Tag Archive for: low-cost technologies

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Tangerine: Early Grade Reading Assessments Go Digital

Photo Credit: eddataglobal.org

The Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA), a tool used in over 50 low-income countries and 70 languages to measure students’ progress toward learning to read, is going digital through its new Tangerine™ platform.  The mobile software application designed by RTI International specifically for recording student responses during the administration of the EGRA can now be used by organizations and governments to simplify preparation and implementation of fieldwork, reduce measurement and data entry errors, and eliminate manual data entry.

The EGRA is a 15-minute test administered orally to students in the early grades of primary school.  It was designed by RTI International under USAID’s EdDAta II project to help educators in low-income countries break the pattern of illiteracy among their poor. Since 2006, the EGRA has been used to evaluate students’ foundation literacy skills, including pre-reading skills like phonemic awareness and listening comprehension, which have been shown to predict later reading abilities. Using test results, education ministries and their donor partners are then able to identify and address learning barriers to develop strategies to improve literacy.

But now Tangerine has taken the paper-based EGRA tool to a new level of efficiency. The open-source electronic data collection software can be used on mobile computers, including netbooks, tablet computers and smartphones to enable assessment administrators to:

  • Simplify the preparation and implementation of field work
  • Reduce measurement and data entry errors
  • Eliminate costly, time-consuming manual data entry
  • Provide rapid turnaround of results

Through these advantages and the analysis of results of student populations, policy makers and organizations can respond even sooner to challenges within an education system.  They can also develop appropriate strategies to improve early-age literacy rates, such as improving teacher training programs and curriculum materials.

In addition to the Tangerine EGRA software, RTI developers are currently developing two new tools that can be used by teachers themselves in their own classrooms:

  • Tangerine:Class – a version of Tangerine tailored specifically for teachers to assist in developing and administering classroom based math and reading assessments and interpreting results to inform their instructional practice.
  • Tangerine:Teach – a tool that can interpret results from Tangerine:Class to identify and develop learning materials to address student weaknesses.

To learn more about Tangerine:

The Edutech Debate posted a blog, ICT and the Early Grade Reading Assessment: From Testing to Teaching by RTI’s Carmen Strigel, which offers an in-depth analysis of Tangerine’s application and cost benefits.

There is also a brief video of EGRA being administered using Tangerine.

 

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Slums, Youth and the Mobile Internet in Urban India: An Anthropological Case Study for ICT4D

Photo Credit: www.dailycontributor.com

Omar, 19 years old and living in an urban slum in India, is an early mobile internet user who repairs mobile phones in his brother‘s store. “This is magic in my palms,” he says valuing the weight of his mobile phone, not only in his hands, but in his day-to-day life. “God knows what I would do without this. I download songs and listen to them all day, I download movies and watch them in the night when I get back home, I play games in between servicing client, I change my internet plans as and when I come across a great one that gives me the most for the least.”

Omar is certainly not the only teenager in his slum who is fascinated with mobile technology. It’s this appreciation for ICT and its various uses for finding comfort — a way of managing and building personal technology infrastructures as an important element in conducting one’s own life — that Microsoft researchers wanted to portray in a new report, Anthropology, Development and ICTs: Slums, Youth and the Mobile Internet in Urban India. The report aimed to bring awareness to the ICT for development (ICT4D) community of the important insights that be gained from anthropological studies within an understanding of what drives a specific user population to adopt technologies in specific ways: even if the latter is only for entertainment purposes.

Researchers observed how twenty underprivileged teenagers living in a slum used ICT in their day-to-day lives by employing a variety of qualitative methods, including open-ended interviews, observations of community life, and semi-structured baseline surveys. They focused their findings on:

1) Investigating everyday entry points for internet use

2) Identifying ways the internet is understood, accessed, used and shared in multiple ways among the user population

3) Qualifying the social paths sustaining the persistence of internet use among teenagers in a constrained infrastructural environment — specifically that of an urban slum.

The report offers a fascinating anthropological view of how ICT could, and perhaps should, be seen by the ICT4D community:

“If constrained technology environments such as urban slums or how youth use ICTs are legitimate interests for ICTD research, such concerns could pave way for a subtle yet vital exchange between the domains of anthropology and development with the aim to expand a utilitarian notion of ICTs and their role in human progress.”

With so much focus being given to ICT for education initiatives, this leads us to wonder: Should technology be introduced into communities where ICT has not yet been adopted? Or is it better that we first observe how technology is already being used, such as use of  mobile phones, and structure our education programs around these pre existing uses? The report suggests the latter and encourages ICT4D developers to consider all of the ways technology is already being used even if it doesn’t have the direct effects that we anticipate or fit a preconceived definition of “development”.

“Indeed, this may require us to broaden our view of how we think about what underlies a good ICTD research project and how we view a range of human behaviors as incremental to development. Rather than using the internet to search for educational material, the youth in our study search for music and Bollywood teasers. These are hardly developmental in any conventional sense, but more akin to behaviors of youth in any part of the globe! No doubt what begins as entertainment can lead to more serious activities.”

The report is certainly a welcome and valuable resource to developers in the ICT4D community.  The full report can be accessed here.

 

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ICT for Cholera Prevention and Outbreak Management in Haiti

Photo credit: www.vaccinenewsdaily.com

With the rainy season off to an early start in Haiti this spring, can technology help stave off the rising cholera epidemic?

That’s what several international aid and health organizations are considering now that the advantages of ICT — innovation, efficiency, fast-response time — are needed to meet the impending rainy season which promises to bring flooding and ultimately more cases of cholera.  Since the earthquake in 2010, more than 530,000 Haitians have fallen ill with cholera, and more than 7,000 have died — staggering numbers when considering the amount of international aid and health projects that have descended upon the country within the past two years.  ICT in all of its forms and all that it enables — low-cost mobile devices, open data and access, social media — could improve the response time and efficiency of health initiatives in the cholera crisis if properly implemented.

One example of how ICT is already being utilized to prevent more cases of cholera is a new vaccine campaign by GHESKIO, a health organization based in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in collaboration with Partners in Health, a non-profit healthcare organization that is well known for their efforts against the spread of cholera.  In order to identify recipients for the vaccines as efficiently and quickly as possible within a country where travel is difficult, community health workers went door-to-door collecting information about the potential recipients via smartphones. The information was then aggregated into a database to locate and distribute the vaccines to the 100,000 chosen recipients — a process that has just begun after a series of delays.

Utilizing mobile technology to combat the spread of cholera is not a new concept to Partners in Health.  In a campaign started just last year, community health workers have been using specially programmed phones to help track information about cholera patients in isolated communities throughout Haiti’s Central Plateau – an important step in gathering up-to-date infection data that could prevent more deaths.  “Receiving real-time cholera information from community health workers is crucial,” says Cate Oswald, Partner in Health’s Haiti-based program coordinator for community health.  “We need accurate and up-to-date reports in order to best prevent more cases and respond to quick spread of the epidemic.”

Social media has also played a large role in detecting and tracking the incidence of cholera outbreaks.  A study released in January by the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene reported that Twitter actually provided data that was faster and more accurate in some cases than traditional methods in tracking the cholera epidemic.  Not only does social media provide a fast response time, it “is cost-effective, rapid, and can be used to reach populations that otherwise wouldn’t have access to traditional healthcare or would not seek it”, said Rumi Chunara, a research fellow at HealthMap and Harvard Medical School in the US, and lead author of the study.

Image from haiti.mphise.net

HealthMap, an automated electronic information system for monitoring, organizing, and visualizing reports of global disease outbreaks according to geography, time, and infectious diseases, has been an important tool in helping inform Partners in Health and other health organizations about the spread of cholera in Haiti.  Not only does HealthMap track the spread of cholera, it also identifies new safe water installations, health facilities, cholera treatment centers, and emergency shelters.

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Addressing the Digital Divide in Latin American and Caribbean Schools

Photo credit: Katie Marney/The McGill Daily

Are schools in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) network ready?  If so, what does it mean for improving the equity and quality of education in that part of the world?

This is a complicated question, no doubt, and one that is going to be asked more frequently with the introduction of the new Broadband Partnership of the Americas which promises to provide connectivity to schools that generally have been considered disconnected from the rest of the world.  Moreover, this question seemingly ignores the unique cultural context and infrastructure of each country within the LAC region.  Providing internet access in schools is just one important variable in a complex equation that the Information and Communication Technology for Education (ICT4E) community struggles to understand when attempting to integrate technology into the classroom.  Does connectivity + ICT devices + digital content = better education?  Many would vehemently argue no when considering differences in quality and methods of delivery.

But the LAC region on the whole appears to have a different equation altogether and one that seemingly receives less attention than other “developing” parts of the world, such as parts of Africa that tend to be the testing ground for many new ICT4E initiatives.  When Latin America is mentioned in the ICT4E community, many often think of recent projects like OLPC deployments in Peru or Seeds of Empowerment’s initiatives in Argentina and Uruguay.  But these are mainly device-based programs and, without increased internet coverage in the region, many of the valuable open educational resources and distance learning opportunities available through internet access remain out of reach.

Internet Access in Schools from the World Economic Forum

According to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) new 2012 Global Information Technology Report, a comprehensive assessment of the preparedness of economies to leverage the networked economy, LAC’s Internet access in schools ranks well below its developed neighbors (see map on the right).  This is just one of many factors, along with education quality, level of adult literacy, and rate of secondary education enrollment, that the WEF considers when determining the “network readiness” of a country.

“Network readiness”, as defined by a complex framework which translates into the Network Readiness Index, is comprised of four subindexes that measure the environment for ICT; the readiness of a society to use ICT; the actual usage of all main stakeholders; and, finally, the impacts that ICT generates in the economy and society.  The report found that LAC’s network readiness ranking is lagging far behind “developed” countries for a number of reasons:

“Although the region is vast and heterogeneous, three shared reasons for this lag can be identified: these countries all exhibit an insufficient investment in developing their ICT infrastructure, a weak skill base in the population because of poor educational systems that hinder society’s capacity to make an effective use of these technologies, and unfavorable business conditions that do not support the spur of entrepreneurship and innovation.  Addressing these weaknesses will be crucial for improving the region’s competitiveness and shifting its economies toward more knowledge-based activities.”

Network Readiness Index from the World Economic Forum

Addressing the weaknesses in the educational systems throughout the LAC region creates a complicated question when considering the role that ICT4E plays:  How can technology be used effectively to improve an education system if the current system’s weaknesses and lack of technology expertise prevent technology from being integrated into the classrooms in the first place?  Obviously, a country’s network readiness — or even ICT4E readiness — is complex and addressing it requires a multifaceted approach.  For schools in the LAC region, improving internet access and expanding broadband technologies will address at least one aspect of the digital divide in education.

More information about ICT4E policies in LAC:

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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.

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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.

 


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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.

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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.

 

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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.

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Demystifying ICT4E Terminology: 10 Acronyms and Names You Should Know

Last week, amidst reading the various blogs and tweets for Open Education Week, I came across several acronyms that were unfamiliar.  Terms like Edupunk and Aakash are just a few of the terms that you simply have to “be in the know” in order to know.

Anyone new to the field of information and communication technology for education (ICT4E) might be a little overwhelmed at first by the plethora of acronyms, terminology, and program and developer names that pervades internet searches and tweets.  Whether you’re an education professional looking for new opportunities to use technology in a development project, or a seasoned ICT4D veteran exploring the new advances being made in open education, there’s usually a new term that pops up, sometimes coined at a recent conference, that might be unfamiliar.

And to complicate things further, common ICT4E terms are also used among the wider national education community, as well as those focused on content more than devices, devices more than quality, quality more than technology, and a small community of professionals that have enough experience to be able to see the overall picture.

So to offer some clarification, here are some ICT4E terms you should know:

  • ICT4E: Information and Communication Technology for Education

Self-explanatory acronym though, within the Twittering world, it has taken on several other forms such as ICT4Ed, ICT4Edu, Edtech and Edutech.  A recent blog from ICTWorks set out to clarify what is the most appropriate hashtag and it seems a consensus has been reached for ICT4E — at least for now.

  • mLearning

mLearning is the use of mobile technology for education — both formal and informal.  Though eLearning — using technology for in-class or distance learning purposes — could technically encompass mobile technology, mLearning has been gaining more ground and becoming increasingly popular with the rise of mobile phone saturation throughout the world — estimated at over 5.3 billion mobile subscribers during the UNESCO Mobile Learning Week — that it has created its own category and is the subject of many ICT4E debates.

Commonly referenced and debated in the ICT4E sector, this controversial project has received a lot of praise and criticism for it’s device-based initiative which has introduced over 2.5 million laptops to schools throughout the developing world.

  • Aakash

The new competitor to OLPC (though that too could be debated since OLPC has expressed support for this new project), this name tends to stir up some excitement among ICT4E advocates.  Aakash is a new tablet computer recently priced at around $35 and already being used in public schools in India.

  • BYOD: Bring Your Own Device

 Bring Your Own Device is simply that — students using their own digital devices in the classroom.  With many digital devices to choose from such as eReaders, tablets, and mobile phones, computers are no longer considered the only or best option.  BYOD is a concept being explored more in connection to mLearning though there are few examples of it already being applied in a development context.

OERs are course and learning materials which can easily be accessed for learning, teaching and research purposes via the internet.  Covered under open licenses, these resources can be modified and updated by multiple users creating “living” resources — those that have the ability to grow and adapt with new innovations, historical events, new perspectives, etc.

  • OCW: Open CourseWare

OCWs are a type of OER.  Simply put, they are the learning materials or collection of OERs organized to serve as course content.  These, like OERs, are openly licensed and can be reused and reshaped so that they can be introduced in various educational settings.

  • FOSS: Free and Open Source Software

Software that is both free and open source; an important tool for developing OERs.

  • MOOC: Massive Open Online Course

Similar to OCWs except that their pedagogical theories and student base differ. A relatively recent innovation in online course development, MOOCs are founded on the theory of connectivism and facilitate learning through teacher led discussions and presentations and developing peer-to-peer networks between students.

  • Badges

A digital representation equivalent to a certificate or diploma, badges certify the specific skills a student has attained and the quality of the instruction that they received from a specific educational institution.

  • Image from www.cooltownstudios.com

    Crowdsourcing

A distributed problem-solving and production process that involves outsourcing tasks to a network of people, usually many and undefined, and a great strategy for collaborating with other teachers and educational professionals.

And in the spirit of open education and crowdsourcing, feel free to share any other essential, humorous, or baffling ICT4E terminology you’ve come across.

/by

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