kind done before the introduction of an educational reform. Even less examples where the outcomes of the assessments really mattered in decision making.

This opinion was backed up in the comments with the general consensus similar to John LeBaron’s comment that while assessemnts themselves are not bad, but we don’t have the right assessment tools and their outcomes would be misused anyway.

Mary Hooker’s response was more in line with my thoughts – she opened with:

Yes we do need to assess ICT4E initiatives more particularly when we are working in environments with scarce resources as in the developing world where investment in ICT can constitute what Unwin (2004) describes as a ‘wasteful tragedy’ if it is not managed and utilized properly.

But then surprisingly, quickly agreed with many of the issues raised by Rob van Son – ICT4E assessments don’t capture outcomes very well, and are often disregarded because the entrenched practices of conventional schooling has strict rules that constrain and retard transformational curricular innovation, especially ICT integration.

Yet, Clayton Wright brought up a great point:

From a western perspective, the benefits of technology are obvious. But in the developing world, perhaps only the benefits of mobile phones, ATMs, and radio seem obvious. When given a choice, local officials would probably spend funds on providing clean drinking water, toilet facilities, medicine, and seeds for crops rather than spend it on ICTs. Local educators would want more teachers not computers. Thus, I believe that evaluations are necessary to demonstrate to the local officials and national policy makers that ICTs are worth the investment. They need to know what local problem(s) ICTs can address or opportunities that are possible.

How can we assure them that technology should be on an equal footing with other educational investments then? Can we really take Rob van Son’s title, “Stop Wasting Children with ICT4E Assessments” to heart? Is he right when he says:

There is little hope that ICT4E assessment as it is organized today will uncover anything that will actually influence educational practices. History is plainly against us. A full blown assessment about “Is [fill in ICT4E solution] a cost-effective improvement” will take years to complete, cost serious amounts of money, and will be irrelevant when published. The worst effect will be the delay which will deprive yet again several cohorts of school children in poor countries of adequate education.

In addition, if all teaching methods that are based on “transmitting knowledge” instead of “recreating knowledge” (aka Constructivism) fail to change the naive preconceptions of students, how does ICT then impart a better knowledge creation system than an increased focus on better teachers and more involved instruction? Rob van Son responded with a reasonable argument:

I think the old Oxford model of a lector and a few students is best. What ICT can do is help in situations where there is a lack of adequate teachers. But such a support cannot be “proven effective” using standard evaluation procedures based on current grading practices. On the other hand, evidence based educational methods are still not generally accepted. So I suggest to try to find a common ground where both the “establishment” and “evidence based research” can meet to improve education for disadvantaged schools. This is much better than waiting for an (elusive) consensus on evidence based educational reform.

In her second post, Mary Hooker agrees with Rob – there are inadequacies of evaluating the use of ICT and its potential for transformational innovation in education systems that are intent on simply harnessing it for maintaining the status quo. It doesn’t help that ICT is also multifaceted, with effects and impact beyond the expected, event by experts.

Worse, ICT is also very fast moving. With the quick change in technology (netbooks, mobile phones, Internet access) over the last few years, long-term studies of ICT impact can be obsolete before they are even finished. To this Mary Hooker responds that the focus should be not the devices then. ICT does not exist in isolation but within a larger socio-cultural context of the school and education system.

Which to me, brings us to classic Change Management – the systematic process of creating organizational change.

In that context, should ICT4E assessments ignore the technology – it changes to fast and is too hard measure its impact – and focus on assessing the ability of educational systems to best adopt ICT usage to their goals? A shift from “device X helps Y amount in reaching Z learning outcome” into “school system A has B ability to incorporate C amount of technological change within its current resource constraints” and then leave the school systems themselves to experiment with different technology?

We recognize the inadequacies of evaluating the use of a tool and its potential for transformational innovation in education systems that are intent on simply harnessing it for maintaining the status quo. As Rob (on the other side) observed ‘any real assessment of educational reform requires a new reflection on what skills and knowledge the children are supposed to acquire at school’.

And so in my response I would like to revisit the question presented by Wayan and reflect a little more on its parameters. I would also like to draw on commentary from both sides of the discussion (quite a lot of comments on your side Rob) to tease out some of the issues.

Do we need to assess ICT4E initiatives?

Rob notes that most reforms have historically been imposed without scientific support but rather on political prejudices. However the sense of fatigue with the failure of education reform syndrome is perhaps changing as we migrate into a 21st century information age. And as we do so, we are witnessing a growing discrepancy between school and the ‘outside world’ – where information, knowledge, innovation and creativity are replacing the traditional sectors of commerce and industry – and where new technologies are changing the way we interact, communicate, socialize and network.

It is a world where mobile connectivity is becoming commonplace and where digital literacy is a critical tool for social interaction, knowledge exchange and construction. If schooling fails to transform itself, it may be transformed albeit haphazardly by the technological transformation outside its gate – and perhaps in a way that may be detrimental to learning.

There is also the challenge of digital divides, both between societies and within societies – with access denied to the poorest and most marginalized. ICT is seen as bridging such major divides. There is thus a renewed sense of urgency, despite the fatigue, for systemic ICT investment and reform to provide all learners with skills they will need for meaningful participation in the economic, social and culture life of new knowledge-based economies and societies.

In such scenarios of massive large-scale investment and reform, assessments are needed to hold systems accountable. Assessments can also provide policymakers with the gateway they need to direct systemic change. As Clayton observes in his comments ‘evaluations are necessary to demonstrate to the local officials and national policy makers that ICTs are worth the investment’. They can help them to identify factors to best influence ICT impact (changes in curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, teacher training) and well as the barriers to ICT use, such as lack of skilled support and adequate infrastructure.

If we assess, how do we do it?

Juan in his commentary describes his skepticism as to the relevance of some of the ICT evaluations he has come across over the years – in particular studies on proprietary software where the emphasis is more on evaluating technology than learning. He notes the lack of comparison with alternative activities and for cost effectiveness. John also comments that effective assessments have not been designed. On cost effectiveness John finds shocking a US study illustrating a lack of empirical research in an area where billions of dollars have been invested. What is particularly ‘unsettling’ is the notion that politicians don’t seem to care.

Yet I wonder John if it is a question that politicians don’t care or that there is a sense of exasperation with the lack of defined mechanisms for informing decision making for such a massive scale of investment and change? Scheuermann, Kikis and Villalba (2009) discuss the lack of clear information in most studies about the multifaced effects and impact of ICT on the learner and learning. It is a situation that is ‘especially unsatisfying for policy-making stakeholders that aim at defining evidence-based strategies and regulatory measures for effective ICT implementation and efficient use of resources’ (ibid. p. 1).

There are calls for more widely accepted indicators and methodological approaches to assess inputs, utilization and outcome/ impact of ICT integration initiatives in order to address this gap (Trucano, 2003; Blanskat et al. 2006; cited in ibid.). Yet there still remain limitations in these approaches on measuring the impact of ICT use – as they often represent a snapshot – a one time, one level approach. Ian comments on the ‘imperfection’ of the data collection in such evaluations more often conducted to appease funder insistence for seeing ‘educational’ results. He also draws attention to the difficulty in attributing the said results to the ICT intervention.

A more powerful approach is the use of indicators within development models of ICT integration in education – to study the progressive phases through which teachers and students adopt and use ICT. Morel’s Matrix is an instrument that can be used for evaluating the degree to which ICTs have been integrated in an educational system through four distinct successive phases: a) emerging, b) applying, c) integrating, and d) transforming.

In GeSCI we have developed an ICT-Education matrix to assist our partners in focusing on what teachers and learners actually do when they use ICTs in schools and institutions through each of the four successive phases (Figure 1). Such models when used to guide Planning, Monitoring & Evaluation (PME) in combination with the indicators approach can offer clearer outcomes on what the integration of ICTs in education should look like at each development stage.

Figure 1: GeSCI ICT- Education Matrix

I like Mark Beckford’s observation in that the key to assessment is to keep it ‘simple but useful’. We hope in developing PME tools as the ICT-Education matrix for our partners that we can do just that.

Related Link

Scheuermann, F., Kikis, K. & Villala, E. 2009. A framework for Understanding and Evaluating the Impact of Information and Communication Technology in Education Available online & accessed 23 November 2009