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

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

Here is the story

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

The results are remarkable

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

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

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

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

The next steps

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

Ringing the School BeLL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Background

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Objectives

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

Innovations in Teaching and Learning Materials to Improve Student Reading

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

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

Innovations in Education Data to Improve Student Reading

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

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

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

Illustrative Areas of Interest

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

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

Innovations in Teaching and Learning Materials to Improve Student Learning

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

Innovations in Education Data to Improve Student Reading

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

What We Will Not Fund

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

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The World Bank Group and the African Development Bank, with the support of the African Union, are producing a new ‘flagship’ report on how ICTs, especially mobile phones, have the potential to change fundamental business models in key sectors for Africa.

The overall goal of this effort, which is known as eTransform Africa, is to raise awareness and stimulate action, especially among African governments and development practitioners, of how ICTs can contribute to the improvement and transformation of traditional and new economic and social activities in a number of sectors, including: agriculture; climate change adaptation; education; financial services; health; local ICT; public services; trade and regional integration; and ‘cross-cutting’ issues.

The final draft of the eTransform Africa education sector study (Transformation‐Ready: The strategic application of information and communication technologies in Africa. Education Sector Study), which was prepared by a team of notable consultants at ICT Development Associates, is now available online. This 144-page report identifies specific opportunities and challenges, and recommends areas of intervention for governments, educational institutions, the private sector, NGOs, and development partners, with a particular focus on five general themes. (Long-time readers will remember these as previous topics of discussion)

• Teacher professional development
• Digital learning resources
• Affordable technologies
• Education Management Information Systems (EMIS)
• National Research and Education Networks (NRENs)

The report identifies six areas where specific opportunities for action currently exist:

1. policy
2. access
3. NRENs
4. management and administration
5. digital learning resources
6. building human capacity

while at the same time noting (some) of the critical related challenges across the continent, including:

1. absence of comprehensive policies
2. lack of financing and prioritisation of ICT investments
3. limited infrastructure
4. lack of capacity at all levels to integrate and support the use of ICT in education effectively
5. many teachers do not have the necessary ICT skills
6. lack of appropriate content
7. lack of accurate, comprehensive, up-to-date data on education
8. equity

The report’s conclusion includes a set of five recommendation for policymakers:

1. Ensure that all investments in ICT in education (including those made by governments, development partners, and individual educational institutions) are – to the greatest extent possible – directed by a single, integrated ICT in education strategy so that they are working towards common national strategic objectives.
2. Adopt a suitable global professional development framework to guide national implementation of ICT professional development.
3. Adopt a suitable global professional development framework to guide national implementation of ICT professional development.
4. Consider judicious investments in content creation and aggregation to ensure compliance with African curricula, or local language demands, motivating usage by educators and students.
5. Promote data-driven decision-making at all levels.

There is much more to this report than just these lists, of course. The authors, who have extensive and varied experience working across Africa on ICT/education projects, have offered up much food for thought, and have referenced scores of interesting initiatives and programmes across the continent that may be new to many readers of this blog.

Importantly, they note that, “in all instances, planning of new interventions aimed at harnessing ICT to improve education must begin with contextualised needs analysis and careful planning that takes account of the realities within which implementation will take place.” Such a statement might seem obvious — so obvious, in fact, that it should almost go without saying — but experiences with numerous projects across the continent over the past decade, some of which are referenced in the report, do suggest that more than a few folks need to be reminded of this very practical suggestion minimal requirement.

The full final draft of the eTransform Africa education report, and its various contituent parts (e.g. landscape analysis, case studies, etc.) available online as pdf documents on the eTransform Africa web site. Those of you pressed for time may wish to go directly to the 19-page executive summary [pdf].

In case it might be of any additional interest:
Some previous analytical work sponsored by the infoDev program and/or the World Bank’s Africa region on ICT/education issues in Africa includes:

• Survey of ICT and Education in Africa (Volume I): A Summary Report, Based on 53 Country Surveys [2007]
• The NEPAD e-Schools Demonstration Project: A Work in Progress. A Public Report. [2007]
• Designing Open and Distance Learning for Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Toolkit for Educators and Planners [2005] [pdf]
• Enhancing Learning Opportunities in Africa – Distance Education and Information and Communication Technologies for Learning [2002]

(And of course, the EduTech blog includes regular posts about ICT/education topics in Africa as well.)

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

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

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

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

Let’s look at these three parts.

1. Content

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

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

2. Teachers

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

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

3. Technology

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

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

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

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

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

A Challenge Prize

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

But there may be another possibility.

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

More than OER

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

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

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Basically, I think there are two visions for free and Open educational resources and technology, that can be summarized by these two figures.

Scenario #1: Closing Gaps

In the left figure, we have the “closing gaps” vision. In this vision, everyone benefits from new educational technologies, but low-income students disproportionately benefit. The hope here is that as the ecology of education is flooded with new free and nearly free resources, low-income students will have access to resources previously only available to students in schools in affluent places.

Take Khan Academy as an example. It’s possible that students in wealthy schools have access to great instructors and plenty of content resources, so Khan Academy is just one more tool in their kit which only offers a minor benefit to these students. But maybe students in schools serving low-income kids have more novice teachers and fewer content and instructional resources, so Khan Academy with it’s free material represents a major boon for these learners. This is a hypothetical scenario of how Khan Academy might disproportionately benefit low-income students.

Scenario #2: Rising Tide

In the right figure, we have the “rising tide” vision. In this model, everyone still benefits, but now the wealthy disproportionately benefit. From a John Rawls framework, this is still a good thing–everyone is better off than before–but the opportunity gap between wealthy and poor has expanded. Consider Khan Academy again.

Maybe teachers in wealthy schools–with fewer students per teacher, more students passing tests, more prep periods, fewer classes to teacher, more curriculum support, more IT support, etc.–are better able to use Khan Academy videos not just to push content to students, but to reimagine pedagogical models. These teachers use the content to flip the classroom, differentiate and personalize instruction, release students from seat time requirements, etc.

Any of these new models are possible because teachers can assume that every kid has reliable broadband internet access at home and on their mobile device. By contrast, maybe teachers working in schools serving low income students simply can’t make as much use of the Khan Academy videos because they lack the planning time, broadband access, etc. In this model, schools with greater fiscal and human resources have more capacity to take advantage of even free and open resources.

This second model is actually quite troubling in its implications. If this model is generally true, then virtually every education technology initiative which does not specifically target the needs of particular populations will disproportionately benefit the wealthy, even if the materials are free.

The empirical reality: Scenario #2

We don’t necessarily have to sit around and guess which model is true, we can use research to answer these questions empirically. This is what I have tried to do with my research with wikis. My assessment of our findings is that in the case of wikis, the second scenario is certainly true.

Wikis are more likely to be created in wealthier schools, more likely to persist longer, and more likely to create opportunities for students to develop 21st century skills. Even within schools, wikis are more likely to be used with AP and honors tracked students (who in turn are more likely to be affluent) than with lower tracked students. I don’t think low-income students are harmed by the innovation of wikis, and I think there are plenty of instances where low-income students have had great opportunities with wikis to work collaboratively and create multimedia publications of their understanding.

But I am also very confident that wealthy students have benefited much more from these innovations. (This research is forthcoming in Educational Researcher this January, a pre-print paper is here.)

Of course, research about wikis doesn’t answer every question about these two models of ed tech and inequality. Are blogs any different than wikis? Possibly, though I can’t imagine why. Are Khan Academy videos different? Possibly, although again, it’s not clear why they would be. But these are empirical questions that we can answer with research.

Three suggestions for greater equality

So if education technology does disproportionately benefit the affluent, what should we do about it? Let me offer three suggestions for teachers, developers and funders.

Orientation towards inequality with technology

For teachers, the orientation towards inequality with technology is very important. Educators need to make a commitment to using social technologies with all their students, not just honors and AP students. Many teachers working with at-risk youth are concerned about inequities with technology access within their classrooms, but urban school teachers need to be more concerned with inequities between schools.

We need to ensure that urban and rural students have the same opportunities as their suburban peers. We can’t make it so no students in a class have a tech-rich learning experience because some students have difficulty with access. That’s fair within a classroom, but not within a society.

Develop technology initiatives that specifically target the neediest students

Technologists, designers and researchers need to develop technology initiatives that specifically target the neediest students. TechGoesHome is a fabulous program that provides netbooks and internet connections to students, along with computer training for the entire family. The Glitch Game Testers in Atlanta, have built a program that hires African-American male students as game testers, teaches them the AP Computer Science curriculum, and has an incredible placement rate in not only getting these kids into college, but into engineering and CS majors.

Bootstrap is a terrific program that teachers students to program their own video games, developing algebra and computer science skills at the same time. . The Leadership Public Schools use CK-12 Flexbooks to develop content for math and science courses that build literacy skills while teaching domain knowledge. These programs are much more likely to benefit the students who most need our support and investment.

Focus funding streams on students who most need support.

Finally, the big foundations supporting ed tech innovations: NSF, Gates, Hewlett, and MacArthur need to be sure to focus a considerable part of their funding streams on students who most need support. A terrific example of this are the Gates/Hewlett Next Generation Learning grants, which target specific kids in specific high-risk courses.

I’m sure down the line that all students will benefit from these kinds of experiments, but if we start by focusing on the kids with the most needs, then we’re more likely to create a scenario where education technology is vehicle for meliorating rather than exacerbating educational opportunity gaps.

Additional Thoughts

I have a video op-ed up on the Harvard Graduate School of Education website, where I address some of my concerns about the role of education technology in expanding educational inequalities. Here’s the video:

So those are some of my thoughts on the topic… obviously there is much more to say. If you are interested, I will be giving a Berkman Luncheon talk on the topic this January.

If you have questions or reactions, please leave me a comment!

This post first appeared as Will Free benefit the Rich?, and is republished here with Justin’s permission

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We have often focused on Open Educational Resources (OER) in the Educational Technology Debates. We talked about the need for creating digital content and examples of existing Open Educational Resources. But this month we’re going to ask a controversial question:

Does OER actually expand the digital divide?

The proponents of Open Educational Resources are right to point out the need for digital content. There are few if any locally relevant resources for educators in the developing world – local language being a major issue. So is access – to the hardware required to view content and often the Internet access to reach it. In addition to content, and the access to reach it, teachers need the skills and training to convert good content into great lessons.

But let us say that all these prerequisites exist – content, access, training:

1. Does that mean teachers will actually use it?
2. And who will they use it with? Students already advantaged with socio-economic resources or the underprivileged learners that are the ostensible focus of many educational technology interventions?
3. Most importantly, regardless of the benefits for the privileged, how can we create better OER benefits for the poor?

Please join us this month for what we all expect to be a lively and informative conversation – your input can start right now in the comments below. You can also submit your extended thoughts as a longer independent Guest Post of at least 500 words. Please email Guest Posts to editors@edutechdebate.org. We will be publishing Guest Posts throughout the month to maintain the conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are bigger factors at play, such as:

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

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

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

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

My suggestion is this:

1. Start with the problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Evaluate, evaluate, evaluate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teaching a child to read is no easy task.

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

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

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

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

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

My mythical ICT tool for literacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let us not forget differences in language

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

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

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

The Hardware Issue

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

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

How much everything else costs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to raise funds for it all

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

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

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

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

How to show the impact of the investments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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