Young people make up 18 percent of the world’s population today, or 1.2 billion in absolute terms. Of these 15-24 year-olds, 87% live in developing countries. At the same time, their basic educational needs are not being met. More than one-third of all youth around the world are not in the classroom – 73% of youth in sub-Saharan Africa and 51% in South and West Asia.

Yet developing world governments cannot expand traditional educational facilitates to these youth or the even larger cohort behind them. Demand for higher education in Asia and Africa will grow from 48 million enrollments in 1990 to 159 million enrollments in 2025, but India spent only 3.2% of GDP in 2005 on education, ranking it 140th of 180 countries tracked by the CIA World Factbook.

Look at that eLearning idea

The inability of developing countries to meet the demand for quality secondary and higher education has a direct impact on economic growth. Researchers at Harvard University estimate that a one-year increase in tertiary education stock would raise the long-run steady-state level of African GDP per capita by 12.2%.

So improving access to education is one of the best investments that donor agencies and governments can make. Now what if it were possible to nearly double the number of secondary and university seats in a developing country overnight and with relatively little investment from the public sector?

eLearning – the provision of educational opportunities via information and communication technologies – could have that kind of scale with recent advances in electronic content creation and the proliferation of technology devices.

In this month’s Educational Technology Debate, we’ll focus on three main questions eLearning models bring forth:

1. What do these new eLearning pedagogical models look like?
2. How can new business models make eLearning services affordable?
3. Who will validate or accredit eLearning programs?

Join us for this conversation by submitting a Guest Post with your ideas around eLearning’s promise. We seek articles of at least 300+ words stating your learned opinion, backed with links and photographs (if possible).

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7116 Comments »http://edutechdebate.org/elearning-promise/elearnings-promise-new-models-educate-youth/eLearning%27s+Promise%3A+Will+New+Models+Scale+to+Educate+Youth%3F2010-03-03+17%3A06%3A50wayan

Today, I approach the issues of disability and accessibility in the case of education in developing countries from the perspective of someone who grew up in Morocco with a visual impairment. While I led a privileged lifestyle, which allowed me to attend a private school, the concept of accessibility and accommodation remained rather foreign to me for most of my schooling. The differences between various disabilities aren’t as nuanced as they are in the North American context.

In Morocco, you were either blind or deaf, but not visually impaired or hard of hearing (except if you’re older and in that case, you either turn up the volume of the TV or radio and have people speak louder). From my experience, there were no in-between categories.

I never thought of myself as disabled because I wasn’t raised to think of it that way. The words, “disability”, “accessibility” and “accommodation” didn’t really become a part of my vocabulary until I moved to North America.

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7052 Comments »http://edutechdebate.org/assistive-technology/disability-is-relative-physically-and-culturally/Disability+is+Relative%3A+Physically+and+Culturally2010-03-01+14%3A35%3A56wayan

Children who are challenged by disability and extreme poverty face the greatest danger of being deprived of their right to education and freedom of expression. For this population, technology must not only be accessible; it must also fit within a context of severe limitations in infrastructure and income. The right solution will address the presence of numerous languages within the same region and will empower local people, disabled or otherwise, to contribute to their own knowledge and culture repository.

Technology that relies on access to grid electricity will not serve the poorest 1.5 billion people. Sadly, this barrier isn’t likely to be removed soon – the International Energy Agency predicts 1.3 billion people will remain without electricity for the next 20 years.

Alternative energy options are ideal, but one should proceed with caution, as the practical amortized cost will often exceed what is possible for consumer-sustained revenues or even for government education budgets. When an education ministry has USD 100 a year per student to split between teacher pay, books, furniture, and construction of running water and toilets, little remains for new educational technologies. Program designers need to thoroughly measure and disclose the total cost of ownership of any solution, particularly technology based solutions.

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6983 Comments »http://edutechdebate.org/assistive-technology/must-address-poverty-and-local-content/Assistive+Technology+Must+Address+Extreme+Poverty+and+Support+Local+Content2010-02-25+13%3A55%3A27wayan

In countries like Afghanistan (where I live) those without disabilities may not be able to access education. The needs of the deaf, blind and those with other disabilities (physical and psychological) are often neglected. For the deaf, communication between parents / teachers and children can be almost impossible and there is a severe shortage of sign language, braille and assistive expertise, never mind the resources to pay for them.

What we are lacking is high quality (preferably creative commons or similarly licensed) localized content for both children and adults, such as interactive video sign language courses. Often we lack localized text to speech software. Because parents often can’t afford or can’t find the resources they need to communicate with their children they often find themselves completely excluded, and such frustration can easily foster worse problems.

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6921 Comment »http://edutechdebate.org/assistive-technology/what-we-really-need-for-students-with-disabilities/What+We+Really+Need+for+Students+with+Disabilities2010-02-23+13%3A30%3A01wayan

NVDA is an open source screen reader, with the ability to install on individual computers, or to run from a CD or a thumb drive. While it is over ten years behind other popular screen readers in development, in practice, the developer team is able to build on previous industry experience, as well as prioritizing [...]

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6751 Comment »http://edutechdebate.org/assistive-technology/nvda-competitive-free-alternative-screen-reader/NVDA%3A+A+Competitive+and+Free+Screen+Reader2010-02-18+15%3A10%3A54wayan

The biggest challenge in bringing access to the digital realm to kids with disabilities in developing countries, and with it access to education and eventually employment, is the adoption of public policy and NGO strategies that are truly scalable. Traditional strategies have no chance of fundamentally changing the horrible statistics that prevail among persons with disabilities given the relatively minuscule resources available to help this community.

Right now, some initiatives run by departments of education and most initiatives run by NGOs spend some of their very limited resources on software-based assistive technologies such as screen readers or virtual keyboards that are extremely expensive. As a result, a very small minority of kids with disabilities get access to technology and then they do, they become dependent on software that they, their families, and future prospective employers cannot afford. Such an approach is just as ineffective whether one is talking about software that runs on PCs, netbooks, or cell phones since the best-known cell phone assistive technologies are extremely expensive.

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6795 Comments »http://edutechdebate.org/assistive-technology/we-need-an-assistive-technology-strategy/We+Need+an+Assistive+Technology+Strategy+not+Devices2010-02-16+13%3A53%3A47wayan

The major roadblock to accessing digital content in the developing world, where more than ninety percent of the world’s visually impaired live, are affordability and access. A more affluent, English speaking resident of India with a desktop computer or smartphone has access to much of the print disability technology and content available in the developed world. But this is not the case for the wide majority of the poor. Their visual learning is often restricted to what others care to read to them and to what content is available locally in hard copy form.

Blind and visually impaired children are at a distinct disadvantage in school without the visual aids and technology that many children in the West now take for granted. With such a high rate of adoption in the developing world, cell phones offer a potential solution to address the challenges of content access and learning for the visually impaired.

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6712 Comments »http://edutechdebate.org/assistive-technology/mobile-reading-solutions-for-the-blind/Hidden+Opportunity%3A+Mobile+Reading+Solutions+for+the+Blind2010-02-10+14%3A27%3A31wayan

Blind? Deaf? Impaired? Then in most of the developing world, this means you’re also dumb. You’re excluded from formal educational opportunities at an early age and possibly even shunned by your family and community. But this doesn’t have to be the fate of physically or mentally challenged children anywhere.

Assistive information and communication technologies can allow those with disabilities to learn and grow, indistinguishable from any other child. But we have to ask three questions about them in our context: 1. Which assistive technologies are appropriate for the developing world? 2. How might they be implemented in resource constrained environments? 3. And what would their impact be on the children that use them?

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6594 Comments »http://edutechdebate.org/assistive-technology/how-can-assistive-technologies-increase-learning/How+Can+Assistive+Technologies+Increase+Learning%3F2010-02-02+13%3A59%3A19wayan

The list is an aggregation of projections from leading forecasters such as the Horizon Report, personal observations and a good dose of guesswork. The Top 10 Global Trends in ICT and Education are:

1. Mobile Learning: New advances in hardware and software are making mobile “smart phones” indispensable tools. Just as cell phones have leapfrogged fixed line technology in the telecommunications industry, it is likely that mobile devices with internet access and computing capabilities will soon overtake personal computers as the information appliance of choice in the classroom.

Read more in the post….

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6553 Comments »http://edutechdebate.org/2010-ict4e-trends/10-global-trends-in-ict-and-education-for-2010-and-beyond/10+Global+Trends+in+ICT+and+Education+for+2010+and+Beyond2010-01-26+13%3A52%3A12wayan

The year started with the Mother of All Disruptions as the world teetered toward economic and financial collapse. The technology industry withered in general due to lack of demand. Intel, for example, reported its first loss in 21 years in the second quarter. As we head in to 2010, things seem to be on the mend, albeit slowly.

I thought I’d jump on the new near “top trends” bandwagon and provide some observations of my own for information technology for development (ICT4D).

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64832 Comments »http://edutechdebate.org/2010-ict4e-trends/2010-trends-alternate-computing-emergence-and-convergence/2010+Trends%3A+Alternate+Computing+Emergence+and+Convergence2010-01-19+12%3A34%3A50wayan