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Wikidata: Breaking Down Language Barriers for Students Around the World

Image from Wikipedia

Over the last decade, Wikipedia has become as ubiquitous a research tool for the modern American student as the encyclopedia was for their parents — though even that has changed now that the Encyclopedia Britannica has gone completely digital. But Wikipedia has remained largely inaccessible for students in remote corners of the world where English, German, French and Dutch are not spoken — languages that receive the most Wikipedia coverage.

Wikidata, a new project from the Wikimedia Foundation, plans to change that by creating a free knowledge base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike, making updating and translating processes easier and more efficient. Through this new project, Wikipedia will provide data in all of the languages of other Wikimedia projects. Announced in February at the Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin, the new project promises to be groundbreaking in both its approach and scope of its audience:

“Wikidata is a simple and smart idea, and an ingenious next step in the evolution of Wikipedia,” said Dr. Mark Greaves, Vice President of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “It will transform the way that encyclopedia data is published, made available, and used by a global audience. Wikidata will build on semantic technology that we have long supported, will accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, and will create an extraordinary new data resource for the world.”

Photo Credit: www.thehindu.com

And that’s including parts of the world that have long been left out of Wikipedia coverage because of language barriers and the digital divide. Though the project is still in its initial stages, the first phase of the project will take place over the next several months as the development team creates one Wikidata page for each Wikipedia entry for over 280 supported languages. By using a unified data management system, data entered in any language will immediately be available in all other languages and editing in any language will be possible and encouraged by the projects completion, slated for March 2013.

The initial development of Wikidata is being funded in part by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through its Science program, both of which see enormous potential for Wikidata and the role it will play in creating common formats for online data:

“It is important for science,” said Chris Mentzel, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation science program officer. “Wikidata will both provide an important data service on top of Wikipedia, and also be an easy-to-use, downloadable software tool for researchers, to help them manage and gain value from the increasing volume and complexity of scientific data.”

Wikipedia’s development team is not new to revolutionary ideas and raising standards. Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation, was quoted several years ago for his vision of “a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” For students in parts of the world where online educational resources in their native language are far and few between, Wikidata promises to take one step closer to this goal.

April 4, 2012/by actualize

Mobile Money, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Introduction of Microinsurance into Mobile Banking’s Product Suite

Banner for Telenor's mobile banking product

Photo Credit: CGAP

As written in this blog before, there has been continued innovation in the mobile banking sector in developing countries this year. But, as surmised by CGAP, there is a greater need to find a balance of products that meet the specific needs of those who traditionally have not had access to formal financial services. While mobile payments, transfers, credit and savings have all expanded using the branchless banking model, there has been a lack of products that provide insurance via mobile phones. That is not to say that microinsurance has not been available in the past. But its availability came from the social sector side, instead of the private side. But there has been a shift as the business case becomes more valuable to both insurers and mobile network providers alike.

Just over a year ago, Swiss Re, re-insurance company, stated that the market size for microinsurance for those making under $4 a day in developing countries totals $40 billion. For businesses, that is a tough opportunity to miss. But simply because the market is there does not make it a profitable opportunity. Many of the targeted customers live in rural regions and have never purchased insurance. With a lack of access and knowledge, the case for profitability would need to include a large upfront investment. But technology and innovation can help to fill in those access and knowledge gaps. According to a recent report by Accenture entitled “Succeeding at microinsurance through differentiation, innovation and partnership,” technology offers real-time connectivity, flexibility and scalability which will help insurance companies to reach new customers in emerging markets. With an estimation of 2.3 billion people who are low-income and need to protect their income and assets, Accenture argues that insurance companies need to view these potential customers as “tomorrow’s premium prospects.” A clear example of this is the millions of individuals who have rose out of poverty through the economic prosperity in China and India over the last decade. By providing products that fit the needs of low-income customers, companies can build brand loyalty and reputation in these regions and reap the benefits as their customers improve their economic state.

As stated in the report, the need to leverage technology in order to reach the customers will be key to creating the short and long term business cases. By permitting customers to purchase and/or manage their accounts via mobile phone, this allows for the business structure to be profitable in the short-term. At least that would have to be the rational thinking as MNO (mobile network operators) are partnering with banks and insurance providers to offer a suite of financial service products (including microinsurance) to their customers.

Two Recent Examples

As a part of a larger suite of products, Airtel Ghana has partnered with uniBank Ghana Limited and Star Microinsurance to provide insurance free-of-charge to Airtel’s subscribers using their mobile money product. As long as the customer maintains an average minimum balance of GHC 5 (roughly $2.84) at the end of every month, they, along with their direct family, will be covered by insurance. Airtel Ghana sees the partnership and new products leading to an improved return on assets, an increase in the customer base and the creation of a one-stop shop for uniBank clients. But one of the challenges will customers registration as an individual must have a valid photo ID and complete an application along with having an Airtel SIM card.

In Pakistan, the MNO Telenor also will be releasing a free microinsurance product through Easypaisa, a branchless banking services company. Easypaisa was created in 2009 by Telenor Pakistan and their Tameer Micro Finance Bank. The free life insurance will be provided through Easypaisa and in partnership with Adamjee Life Insurance Company Limited (also located in Pakistan).

As you can see, mobile technology and the focus of creating value-added service by MNOs has increased the access to microinsurance in developing nations. Even in Kenya, insurance associations are pushing their members to utilize mobile phones in order to reach clients in new and untapped markets. In the push to increase access to financial services, the business cases for microinsurance are being shaped around mobile technology. And amazingly enough the insurance is being provided for free.

April 3, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Health, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

More Randomized Controlled Trials in mHealth Please!

mHealth is by no means the magic bullet (I believe there is no magic in international development; every situation is so different and complex for one solution). But it could help to improve the public health workforce or women’s health in developing countries. In order to determine this, there needs to be further field research. And it needs to focus around the true impact of the intervention. While the social sciences are imperfect and it is very difficult to know an intervention’s true impact (meaning if the mobile device is removed, how different would the outcome be), there is a best practice to assess the true impact – Randomized Controlled Trails.

There are multiple examples of projects providing “evidence,” but they tend to only show who has been reached (reproductive health information was received by 20,000 mothers). We need further evidence to show that mobile phones and/or their content are creating the sought behavior change. mHealth could be like microfinance where there has been a lack of evidence showing the impact of it on families. But, knowing this, microfinance is still essential for the bottom of the pyramid to access necessary formal financial services (savings/insurance/credit). In the same light, mhealth tools help fill in gaps (ie sending information via text message instead of walking it in paper form). But does it really make a community health worker (CHW) more effective and efficient at their jobs? It will give women and families reproductive health information. But does it improve ART intake or change a women’s behavior? These are the questions that must be answered in order to know the true impact of mhealth applications.

To the benefit of the sector, RCTs have and are being conducted. At the ICTD 2012 Conference in Atlanta a few weeks ago, Brian DeRenzi, who completed his Ph D at University of Washington in the department of Computer Science and Engineering, presented his paper entitled “Improving Community Health Worker Performance Through Automated SMS.” As the title indicates, the focus of his research was testing the impact of reminders via SMS to CHW’s follow up visits to their patients. The study was conducted in Tanzania and in collaboration with D-Tree International, Pathfinder International, and Dimagi. It included one pilot project and two larger studies. In the end, the reminders reduced the average number of days between follow up visits to patients by CHWs. This is a clear benefit to helping improve the care provided to patients. But the study also provided further knowledge into issues with patient reminders to CHWs. This included the benefit of having the supervisor of the CHWs receive a SMS reminder if their employee did not conduct a follow up visit. When the supervisor was taken out of the equation, the performance of CHWs decreased considerably. This is an important design aspect to the program that could have been missed without a RCT. By testing the removal of the supervisor, it showed that the mobile phones helped but combining it with the supervisor’s real time knowledge of their work provided greater incentive to the CHWs to follow up with greater regularity with their patients.

Another example of an RCT currently in progress is in Ethiopia. In a very similar study, Kate Otto, from the World Bank, is working in collaboration with Addis Ababa University to test the impact of mhealth interventions on the care provided by Health Extension Workers (HEWs) in rural areas to women and child (In Ethiopia, the HEWs are equivalent to CHWs in Tanzania). The research question is “does the use of a mobile phone-based tool enabling patient registration, appointment reminders, and inventory management – in the hands of Health Extension Workers – result in improved maternal and child health outcomes in a rural Ethiopian setting?” The goal is to find evidence supporting the use of mhealth interventions with HEWs.

Since these RCTs seem very similar, it would be easy to say that the World Bank and Addis Ababa University should have simply copied the intervention and implementation of the best practices learned in Tanzania. But this is the power of RCTs. Since each region is different with varying degrees of complexity, solutions that work in one area will not produce the same outcomes in another. Just because a program and intervention worked one place does not mean the same model or theory will work in another setting (see m-Pesa). The benefit of RCTs is that it will assist in finding interventions that will provide a solution for the region/country. This is especially necessary in the mhealth sector as the complexity of each situation dictates the need for specific program requires. But we are not sure what those are. The benefit of RCTs is that it can remove these variables and focus directly on the how and why interventions work or not, especially in behavior change. And as shown in Tanzania, it helps us understand what is and provides insight into areas of improvements.

Funding is always going to be an issue with RCTs. But the knowledge gained makes up for the investment by further understanding the true impact (if any) of the device. In the end, we need to find answers to what changes behavior, especially the role of mhealth in the change. There has been a greater increase in RCTs in mHealth projects to test how mobile phones and their applications are improving health. But there needs to be more done.

For those interested in learning more about M+E in global health programs, there will be a panel through GHDonline.org at the beginning of April. Please find further information about the panel here.

April 3, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Education, Education Partnerships, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Where is the NEPAD e-School Initiative Now?

Image from ypia.org.za

Many in the aid and ICT4E community know NEPAD — the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) — and probably remember the launch of the e-School Initative, first announced during the Africa Summit of the World Economic Forum in June 2003. As part of the overarching objective of the NEPAD program to enhance Africa’s growth, development and participation in the global economy, the e-School component involves a complex implementation strategy involving a multi-country, multi-stakeholder, and multi-stage approach to introduce ICT use and support to 600,000 schools across Africa. But now, close to ten years after the initiative was first introduced, what progress has it made?

That’s what participants and leaders of the NEPAD e-School Initiative discussed when they gathered in Accra, Ghana earlier this week for the two-day NEPAD e-School Regional ECOWAS Conference. Reverend Emmanuel Dadebo, Head of the Teacher Education Division of Ghana Education Service, led the discussion and press event, emphasizing the project’s need for a business plan that promotes private sector investment by introducing a new Private Public Partnership (PPP) model.

The conference comes after five years of discussion and debate concerning the key findings made during the initial phase of the e-School Initiative — the “NEPAD e-Schools Demo”. The purpose of the Demo was to accrue a body of knowledge, based on real-life experiences of implementing ICT in schools across the African continent, in order to inform the rollout of the NEPAD e-Schools Initiative. The program was implemented in six schools in each of 16 countries across Africa through partnerships that involved private sector consortia, the country government and the NEPAD e-Africa Commission (eAC), which is responsible for the development and implementation of the NEPAD ICT program.

Photo Credit: computersforcharities.co.uk

Though various stakeholders and members of the aid community consider the Demo successful in some ways, like introducing ICT hubs into rural communities, most agree that it remains unsustainable in its current form. A report released by infoDev and the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) back in 2007 entitiled “The NEPAD e-Schools Demonstration Project: A Work in Progress”, highlights the realization of this challenge within the early stages of the Demo and stressed the need for dialogue between all stakeholders:

“The expectations that implementation of the Demo would occur within a few months of it being announced in the participating countries, and, that a Business Plan would be developed to address sustainability and future rollout, were not met, and explanations for the delays were not effectively communicated. The disappointment and cynicism that resulted in some of the participating countries underlines the oft-learned rule of project management: Communicate! Communicate! Communicate!”

Like many development projects of this kind, and on such a large scale, lessons like these take time to learn and often come from trial and error. Shafika Isaacs, the founding executive director of SchoolNet Africa and a member of the monitoring and evaluation team for the report concluded saying this:

“Never before has there really been a program that mobilised national government participation and leadership at the official continental level in the way the NEPAD e-Schools vision has. Further, it has brought the private sector into partnerships that, while experiencing growing pains, has mobilised resources in a way that few other projects have been able to do. And there is much yet to learn about doing this in an optimal way.”

Exactly how much has been learned between 2007 and now, has yet to be seen. Several news articles have claimed that the program has already benefited several schools in Ghana and according to a statement given in Accra at the e-Schools conference, Ghana will launch the next phase of NEPAD e-Schools later this year. The program’s methods of monitoring and evaluating these benefits and ensuring effectiveness and transparency are unclear. However, with more buy-in from the private sector and the introduction of a new business model, it’s clear that some progress is being made and a more sustainable future for the e-Schools Initiative could be within reach.

March 30, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

NMC Horizon Report for Higher Education: What to Expect from ICT in the Next 5 Years

Photo Credit: hsctoolkit.bis.gov.uk

Of all of the new innovations in ICTs — mobile apps and games, open educational resources (OER), and everything else related to ICT for education (ICT4E) — which will be the most important in the next five years?

That’s just one of the questions that the new NMC Horizon Report: 2012 Higher Education Edition aims to answer. The report was released last month by the New Media Consortium (NCM), an international community of experts in educational technology, and Educause, a nonprofit association which aims to advance higher education by promoting intelligent use of information technology.

The report charts the path of emerging technology innovations, trends, and challenges in higher education from around the world to highlight which have the most potential for impact within the next several years. It’s the ninth edition of a decade-long research project and over 450 technology and education experts from more than 30 countries have contributed to the research, discussions, and conclusions made in the report since the NMC Horizon Project began in 2002.

What to expect within the next 12 months:

Mobile Apps

As the fastest growing component of mobile technology, students are using these for formal and informal learning, teachers are using them to be more efficient and innovative in their classrooms, and both are enabling apps for research, ePublishing, recording, etc.

Tablet Computing:

Now preferred in a growing number of classrooms in the developed world, tablets cause less disruption than mobile phones, can be easily stowed and used for field and lab work, and allow one-to-one computing opportunities, usually at an affordable price.

2-3 Years:

Game-Based Learning

This has been a fast-growing field within recent years and there are now more studies and reports that offer quantitative data on its effectiveness in education. The report highlights educational gaming as an important tool for fostering student collaboration and engagement in the learning process.

Learning Analytics

A valuable tool for teachers, this allows educators to record, process, and track student achievement and engagement. This data can lead to curricula revision, teaching assessments, and improved teaching methodologies.

4-5 Years

Gesture-Based Computing

This enables students to learn by doing. From touchscreens to voice interpretation software, students use gesture-based computing to expand their ICT-enabled learning opportunities to encompass embodied learning. The report expects that this technology will soon develop to allow numerous students to use large multi-touch displays for collaborative learning.

The Internet of Things

This emerging technology provides online data about an object’s unique characteristics and allows students to record, study, and learn about the physical world around them. The potential benefits for this technology in education are still being explored.

Key Trends:

A rise in student expectations to be able to work and study whenever and wherever they want
More advances in cloud-based technologies and applications
An increase in student collaboration as project-structures change with new technologies
Teachers will continue to be challenged and redefine their roles with the addition of new resources and relationships
New models of learning, like hybrid and online learning, will change education paradigms
Teachers will use more active and challenge-based learning methods

Photo credit: www.latestdigitals.com

Current Challenges:

Traditional Models of teaching are being challenged by new ones enhanced by technology; often the two compete to find a balance that ensures the quality of education.
Research, authoring, and publishing methods are expanding with the growing use of social media in research; many academics still do not accept these new methods as valid.
Demand for digital media literacy continues to rise in work and educational settings, however it is still rare in teacher education and training.
Emerging technologies are slow to be adopted by teachers on a large scale because of their conflict with traditional teaching models and their self-perceived role and comfort level.
University Libraries are challenged with determining how to categorize and support scholarly resources made available through social media and open content, and how to evolve with this growing trend.

For further reading, each section of the report concludes with a list of resources and examples of how the technology is already being used in higher education. In addition, these and additional resources can be found in an online database on the NMC Horizon Project Navigator website.

March 28, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

GraphoGAME: ICT-Enabled Game is Improving Literacy in Low-Income Countries

Photo Credit: TodayHeads.com

Remember “Hooked on Phonics“? The famous infomercials from the 90’s that promised an educational video series could improve children’s reading scores through phonic-based learning methods?

GraphoGAME, a digital-based phonics learning game developed in Finland, is proving to be just as effective for children in low-income countries and as easily accessible through an array of ICT devices. Developed at the Agora Human Technology Center of the University of Jyväskylä in collaboration with the Niilo Mäki Institute, the game has already been developed in numerous languages — Bantu Languages in Africa, English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, etc. — to improve literacy where access to sources of high-quality education is limited.

GraphoGAME promotes literacy development by teaching children to form letter-sound associations instead of simply memorizing letter symbols and names. By using fun and entertaining activities, the child becomes engaged and progresses as the game becomes increasingly difficult according to their progress. It starts by introducing basic sounds and gradually progresses to complicated sound combinations.

The research team and developers didn’t design GraphoGAME to replace the role of teachers in literacy learning, but instead promote its value as a powerful learning aid when placed in an educational setting where there are challenges to literacy development. For example, it would be a valuable resource in classrooms where teachers use rote learning — often considered a barrier to meaningful learning and is pervasive throughout the developing world.

The idea for GraphoGAME was introduced in the early 1990’s after Finnish researcher, Heikki Lyytinen, conducted a series of studies on children with dyslexia to identify predictors that could anticipate problems in literacy education. Using these findings and with funding from the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, the research team developed the first version of the educational game for children in Finland, and in 2011 expanded the project to address illiteracy in other countries.

Image from GraphoGAME

To support the expansion, the GraphoGAME developers created a larger project called the Grapho Learning Initiative which is divided into four focus areas: GraphoGAME, GraphoWORLD, GraphoREAD, and GraphoLEARN.

GraphoWORLD is a network of university professors and researchers from around the world who are working together to develop non-commercial technologies to improve literacy. In order to address each country’s unique orthography (system of spelling) and general learning environment, researchers conduct studies and assessments to support the effictiveness of GraphoGAME within that particular country.

GraphoREAD is a promising research project on eReading platforms and the business models to support them within low-income countries. This is a valuable addition to the GraphoGAME project and the research team is working to ensure that high-quality reading materials are made available for children developing literacy skills.

GraphoLEARN is an entity that will be created after the GraphoREAD research is completed and analysed to support the production of the learning materials identified in the research.

There are a number of videos online that can offer a brief introduction to the format of the games and the educational philosophy behind them. You can also go to the GraphoGAME website to try some of the games yourself.

March 23, 2012/by actualize

Democracy & Governance, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Does ‘openness’ enhance development?

Does ‘openness’ enhance development?

This was the question explored in a packed Room 3 (and via livestream and Twitter) on the last day of the ICTD2012 Conference in Atlanta, GA.

Panelists included Matthew Smith from the International Development Research Center (IDRC), Soren Gigler from the World Bank, Varun Arora from the Open Curriculum Project and Ineke Buskens from Gender Research in Africa into ICTs for Empowerment (GRACE). The panel was organized by Tony Roberts and Caitlin Bentley, both pursuing PhD’s at ICT4D at Royal Holloway, University of London. I was involved as moderator.

As background for the session, Caitlin set up a wiki where we all contributed thoughts and ideas on the general topic.

“Open development” (sometimes referred to as “Open ICT4D“) is defined as:

“an emerging area of knowledge and practice that has converged around the idea that the opening up of information (e.g. open data), processes (e.g. crowdsourcing) and intellectual property (e.g. open source) has the potential to enhance development.”

Tony started off the session explaining that we’d come together as people interested in exploring the theoretical concepts and the realities of open development and probing some of the tensions therein. The wiki does a good job of outlining the different areas and tension points, and giving some background, additional links and resources.

[If you’re too short on time or attention to read this post, see the Storify version here.]

Matthew opened the panel giving an overview of ‘open development,’ including 3 key areas: open government, open access and open means of production. He noted that ICTs can be enablers of these and that within the concept of ‘openness’ we also can find a tendency towards sharing and collaborating. Matthew’s aspiration for open development is to see more experimentation and institutional incentives towards openness. Openness is not an end unto itself, but an element leading to better development outcomes.

Soren spoke second, noting that development is broken, there is a role for innovation in fixing it, and ‘open’ can contribute to that. Open is about people, not ICTs, he emphasized. It’s about inclusion, results and development outcomes. To help ensure that what is open is also inclusive, civil society can play an ‘infomediary‘ role between open data and citizens. Collaboration is important in open development, including co-creation and partnership with a variety of stakeholders. Soren gave examples of open development efforts including Open Aid Partnership; Open Data Initiative; and Kenya Open Government Portal.

Varun followed, with a focus on open educational resources (OER), asking how ordinary people benefit from “open”. He noted that more OER does not necessarily lead to better educational outcomes. Open resources produced in, say, the US are not necessarily culturally appropriate for use in other places. Open does not mean unbiased. Open can also mean that locally produced educational resources do not flourish. Varun noted that creative commons licenses that restrict to “non-commercial” use can demotivate local entrepreneurship. He also commented that resources like those from Khan Academy assume that end users have a computer in their home and a broadband connection.

Ineke spoke next, noting that ‘open’ doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Sometimes power relations become more apparent when things become open. She gave the example of a project that offered free computer use in a community, yet men dominated the computers, computers were available during hours when women could not take advantage of them, and women were physically pushed away from using the computers. ‘This only has to happen once or twice before all the women in the community get the message,’ she noted. The intent behind ‘open’ is important, and it’s difficult to equalize the playing field in one small area when working within a broader context that is not open and equalized. She spoke of openness as performance, and emphasized the importance of thinking through the questions: openness for whom? openness for what?

[Each of the presenters holds a wealth of knowledge on this topic and I’d encourage you to explore their work in more detail!]

Following the short comments from panelists, the room split into several groups for about 15 minutes to discuss points, tensions, and questions on the concept of open development. (See the bottom of the wiki page for the full list of questions.)

We came back together in plenary to discuss points from the room and those coming in from Twitter, including:

Should any research done with public funds be publicly open and available? This was a fundamental values question for some.
Can something be open and not public? Some said that no, if it’s open it needs to be public. Others countered that there is some information that should not be public because it can put people at risk or invade privacy. Others discussed that open goods are not necessarily public goods, rather they are “club” goods that are only open to certain members of society, in this case, those of a certain economic and education level. It was noted that public access does not equal universal availability, and we need to go beyond access in this discussion.
Is openness fundamentally decentralizing or does it lead to centralization? Some commented that the World Bank, for example, by making itself “open” it can dominate the development debate and silence voices that are not within that domain. Others felt that power inequalities exist whether there is open data or not. Another point of view was that the use of a particular technique can change people without it being the express intent. For example, some academic journals may have been opening up their articles from the beginning. This is probably not because they want to be ‘nice’ but because they want to keep their powerful position, however the net effect can still be positive.
How to ensure it’s not data for data’s sake? How do we broker it? How do we translate it into knowledge? How does it lead to change? ‘A farmer in Niger doesn’t care about the country’s GDP,’ commented one participant. It’s important to hold development principles true when looking at ‘openness’. Power relations, gender inequities, local ownership, all these aspects are still something to think about and look at in the context of ‘openness’.

The general consensus was that it is important to fight the good fight, yes, but don’t lose sight of the ultimate goal. Open for whom? Open for what?

As organizers of the session, we were all quite pleased at the turnout and the animated debate and high level of interest in the topic of ‘open development’. A huge thanks to the panelists and the participants. We are hoping to continue the discussions throughout the coming months and to secure a longer session (and a larger room) for the next ICTD conference!

Note: New Tactics is discussing “Strengthening Citizen Participation in Local Governance” this week. There are some great resources there that could help to ground the discussion on ‘open development’.

Visit the ‘does openness enhance development’ wiki for a ton of resources and background on ‘open development’!

March 22, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

TED Announces New TED-Ed Initiative: What Does it Mean for Development?

Image from TEDEd/YouTube

The ever-growing universal digital library, full of open educational and adaptable resources which allows teachers and students from around the world to pursue opportunities in distance learning, is about to raise its standards for a new initiative due to be launched in April —TED-Ed. TED, a nonprofit famous for its award-winning TED Talks devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading”, introduced its new “Lessons Worth Sharing” project last week and, according to its short introductory video, aims “to capture and amplify the voices of great educators around the world.”

By connecting exemplary teachers with animators, TED-Ed will produce videos — no longer than ten minutes each — capable of explaining innovative, thought-provoking, and challenging ideas through easy-to-understand visual representations. The TED-Ed initiative promises to bring the same high production values used in its TED Talks to create a valuable collection of resources, coupled with new interactive leaning tools, to improve education quality and promote life-long learning — that is, primarily in the US and English-speaking world.

Photo credit: Computers4Africa

So what does this mean for teachers from non-English speaking countries and the developing world? Though TED has not announced plans to translate each of the TED-Ed lessons, its TED Open-Translation Project has already provided subtitles and interactive transcripts for many of its TED Talks — currently 86 languages and counting — so it’s possible they’ll do the same for the lessons. And if they do and plans are made to use TED-Ed lessons within a foreign context, could the content be ‘open’ and easily adaptable to be considered culturally appropriate for different educational settings?

These are some of the questions that the ICT4E sector and the international teaching community need to start asking. With so much of the focus being placed now on how using digital devices like tablets and mobile phones will affect the delivery of educational information, the importance of improving the quality of that information is easily being pushed aside. So who better to raise the standards for this quality than organizations like TED who have made so many complex ideas like nuclear fusion and how cymatics work to be understandable and relatable, presented by experts in their given fields and directed to a diverse audience of learners.

This is a revolutionary idea when considering the ways in how to raise the poor quality of education in many schools throughout the developing world. Imagine how students’ — and teachers’ — comprehension of STEM subjects could be improved if the teacher-centered pedagogy used in many classrooms today was enhanced by supplementary videos explaining new ideas through understandable terminology and images for visually-inclined learners. Moreover, imagine the effects it could have on teachers’ teaching methods if they adopted some of the conversational-style approaches used in the videos.

Image from Khan Academy

Though TED-Ed’s teaching style and delivery method is unique, Innovators and creative thinkers in distance learning have already been exploring this territory of open educational resources (OER) and organized open education since the 90’s. The Khan Academy, a not-for-profit organization created in 2006 that has pioneered the free open educational video platform, has already created a vast digital library of over 3,000 online videos covering various subjects, though mainly in the maths and sciences. Having delivered over 131 million lessons, Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, has impressive goals for the organization and aims to create “the world’s first free, world-class virtual school where anyone can learn anything.” Given Salman Khan’s stature and notoriety in the field of distance learning, he was featured as one of the speakers at the TED 2011 conference when the TED-Ed initiative was first announced to the TED community.

So what can we expect from TED-Ed in the future? If its lessons are as interesting, well-structured and thought-provoking as TED talks, students are in for a pleasant change from their usual lecture-based lessons. And hopefully TED-Ed will have a similar approach to that of the Khan Academy to contribute to and enhance the universal digital library while considering what it means for education quality around the world.

March 21, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Can Video Instruction Improve Education Quality in Low-Resource Schools? 7 Important Lessons from India

Photo Credit: www.popsci.com

If education quality is largely dependent on the teaching capacity of educators, wouldn’t integrating video instruction from expert teachers into low-resource schools’ curricula seem like a good idea?

Digital StudyHall (DSH), a program that has pioneered Facilitated Video Instruction for primary school education in low-resource settings since 2005, might seem revolutionary to the improvement of education quality in theory. However, a team of researchers from the University of Washington and the StudyHall Educational Foundation recently completed a two-year study in government primary schools in Northern India which concluded that might not be the case.

The Facilitated Video Instruction in Low Resource Schools report detailing the study and research results was presented at the International conference on information and communication technologies and development (ICT4D2012) last Tuesday in Atlanta, and offers valuable insight into the core challenges that prevent the project’s scalability and sustainability, as well as a few lessons that the whole ICT4E sector could benefit from.

Over the course of two years, researchers observed and compared the use of DSH in eleven schools on the outskirts of a large city in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, one of the most populated and least developed provinces in India. With the approval of the Indian government and while adhering to the national curriculum, the team introduced video recordings of high-performing teachers into low-performing classrooms and conducted quantitative and qualitative studies to measure the impact of this educational intervention. The team also held technical training seminars for participating teachers and helped establish electrical connections to support the TVs and DVD players.

Setting out, the researchers expected to see positive quantitative results in student competencies and noticeable improvements in the participating teachers’ teaching skills. However, within this cultural context, a number of variables such as student test scores heavily influenced by cheating and a large number of student and teacher absences during harvest seasons, prevented the researchers from collecting reliable quantitative data.

Though the researchers saw positive improvements in some of the participating teachers’ pedagogy during DSH and throughout the rest of their teaching — based primarily on their ability to use the interactive teaching methods displayed by the model teachers in the videos — other teacher’s were not receptive to working with DSH staff and two schools had to drop from the program due to theft of equipment.

So while the report ultimately concludes that the project is not sustainable in this particular context, at least not without substantial support from outside organizations, here’s a few lessons we can take away from this project:

Teacher buy-in is essential. The major contributor to successful programs in the study was having at least one motivated staff member who was passionate about teaching, as well as having support from strong school leadership.

It is critical that all of the participants — teachers, principals, students — view the educational intervention as valuable relative to available options. This should help to ensure sustainability and reduce incidents of equipment theft.

Photo Credit: Teach for India

The main obstacle to scalability is the educator’s view of their profession and personal teaching capacity, as well as their commitment to education. Teachers must value their role as an educator in order to have incentive to continue to grow professionally and use effective teaching strategies.

Educational context matters. The content and format of the lessons should reflect the cultural context in which they are used. In other words, is it appropriate for the target audience considering what teaching methods they are already familiar with? In a context like India’s where the teaching profession is respected in the community but is divided between credentialed teachers and paraeducators, what are the impacts of introducing a teaching aid that might undermine the efficacy of a teacher’s previous training and teaching skills?

The improvement of the participating teacher’s pedagogy is essential and progress should be continually monitored. Teachers should show progress in using student-centered teaching methodologies to be considered effective. For example, do they ask questions and initiate discussion? Do they check for student understanding?

Programs of this kind should supplement a teacher’s instruction, not replace it. A teacher can learn just as much as the students can from educational videos — especially if they have not received the proper training for teaching their assigned subject — but without improving the teacher’s teaching strategies, the project’s overall goal cannot be achieved.

Photo Credit: www.mtestsite.com

Socio-economic issues can indirectly be addressed within video content. The report notes that the students in the videos were all girls and came from poor, urban backgrounds. The participating students responded well to their video peers, sometimes interacting with them, like clapping for their video peers who answered a question correctly, small details that can have positive lasting effects. (A recent blog entitled What Sesame Street Can Teach the World Bank by Michael Trucano, offers additional lessons in developing this kind of valuable video content)

The DHS researchers anticipate that as the ICT4D field matures, there will be increasing emphasis on larger evaluation studies. Until then, facilitated video instruction programs need more program refinement and teacher buy-in to be considered a worthwhile investment.

March 16, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Health, Mobile Money, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

The Intersection of mHealth and mFinance: A mHealth Alliance Report

Photo Credit: mHealth Alliance

The mHealth Alliance recently released their second white paper on the interconnection between mobile health and mobile finance services. Entitled “Advancing the Dialogue on Mobile Finance and Mobile Health: Country Case Studies” and co-authored by Menekse Gencer, Founder of mPay Connect, and Jody Ranck, the report focused on four separate countries with varying degrees of intersection between mHealth and mFinance – Ghana, Haiti, Kenya, and the Philippines.

The report was commissioned in order to further explore how business models in the mHealth sector have leveraged mobile financial services (MFS) to improve the access and reach of health care in developing countries. The objectives included identifying new use cases that have shown promise at strengthening health systems, showing the characteristics in markets that have allowed MFS to improve the health care system, and recognizing the trends and challenges in how MFS can be implemented into mHealth projects. The goal is to continue to open the eyes of health providers, NGOs, MNOs, and government health agencies in developing countries to the ways that MFS can increase the care provided to the poor.

Benefits of Using MFS in Health Care

The authors make the argument in the report that mHealth can be assisted by MFS along the entire continuum of care (pre-pregnancy, pregnancy, birth, and postnatal) at multiple levels – patient, provider and administrative. Its uses at the patient level include all aspects of formal financial services (savings, insurance, and credit) to help smooth consumption as well as mobile money transfers to pay for medical services or transportation via cash. For providers, MFS allows for quicker remote payments to occur for health services and products along the supply chain and settlement of patient vouchers. Finally, at the administrative level, mobile payments allow remote and unbanked health workers to receive their salaries and reimbursements as well as for families to receive conditional cash transfers.

Countries

The countries selected have a diverse infrastructure in the MFS market and drivers from the private or public sectors, but the authors discovered three trends in each country:

1. A significant health concern that needed to be met

2. MFS had already launched in the markets

3. Either the business model, the quality of the services, or the accessibility of critical healthcare services was suboptimal without the use of MFS.

In Ghana, insurance has been pushed by the government. In a partnership with two MNOs (MTN and Tigo), Microensure has provided customers on the networks with life insurance. The drivers for this service included the need for assistance in covering funeral costs, the lack of a public option for life insurance, and consumer demand of insurance products which was caused by the government’s push to educate its citizens on health.

In Haiti, the driver of MFS in mHealth was the effect of the earthquake in 2010. After grants were provided to MNOs to develop mobile money services after the earthquake, the MNOs saw an opportunity to expand their services into mHealth with the cholera outbreak. This includes utilizing MFS to dispense medical supplies to stop the spread of the disease across the country.

The Philippines is the first country to heavily adopt MFS, and now they are leveraging the large adoption rate to provide health services. The government is now supporting the use of mHealth to reduce maternal and neonatal mortality rates through the well-developed MFS infrastructure. This includes payment for health products and vouchers for health services.

Finally, Kenya has utilized M-Pesa to pay for medical services and transportation at the patient level, payments for remote diagnostics at the provider level, and dispensing of conditional cash transfers and salary payments at the administrative level. M-Pesa was the driver along with Universal Health Care (UHC) in Kenya.

Key Challenges and Future Trends

The authors noted that there were multiple challenges discovered in their research and included brief look into the future of MFS and mHealth. The challenges included the MNOs desire for exclusive partnerships, scaling of services that need greater customer information, risks of cross-sector initiatives in markets with low mobile money adoption rates, shared phones which make it difficult to implement ID management systems, and exorbitant setup costs because of lack of interoperability between mobile money providers. As for the future, the authors see that these challenges will decrease with increased adoption rates of MFS and the decrease of the costs of utilizing MFS in the mHealth sector. Finally, the authors see a greater need for quality data to be accessible by both healthcare and financial service providers. The idea is that more quality data about a patient’s health and finances will allow for micro-insurance to be provided. It would allow for re-insurance to be provided to private or public insurance schemes to provide greater protection to those providing the insurance. The authors see a lack of movement in this space because of this lack of data. They see technology as a tool that would provide this information and expand the reach of insurance to the poor.

March 16, 2012/by actualize

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