Interactive Radio Instruction (IRI) isn’t sexy per se. It doesn’t employ cutting edge networking and caching technologies. It isn’t an Android application. It doesn’t even do social media. IRI may not have the whistles and bells that often support (and sometimes distract) in ICT for Development, but what it lacks in bling, it makes up for in effectiveness.

1. It scales – one tape player, one moderator, many students.
2. It engages – students’ attention spans are courted and kept.
3. It reaches – thousands learn, in places where cellular coverage providers, electricity utilities, and governments have little incentive to provide service.

However, IRI lacks the “R” – the radio in Interactive Radio Instruction refers to the content, not the mechanism. Students listen to voices coming out of a rectangular device, much like a radio. Where does “real” radio come into IRI?

I have been self-taught with IRI, reading what I could on the subject by experts like Mary Myers and following EDC efforts – probably the most comprehensive programs to date. However, as many community-based organizations know, having the experts create an IRI initiative for a community is expensive (and likely worth the expense, unless the expense is simply out of range). Custom hardware initiatives, such as the Talking Book by Literacy Bridge, offer alternative ways to conduct IRI-based education.

Through my own work in trying to add interactivity to community radio, I’ve gotten good exposure to educational programming and have come up with some permutations of IRI that seem appropriate for communities and less expensive than “expert” IRI providers, even if the processes are not as clean. The traditional model of tape recorder, tape, and teacher starting and stopping the tapes is always fine and good, but limited in terms of extensibility, and collaboration with other schools and organizations that can be helpful in curriculum development and subject matter expertise.

Tapes and their players break. The interactivity is based on information dissemination, not information exchange, remaining a one-way communication system. While real-time two-way communication is a luxury in many communities, there are ways to truly make IRI interactive and to engage radio. It’s time to upgrade the I and R in IRI.

Using Community Radio

I’ve worked with elementary schools where teachers outsource teaching to CDs and IRI programs, even though IRI requires in-class moderation of learning modules. Lessons were often repeated, and learning became rote. As part of an unrelated project to build a closed WiFi network that connected wifi-enabled phones to the community radio station in town, the radio station saw the opportunity to offer interactive teaching, inviting subject experts and teachers come to the station to deliver lessons. Radio receivers are more common than tape players, and having educational content on the air gave the content cachet and visibility that won students and non-students alike to listen.

In addition to delivering lectures and lessons, the radio gave the WiFi phones to the students so that they could answer questions and take quizzes on air. Kids wanted to have their say on the radio, and parents wanted their kids to do better in school as it reflected well in the radio program. Classroom attendance grew, as did program complexity, using SMS and interactive voice recording systems as the community radio producers and teachers became more creative. This may not be a case that can be replicated in every community, but leveraging community radio stations is a great way to add a “real” R to IRI.

Using Mobile Phones

Similar to this, on another closed network in an Amazon educational scenario, teachers from the only high school in 400km used the mobile handsets to call other river communities on speakerphone. There was no community radio in this community, and some of the towns were a three day boat ride away. It used to be that the high school would send books and academic materials on these dugout canoes for educational use, but the river and rain more often than not ruined the texts.

Here, the original IRI model provided an effective blueprint from which to modify for geography and need. Students in other towns, facilitated by the primary school teacher or elder in the community, listened along with the lesson and were prompted to respond to the academic conversation a la conference call.

No Standard Solution, Many Options

There are natural and immediate critiques to both of these scenarios. In the first case, public praise may not be a great pedagogical model. In the second, the often-terrible connections between communities required the use of Citizen’s Band radio – one of the original ICTs! Certainly the content creation is the hardest part – this is a bit easier where English is a national language, but the judgment call needs to be made by someone much more knowledgeable about education that some of us general ICT folks are.

• Is there a national curriculum standard to follow?
• Does that standard have relevance to the students in this community?
• If not, what supplemental information is necessary for community-specific education?
• Does this content reach into vocational/health/development content?

I’ve found no dearth of content in education departments at colleges, where masters of education students are mostly willing to help for a lot less money than content experts demand – and they are also well-versed in curriculum standards and national tests, if that is an aim of the school using IRI for preparation.

Let’s also not forget richer media in the search to integrate community radio and interactivity into IRI. CD and DVD players are common in several communities, primarily in South Asia. Visual cultures seem like a natural fit for such projects as Digital Study Hall. The cost is relatively low, the scale potential is high, and the ability to show – rather than just tell – can’t be replicated by IRI or community radio. It follows one of the most effective models I know, the “see one, do one, teach one” model.

So let’s start leveraging all the ways to hear one, teach one, do more.

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The Mobile landscape in Africa has rapidly evolved over the past decade with 380 Million mobile subscribers and 1 million added every week. This growth has been fueled in a large part by the liberalization effort resulting in the formation of independent regulatory bodies and increased competition in the market. This has enhanced numerous grassroots efforts to empower the poor and marginalized by providing access to knowledge through technology, more so a platform for communication. SMS and voice is being used in innovative ways to share knowledge and improve learning among students in Africa.

Text to Change: Best practices

Text to Change has over the years proven that SMS and Voice based applications can be used successfully in various interactive mobile health education programs reaching thousands of people across the African continent. Text to Change (TTC) uses text messaging (SMS) to encourage behavioral change and has proved that this approach is a highly effective communication channel for health education, encouraging testing and drug compliance and informing people of the choices available to them concerning their wellbeing.

For example in 2008, TTC in partnership with Zain and Aids Information Centre, Uganda, devised a six-eight week SMS behavioral change campaign which was advertised with the slogan ‘’Don’t guess, learn the truth about AIDS’’ and its aim was to encourage people to know about their HIV status and learn more about the disease. Today, TTC is active in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia, Cameroon, and Sierra Leone and in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). However, the impact of these programs needs to be complimented by other media like Radio and posters to build an awareness platform.

Opportunities and challenges

60% of people in Africa are under the age of 24, a school going age, which is knowledgeable about new technologies (even the use of smart phones) and becoming very demanding. The youth are booming with lots of enthusiasm to explore and learn any technologies at their disposal in schools and communities. They learn fast and are inquisitive. Technology distracts youth- either positively or negatively. The idea is keeping it simple to encourage learning. Also, mobile is still a more affordable technology than a computer for the youth seeing that service providers always have subsidized packages that accommodate them.

Technology role out for learning is still stalled by a number of factors in Africa including:

• Poor ICT policy implementation especially in the areas of Health and Education. These two areas are complimentary – will you educate an unhealthy nation?
• Most schools in Africa still do not accept mobile phone possession in classroom or even at school. Aspects of high teacher absenteeism and quality of teachers are still apparent.
• Limited mobile coverage especially in the rural areas which has also led to poor internet connectivity. Mobile operators are always seeking a win-win market situation– how then should we package these programs to make them interesting to the operators?
• Africa is characterized by too many ICT pilots of which most have not materialized to ongoing impact generating programs.
• Technology is powered by Electricity, which is a challenge to most of rural Africa.

The bloggers reflections

The future of ICT/Mobile deployment in mLearning is encouraging, however, this cannot be substituted for a weak education system – a good quality education sector is vital. It should be understood that ICT/Mobile is just a tool or an enabler to development. Success stories and failures aside, we need to be unambiguous about the definition of M-learning which varies from country to country. I believe the biggest opportunities lie in the access to information and knowledge.

In my outlook, many of the mLearning initiatives are designed within a ‘’what if’’ scenario: “What if everyone in rural Africa has access to a smart phone and/ or has access to internet?” The fact of the matter is that, inspite the rapid growth of the mobile industry; we need to use that which is currently available and practical. In most parts of Africa, we are limited to SMS, and Voice; this is the only medium that works on most basic devices. Teaching how to read, write and to do simple arithmetic is the responsibility of the parents, teacher and the government. It is complex to replace that by applications and mobile technology. I encourage that ICT or mobile should always be used as an enabler and could never be successful if it is used in isolation.

Mobile operators could encompass the role of an incubator; where a commercially viable product is introduced that will encourage the deployment and uptake of the other operators. Competition drives innovation. It is undeniable that operators are an enabler of technology with good network coverage and infrastructure their primary role. Text to change has partnerships with most major mobile operators in East Africa from which we get subsidized tariffs. Our short codes run on all networks in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.

For example, Orange is providing us with technical support in countries where they have operations; however, the partnership does not demand exclusivity- we are open to work with other existing operators within the region. I then must argue that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is always a short term association. To have a sustainable working relationship with the mobile operators we must ensure a win- win situation since the primary goal / core business of the operator is to provide network services and make profits. This is how it should be. I rather have premium services and pay for it than a CSR project that doesn’t have priority for the service provider because it is not profitable.

Very many pilots in developing countries are currently donor funded and have created vast impact. The question is if they are successful, why then doesn’t the government take them on and scale them up nationwide? It is a pity to say that if the government does not scale them up then we remain in a pilot cycle.

The role of government (education ministries) can never be over emphasized. Development of a strong regulatory framework involving a range of stakeholders with accent on end user involvement will bring us far. For example, in Uganda a technical e-readiness working group is in place with the aim to bring different stakeholders together to accelerate ICT implementations in Uganda. A national ICT policy is in place and an education sector ICT policy is before Cabinet. The Ministry of Education and Sports is taking steps to co-ordinate ICT development and has allocated resources to support implementation of its ICT strategy.

Nationwide deployment of a mLearning application programme could only be successful with the inclusion of government having a dedicated budget. That said, mLearning applications have the potential to improve and strengthen the current Education system if integrated into an existing ‘well functioning’ Education system. It is interesting to ask ‘’If the paper based system works; why replace it by mobile phones? ‘’

The fact that Mobile is the most widely used technology in Africa and more people have access to a phone than a computer or even to good quality educational material offers vast opportunities for mLearning.

Recommendations to policy makers, regulators and other stakeholders

My 2 cents lie in the need to develop a legal regulatory framework, mobilize resources to support development of programmes and applications for mLearning. The Ministry should also directly support the development of mLearning applications and or innovations. In addition, the use and deployment of proved programmes and applications in the Education sector.

Before supporting more pilots, donors should research on what already exists; what has worked and what hasn’t. This will help cub duplication. Since most pilots are funded externally, therefore, we need to be creative in sourcing funds and build new business models to ensure continuity. The role of government and other private sector parties cannot be undermined to ensure continuity or sustainability of the pilot projects after the donor has exited. However, we need to be mindful that the MLearning project objectives should therefore be able to meet the countries’ development goals to attract continual implementation by government.

Public private partnerships in the mobile industry need to be encouraged. Tax on Mobile technology, especially on mobile devices is very high in East Africa. In Uganda the VAT on Mobile products is high at 30%. A recent report on the GSMA shows that mobile subscribers across East Africa are highly taxed the world over. This has to be lowered to encourage mobile deployment in Africa. In order to encourage mLearning, the government needs to be creative with tax incentives that will encourage service providers to engage without incurring losses.

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Calls are frequently heard for improving schooling by closing the gap between children’s life out-of-school and traditional learning styles, and by broadening the space and span for life-long learning opportunities. The Math4Mobile development endeavors to engage all students with mathematical ideas. It provides a collection of tools that could be included in a variety of activities to support students’ mathematical skills, conceptual understanding, and creative mathematical thinking.

Computerized tools have been shown to provide important support for achieving these goals. Three decades of using technology in mathematics education provide clear evidence that the tools designed to support a well-defined educational agenda were the most successful ones. In general, technology achieves its most important gains in settings in which it is available for long periods of time, and when it is designed to be incorporated regularly into the learning process. I suspect that an important reason for the slow pace of change in this area is that ubiquitous, long-term access to technology is yet to be achieved in most learning environments.

Given the high rate of increase in the number of mobile phone owners worldwide, the computational capability of most phones, and the widely available communication infrastructure, we have been looking for ways to turn the available and relatively cheap personal mobile technology into a relevant learning tool in and out of school.

Meeting the challenges of computation, communication, and usability

Understanding the computing potential: The Math4Mobile project has been developed based on VisualMath, which was found to be a successful technology-based curriculum for changing the ways students learn geometry, function-based school algebra, and calculus. The Math4Mobile project started as yet another cycle of development of already existing WEB tools, but working under the constraints of the new hardware and enablers has led us to ideas and challenges beyond hardware-related problems. To support cognitive empowerment for the learning of mathematical content, our first challenge was to plan a variety of well-recognized useful applications. Design decisions were to focus on:

1. Applications that have already been recognized as successful in using technology for learning: Graph2Go, a graphing calculator that serves a wide range of users at different levels and in various fields of learning; Quad2Go, a dynamic geometry environment that allows constructing and analyzing while dynamically changing the various available quadrilaterals, mostly supporting primary school geometry.
2. Applications that could be useful in motivating learning out of the classroom: Sketch2Go and Fit2Go, which support recording and mathematically analyzing temporal processes that students might face in a task out of class.
3. Design applications supporting scientific inquiry; all applications designed to include embedded feedback in a variety of representations, to encourage observation of multiple examples, and at the same time to support the development of mathematical skills through intensive practice (for example, Solve2Go).
4. Applications that first and foremost can be easily operated “on the go,” with a numeric keypad being the only necessary requirement, although navigation keys can also be used. Because typing mathematical signs and expressions can be extremely tedious, our design strategy is to provide ready to work but easy to alter mathematical objects such as expression or equation clusters, iconic graphs, geometric shapes, etc.
5. Applications that are appropriate to use by children and that comply with hardware, resources, and infrastructure constrains. Our intention is to develop for everyone, closing rather than widening the social gaps in the process. Thus, we plan for minimal air time and the lowest possible end, and for widely used hardware that does not require compromising on essential learning goals. We chose J2ME as the development language because it supports the visual mathematical representations assumed to be essential for conceptual learning and design that works for users of small screens.

Understanding the communication potential: According to social-cultural theories of learning, collaborative thinking is an essential component of scientific inquiry. Whereas the social studies and humanities are better known for providing opportunities for sharing, mathematics is assumed to be practiced and developed individually. The choice of mobile phones provides an opportunity to create incentives for collaboration that are authentic learning processes for a community of math learners at all levels. We examine designs of three types of communication:

1. Each Math4Mobile application includes Phone 2 Phone collaboration via SMS center. Students can use it to share their work, post it to receive critical comments from their peers, analyze and propose improvements of others’ work, and submit their work to the teacher.
2. We identified two challenges for our future development work: multi-user communication, where users can share their work interactively, and communication between phones and computers. Advancing in this direction, we developed the Click2Go Classroom Interaction System, currently piloted in schools. Click2Go allows students to use the local communication infrastructure to respond to teachers’ prompts and present the collated students’ responses to promote whole-group discussion.
3. Another channel of communication, the Augmented Textbook, works with the Math4Mobile application to augment paper textbooks with mobile applications that include interactive diagrams, a counterpart to printed diagrams.

Understanding the Usability Potential: Pilot experiments involving teachers in schools and pre-service teachers were part of our development work. In each experiment we designed activities relevant to the curricular agenda. The learning was recorded and analyzed, and usually the results showed the direction of required improvements of the application. After analyzing the learning and teaching opportunities, we design scenarios that can be relevant to the following pedagogical and technological variables:

• Space: activity suited for use in class, in and around school, or anywhere
• Size: to be used by an individual student, in collaboration in a small group, in the course of a whole-class discussion
• Learning mode: exploring, practicing skills, or solving problems
• Teacher’s role: teachers could use the tools and the activity to deliver instruction, moderate group collaboration, assess individual performance, or observe student activities out of the classroom
• Means of use: online, offline, asynchronous, synchronous
• Infrastructure media components available (ubiquity): the ideal setting for the activity also includes, in addition to the personal mobile phone, a “smart board,” a website, a desktop application, and an augmented textbook
• Phone resources: camera, calculator, stop watch, dedicated applications

Educational impact: Patterns, scalability, and sustainability

Since 2008/2009, downloads range from hundreds to thousands monthly, the more frequently downloaded being Graph2Go and Solve2Go. Most applications can be downloaded from the site free of charge. There are many options to download the applications from a variety of sites that adopted them as favorite educational resources. The applications also spread virally. We therefore assume that the above figures are only partial.

The geographic breadth spans the globe and includes India with thousands of downloads yearly, and African countries (Cote D’Ivoire, South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Mozambique), South American countries (Argentina, Mexico), and Asian countries (Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Philippines) with hundreds of downloads a year. Clearly, the development is attractive, sought after, and useful in rural locations and in less developed communities.

Users: We suspect that the applications are being used by students in a wide range of ages and settings. We learn from teachers around the globe who occasionally write to us about their use of the applications in their schools, from teachers’ centers using the applications for professional development at teachers’ workshops, from secondary and higher education students reporting and asking for further improvements, and from resources being created for Math4Mobile independently by users.

Development challenges

The lack of standards has been a major difficulty. Several years ago Symbian and J2ME were supported by the majority of mobile phones. This is not the case anymore, and since 2010 the market share of Android and iPhone systems keeps growing. This continuing fragmentation is a major obstacle for the scalability and sustainability of the development. It requires constant investment in parallel development (different languages and mathematical packages) for a variety of systems and hardware, that have different capabilities even when operating under similar system. It also requires software verifications and quality assurance that are not easy to do in educational environments.

Developing high-quality applications is relatively expensive. Math4Mobile, an innovative experiment, has been developed in an academic R&D center by faculty and students. To scale it up, it requires economical models that would support free personal use and also provide sustained support for further development and implementation.

Designing human-computer interfaces that take into account the yet unknown health effects of extensive use of mobiles by children. For example, current design is aimed at maximizing offline use.

Investing in a variety of application types such as games and location-based applications that have been shown to be important for learning.

Pedagogical challenges

At present, educational systems own the hardware and software required for learning. Mobile personal phones are a different ball park, in which the centralized models do not seem to work well.

Taking into account the new meaning of students working with their own personal tool is a challenge. A major threat to teachers is the misuse of the communication tools during school time. Another threat is use of applications that students upload to their mobiles (or of resources such as video clips) that interrupt class work. Yet another popular use that can be interpreted as misuse of a cell phone in a classroom setting is recording with the camera and mailing paper resources. It requires imagination and creativity to turn these affordances into constructive learning situations. Projects that involve children in the design could be important in establishing new learning norms.

Tools should support teachers in managing the load of students’ personal work. Following the first design experiment, a full archive system was developed for each application. It was required because the traffic of work sent by SMS between students and the teacher was enormous. The development of Click2Go, which collects and organizes personal data on a server that can be accessed by the teacher, is another model for organizing assessment. Further enhancement of ubiquity that would easily make the same applications work with a variety of media is essential.

Math4Mobile provides and updates activities and teaching ideas at its site. We hope to create professional development models using new means that assume the active involvement of such media as blogging, mobile communication, and sharing mLearning scenarios used around the world throughout social networks. We continue developing instructional materials to be used with existing curricular standards and platforms that allow phone users to communicate with colleagues and mentors worldwide, even when they have no access to computers (as we recently prototyped in India with www.mobilegurukul.org).

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I am grateful for the chance to contribute to the current debate on the potential for Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in education in Africa. It is clearly a debate about important issues.

Mobile phones hold out enormous promise as the single ICT most likely to deliver education in Africa, and to do so on a sustainable, equitable and scalable basis. I think however that so far, we have not often seen much progress beyond fixed-term, small-scale and subsidised pilots and it is worth exploring whether mobile phones can really deliver their promise.

Delivering education in Africa using mobile phones probably strikes governments, institutions and practitioners as easy and obvious because mobile phones and mobile networks are almost universally accessible and reliable in places where environment, economics, infrastructure and security might variously militate against any other ICTs and where the demographics of mobile phone ownership, access and competence, unlike most other ICTs, takes us near to the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ – the actual ‘bottom of the pyramid’ is of course populated by people who can’t even afford mobile phones! Furthermore, mobile phones are an individual ICT not an institutional or corporate ICT and are not predicated on access to colleges, business centres, cyber-cafes or maybe even cities. Therefore, learning on mobile phones should work.

The current World Bank Group and the African Development Bank study is intended “to raise awareness and stimulate action, especially among African governments and development practitioners”. These are indeed vital prerequisites but perhaps ‘critical awareness’ and ‘rigorously evidence-based action’ are even more vital. This is important debate is often characterised by simplifications, misplaced optimism and untested assertions. Hopefully this piece will strike a better balance.

My contention is that whilst many good projects using mobile devices to support learning, by definition, do good work and thus deserve to be praised and celebrated, our problems start when we try to understand these projects, when we try to reason and infer about these projects, when we try to explain and disseminate them in the hope that we can reproduce and replicate them. This is all the more worrying as we overlook the far larger number of less successful projects or when we group, organise and cluster projects in order to find common generalisable themes, forces, causes and mechanisms. Therein lies our problem with scale, sustainability and equity.

Something is wrong and we need to dig beneath the surface. What are my reasons for advocating such caution?

Firstly, of course, failure often goes unreported, unpublished, and unacknowledged, and common impression is that careers and reputations are not built on failures however interesting or thought-provoking. Furthermore, many projects are doomed to success and are reported accordingly. Funders, agencies, ministries, officials, researchers and others will have all invested much prestige and resource giving projects the necessary momentum and visibility, and failure becomes unthinkable or inconceivable.

A common saying maintains that, “if you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Watching evaluations in South Africa and Kenya made me think this is true of the mind-sets we bring to our analysis and evaluation of projects. An educationalist will see educational explanations, a technologist will see technological ones, a policy-maker will see policy ones and so on. Our inferences about success are conditioned by our backgrounds.

Sometimes these predispositions are built in projects from the outset. In looking at siting or sampling, people from different backgrounds and organisations bring their own ideas about where to site their cluster of project interventions in the hope of getting maximum generality from limited resource but in doing so they bring to the fore, those variables they think significant (and thereby make them significant) and push others to the background. So class size, network coverage or educational content will appear important because they were built in that they would be!

Furthermore, the dream of successful large-scale sustainable learning with mobile devices has been haunted by high-profile successes like mPesa and Grameen. These successes create the expectation and the pressure that learning with mobile devices should be a worldwide runaway success.

On top of that, some years ago, I and Agnes Kukulska-Hulme looked back at reports of mobile learning research projects from around the world and concluded that the researchers were not always very competent and trained in project evaluation. Their evaluations were often fairly informal, disconnected from project objectives, bolted on as late extras, unfocussed and not informed by the relevant literature or expertise. Also, funders and donors are not necessarily trained or critical readers of monitoring and evaluation reports. Below the executive summary and the headlines might be many caveats and nuances that get in the way of simple prescriptions and these get lost.

Of course, in saying this, I am caught between funders who want results, policy makers who want simple robust bases for policy, the development community talking about predictable unexpected consequences, social scientists telling us reality and experience are contingent and postmodernists telling us that the grand narratives of the Western European mind, of which development is undoubtedly one, are all broken and dead.

So our first conclusion must be that our inferences about success and about critical success factors in learning with mobile devices are fairly shaky.

If we look at the mechanics of mobile learning projects in particular and ask about sustainability, things do not get better.

Firstly, funders fund projects, and understandably they try to fund good projects, and as soon as their funding finishes so does most of their influence. This makes moving projects towards sustainability problematic in practical terms. It might however be starting from the wrong perspective all along. Perhaps instead of funding good projects in the hope that they will become sustainable, funders should fund sustainable projects in the hope that they will become good.

Meaning that funders should pay more attention to the host, the target, the destination, to the culture, values and expectations of the people who will inherit and support the project and less to the concrete specifics of the projects and its innovations. Perhaps funders should actually avoid known innovators and early adopters on the basis that these people have least in common with the rank-and-file staff who will institutionalise, embed and appropriate educational change and have least in common with the ethos of their institution.

Most mobile learning projects, especially research projects, have been based on providing learners with the necessary devices, especially first generation projects when devices were rare, expensive and complex. This was sensible in producing more rigorous evidence in coming from a uniform technology platform but not in producing evidence that was transferable into the world where funds did not exist to continue to provide learners with devices.

Those mobile learning project funded by corporates, especially from within their corporate social responsibility budgets, suffered from similar problems, compounded by the shorter time-scales that characterised the corporate and commercial world. Fixed-term projects, either funded as research or as corporate social responsibility, taught us little about sustainability. By definition, they were not intended to teach us about sustainability. The fact that projects run more smoothly and produce cleaner less noisy data with provided devices rather than learner devices, that they often use the enthusiasm of project staff and the novelty of innovation, has instead created very false and contrived environments and evidence that does not transfer.

If we could produce evidence that was convincing and relevant, we then have the problem of what to do with it!

In countries of big government, where society expects government support from cradle to grave, the role of evidence is at least in theory straightforward, namely researchers take evidence to government, this impacts on policy and then releases or diverts public resources. In fact, informing policy and changing practice are much more complex than this, involving various ways of exploiting expertise as well as evidence but it is still being basically a political process underpinned by a particular set of ideals about the responsibilities of government.

In countries of small government, however, the role of evidence, expertise and experts is more complex and problematic. The players in any possible mobile learning space might include network operators, publishers, handset manufacturers, maybe government, maybe not, and possibly social entrepreneurs and various kinds of community activists. We must work towards models of learning with mobile devices that make money since this ensures that they are sustainable, big money in the case of scenarios that include corporates and small money in the case of scenarios that include social entrepreneurs.

Corporates, of course, each have a specific focus, be it handsets, content or connectivity, and so the challenge for advocates of learning with mobiles devices is moving the argument forward and fostering collaborations, with evidence and whatever else works, with these players. We must recognise however that even if a commercial operation can take learning to the mythic next billion subscribers of the global South, there will still be parts of the curriculum or parts of the population left uncovered, where governments must still recognise some responsibility and recognise the potential to build human capital and potential for the greater good, if only we knew the language, the issues and the arguments that would change their course.

The alternative is working with social entrepreneurs, those individuals embedded within their own communities, prepared to blend making a profit and delivering a social service, perhaps analogous to community teachers in rural schools in Kenya or bare-foot doctors in China. The challenge for advocates of learning with mobile devices is finding out how to design or adapt those devices or applications that hit the spot where market and education might just overlap.

A colleague recently remarked that every technology embodies an ideology; I realised that the implication was that every educational technology embodied a pedagogy, embodies a specific set of ideas about teaching and learning. This ideology or pedagogy may be that of the designers or the manufacturers; the technology may however be appropriated by users and learners and the ideology or pedagogy embodied within the technology becomes theirs not the original or intended one. This issue represents one of the challenges to transferring strategies for educational technology from one culture to another, even from one community or sub-culture to another, especially when we recognise how many slightly different communities and sub-cultures inhabit phonespace and cyberspace.

Finally, one obvious way to enhance sustainability and scale is to consciously exploit learners’ own devices, to base national or institutional strategy around the phones that individuals choose, own and carry everywhere. Of course, institutional culture and regulations may actually prohibit phones on the premises and much needs to be done in order to address issues of standards, infrastructure and performance, of access and equity, of content and training but the main hurdle is teachers’ and officials’ perceptions about loss of control and agency in the class-room, about suddenly letting the animals run the zoo. Fortunately some countries, South Africa, for example, are starting to explore these issues and make progress on a major prerequisite to sustainable learning with mobile devices.

There’s a lot going on in this blog and some prevailing assumptions and generalisations may have been addressed with just a different set of assumptions and generalisations; the aim was however not to convince but to unsettle, and perhaps to encourage more caution and scepticism. Learning with mobile devices somewhere near the bottom of the pyramid is still our best bet.

In this context, we are interested in exploring the following questions:

• Where and how are mobile devices or other affordable technologies being used for access to learning materials and collaboration? What lessons can we learn from these experiences?
• What are the key challenges for the use of these technologies in education in Africa? What are the critical success factors for their effective use?
• What recommendations should be made to policy makers, regulators, donors and other stakeholders if technology is to be used to support learning and collaboration in an equitable, sustainable and scalable manner?

The next several posts will look at some of these questions and we hope that they will trigger discussion on some of the issues they raise. We invite responses questions as well as the sharing of both successes and failures.

This conversation is part of the eTranform Africa initiative.

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Enter a new breed of technology. Niger has the second highest compound annual growth rate of mobile phone use in West Africa, and the fourth highest in Africa (83 percent over 5 years). While there is little evidence of mobiles being used as the ICT of choice in formal education systems in West Africa, mobile technology is being used in early trials for literacy in adult non-formal education.

Project ABC Mobile Phone Adult Literacy Program

Catholic Relief Service (CRS), in partnership with UC Davis, Tufts, and Oxford University has completed the initial phase of a pilot that shows how SMS can turn mobile phones into a platform for adult literacy and market information for agricultural communities. Planning for the pilot began in 2007/2008, and at the end of 2010, it will have run for 2 years.

Projet d’Alphabetisation a Base Cellulaire, or ABC, works with non-formal education centers established by the CRS Niger Food Security and Nutrition Program (2007-2011), is funded by USAID/Food for Peace, and is implemented with Care and Helen Keller International. The project uses multimedia phones that have been programmed with a digital curriculum in the local languages of Hausa and Zarma, and incorporates a practical literacy component tied to obtaining market information via text message.

The Project ABC literacy curriculum is taught by local facilitators trained by the Ministry of Education in Niger, and has two components. The first part of the program, developed by the Ministry, involves basic functional literacy. The second part of the program, taught by CRS team members with the aid of a multimedia phone and digital curriculum, is being studied by CRS in the Project ABC pilot. Learners also use more basic phones, commonly available, to practice literacy and numeracy skills via SMS. Lessons take place for three hours a day from May through June. The ratio of learners per teacher is 25:1. Practice work with multimedia phones takes place in groups of 5 learners.

In the first year of ABC, participants learn basic cell phone technology, including SMS. In the second year, interactive multimedia phones and a digital curriculum that includes phonetic activities and varied texts are used to further develop literacy skills. Participants also use skills in literacy, numeracy, and basic cell phone technology in a companion program that teaches them how to request and retrieve market information via SMS.

The SMS communication system used in the project, IMAC (Information from Agricultural Markets by Cell Phone), is based on FrontlineSMS software. The system allows participants to access current market information, which is collected by CRS in partnership with a Nigerian NGO, SIMA (Agricultural Information Market Systems). SIMA-trained CRS agents are also able to update crop prices by sending a formatted SMS. In the long term, CRS is studying the use of the IMAC system to determine its impact on the income of agricultural producers.

The program is operational in 56 literacy centers in the rural regions of Dosso and Zinder, in primarily agricultural villages. As is the case in most rural settings in West Africa, local language reading materials are otherwise scarce. Participants in the program include 1,400 learners, half of whom are women (Isbrandt, 2009).

Preliminary results from a randomized evaluation of Project ABC indicate that mobile phones have had an impact on participants’ literacy skills, and the model could be sustainable in the long run.

Overall, students demonstrated substantial improvements in literacy and numeracy test scores, suggesting that the adult literacy curriculum is effective in increasing learning. Students in ABC (mobile phone literacy) villages showed substantial additional gains in numeracy exam scores, but we cannot rule out that there are no effects on literacy in the full sample. There is evidence of heterogeneity in program effects across regions, suggesting the impact is stronger in a relatively more densely populated region. Furthermore, both literacy and numeracy effects are stronger and statistically significant for younger populations.

There is also evidence of persistent impacts: six months after the end of the first year of classes, students in ABC villages retained what they had learned better than the non-ABC students. These effects do not appear to be driven by differences in teacher quality or in teacher and student attendance. These results suggest that simple and relatively cheap information and communication technology can serve as an effective and sustainable learning tool for rural populations.

Challenges in implementing the program include poor cell phone coverage, and the non-intuitive nature of communication by SMS. It is likely that other challenges will include the costs of communication and of the multimedia phones. One of the dangers of incorporating cell phones into a project model is that more often than not, the costs associated with using a phone to communicate compete with other basic needs in rural Sub-Saharan Africa.

References

Jenny C. Aker, Tufts, Christopher Ksoll, Oxford ; Travis Lybbert, UC Davis (2010) ABC, 123: Can you Text me Now? Presented at the Centre for the Study of African Economics (CSAE) Conference, St Catherine’s College, Oxford. March 2010. Retrieved September 1, 2010.

Donner, Jonathan (2009), Research Approaches to Mobile Use in the Developing World: A Review of the Literature, in The Information Society, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 140-159, 2008. Retrieved September 1, 2010.

Ford, Merryl; Botha, Adele (2009) MobileLed – Mobile-Led and Leading Via Mobile. IST Africa 2009 Conference Proceedings. Meraka Institute, CSIR; University of Pretoria, South Africa.Kampala, Uganda Retrieved August 28, 2009.

Isbrandt, Scott (2009) Cell Phone in West Africa: Improving Literacy and Agricultural Market Systems. Retrieved September 1, 2010.

Pearce, C. (2009). From Closed Books to Open Doors – West Africa’s Literacy Challenge. ANCEFA, Pamoja West Africa, African Platform for Adult Education, Oxfam International andActionAid. Retrieved September 1, 2010.

Traore, D., Moody, G. B., Diouf, A. M. I., & Camara, E. H. H. (2009). Panafrican Project on the
Integration of ICT’s in Education: Phase 1 national reports PanAF, ERNWACA. Retrieved October 16, 2009.

Of particular note is the Tanzania-based mEducation program called Bridgeit. Locally known as Elimu kwa Teknolojia (Education Through Technology), the Bridgeit program involves an innovative process of disseminating educational programming directly to the classroom via a mobile phone.

The program is a function of a multi-sector partnership involving Tanzania’s Ministry of Education and Vocational Training (MoEVT), the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE), the Pearson Foundation, the International Youth Foundation, Nokia Corporation and funded by a three-year $2 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Bridgeit’s primary objectives demonstrate a holistic approach to the educational challenges faced by the regions in which it is deployed, in that it seeks to:

• increase student achievement in the areas of math, science and life skills at the primary school level, with a special emphasis on girls;
• improve pedagogy and teacher performance within the classroom, by facilitating the overall learning experience through greater student-teacher interaction and participatory learning;
• become adopted by MoEVT in order promote sustainable education reform at the national level.

Within the three-year span following its launch in September 2007, Bridgeit has made considerable progress towards the objectives outlined above. To date,

• 150 schools have adopted the program;
• 1,021 primary school teachers are now trained;
• 60,540 rural and urban students have participated or are participating in the program;
• 151 math, science & life skills videos have been created or adapted;
• 151 learner-centered math & science lesson plans have been developed;
• 32 life skills lessons have been adapted &
• the project is now housed within MoEVT.

These types of results can largely be attributed to careful planning and consideration of technology solutions that were appropriate for the situation. The program implementers initially set out to replicate text2teach, a successful Bridgeit program in the Philippines, which utilized satellite technology. However, given problems with infrastructure, particularly in the rural areas, the program was modified to take advantage of leap-frogging opportunities offered by mobile technology.

Program Description

Through the Bridgeit program, teachers are provided with access to a digital catalog of educational videos that are typically 4-7 minutes in length. The teachers download the videos from the server via a mobile phone connected to a television installed in the classroom. With each video comes a lesson plan crafted to allow teachers and students interact with the ideas introduced by the video. Hence, a typical teaching period would involve a viewing of the video followed by teacher-led exercises and activities aimed at reinforcing the ideas the students have just learned.

Note that mobile phones are not the instructional medium – video is – the phones are used as a conduit to access educational content. This is quite different than the usual focus on mobile phones as the actual education device.

Program Review

In a recent TechSalon hosted by the World Bank, Christoph Derndorfer, co-editor of OLPC News, offered a set of six criteria that he thought were critical to the success of any ICT4E initiative. The Bridgeit project made a formidable showing when evaluated against the criteria:

• Teacher Training/Capacity-Building: One of the main strengths of this program is its focus on the professional development of the teachers involved. Far from just training the teachers on how to the use the Bridgeit technology, the teachers receive support through ongoing curriculum development and adaptation and through lesson plans built around proven teaching methodologies leading to increased learning gains among students.
• Relevant Content/Materials: Bridgeit videos are released every three months and this gives teachers the opportunity to provide feedback and participate in the curriculum development process. For instance, the involvement of the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) has helped schools better meet some of the needs of its female students by providing materials that showcase positive images of women. Furthermore, content developers are continuing to develop educational materials that ultimately alleviate the need for books, given the scarcity that is prevalent in many rural schools.
• Community Inclusion/Stakeholder Buy-In: The program was developed in consultation with the Tanzanian Ministry of Education and Vocational Training (MoEVT) and the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE). This has resulted in its being adopted as part of Tanzania’s strategic plan for providing quality and accessible education to its citizens.
• Infrastructure: Because full deployment requires just a television and a mobile phone, Bridgeit presents a feasible, low-cost solution to bridging education gaps faced by many rural and urban schools in Tanzania. The one apparent draw-back is the need for electrical power. However, given the short length of the videos and the resourceful ways in which many people in sub-Saharan Africa keep their mobile phones charged, the program implementers would do well to source a solar-power device that can be bundled with each deployment.
• Maintenance: While this has not been adequately addressed, the simplicity of the setup and the vast proliferation of mobile phones in many developing countries could make this criteria a non-issue. However, base-line data on how the equipment has fared over the initial phase of the project could provide insight on how to tackle this issue going forward.
• Evaluation: The program is currently in its evaluation phase (Jan – Dec 2010) and results are expected in early 2011. However, initial findings show an increase in school attendance and improvements in the overall quality of teaching.

Conclusion

By equipping teachers with relevant materials and thus, improving the learning experience for students, Bridgeit is successfully utilizing technology as a means to an end and not an end itself.

Given the high failure rates of many well-intentioned ICT4E projects, this program seems to have set itself up as a model for scalable, sustainable and community-based projects that carry the potential for significantly reforming education in many under-served countries. The upcoming evaluation results should provide more information on how this program can be improved and replicated in other countries.

Resources

• IYF July 2010 Bridgeit Update (PDF)
• MoVET Report from Tanzania’s Minister of Education (PDF)
• MobileActive Case-Study: Bridgeit
• EduTech Blog: Checking in with BridgeIT in Tanzania

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Mobile phones are becoming ubiquitous in the developing world – almost everyone can get access to simple voice and SMS text messaging phones. With the introduction of $100 Android smartphones, real computing power is coming to mobile phones at a price point that can be affordable for educational systems.

One powerful smartphone per teacher, or a combination of voice/SMS phones and smartphones for teachers and students, have the potential to actually achieve the unfulfilled technology saturation promise of One Laptop Per Child.

But before we get lost in the possibilities of mobile phone usage in the classroom, lets look at the practicalities – programs that are already using existing mobile phone technology to reach educational objectives inside and out of the traditional classroom. In this month’s Educational Technology Debate, we’ll look at several mEducation initiatives where mobile phones are reaching and teaching students across the developing world:

• Janala Project in Bangladesh
• BridgeIT in Tanzania
• Project ABC in Niger
• Yoza Cellphone Stories in South Africa
• SMS:Learning in Nigeria and Uganda
• Jokkoo Initiative in West Africa

Yet these are not the only mEducation projects. Please be sure to add your favorite use of mobile phones for education in the comments below. We’ll collect all the examples for a mEducation directory at the end of the month.

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This is the opening remarks and initial response of Wayan Vota, ICT in education consultant to infoDev, and moderator of Educational Technology Debate, to the question: Are most investments in technology for schools wasted?

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Wayan Vota at Live Debate India

Wayan Vota: (download the podcast)

I am against the motion; I actually feel that technology in schools, in education, is not wasted. In fact we have some great successes. We have great success at the implementation level. That are actually transforming and improving the grades at the board level.

I think these are transforming when we move beyond a few ideas. When we move beyond the concept of computers, when we move beyond the concept of the classroom, when we move beyond the concept of the student.

So lets start with looking beyond computers.

Information and communication technologies. That’s not just a computer, it’s not even just a cell phone, it’s the actual concept of a phone line. We can go back to the concept of radio, FM radio. They do something called interactive radio instruction (IRI), very successfully, in seven states, here in India. IRI is actually increasing learning, increasing reading comprehension, increasing educational outcomes, as tested by the boards. So we have implementation there as a success.

TV and video. How many of you – come on raise your hand – watch the video or watch TV and learn something? People of this webcast are doing the same hopefully, now. Maybe not with me but with the others.

At the same time phones. As a school administrator I can call up the teacher, “Are you coming today?” The teacher can call back and say, “I am sick.” A parent can talk to a teacher, or teacher can call up the parent and say, “Do you know your son was not in school today?” And the parent answers, “Oh really? Let me go see what happened”

And let’s look beyond the actual students themselves.

Teacher training is mentioned often, also the concept of teachers being able to share lessons plans – be it over the phone, be it over the Internet. Being able to look at the lesson plans from other areas, other subjects and learn from them. The school administration – I really hope that they have a spreadsheet that shows the number of teachers and what they should be getting paid, because if they don’t get paid, they probably not going to show up the next day.

Better yet, a spreadsheet showing about how many students are actually there in a classroom, in each classroom, in each school, in each school. Or at least the location of every school. Maybe we don’t have this, but it will give a good idea, yeah? This is ICT in education. It is beyond the student.

Now think about parent participation. I am not sure if you have this in India – in many countries, we have the parent teacher associations. In the U.S., parent teacher associations until the 80′s – it was all the mothers, the dads says, “I gotta go bowling.” Now, the mothers are complaining because the fathers are all in the PTA’s. “Really? What kind of technology do you have? Oh cool, I can fix that!” The fathers now engage, they are back. It is not a direct impact… actually it is a direct impact, but it is not a direct in the classroom experience with ICT.

So lets actually take a moment and think about ICT beyond the school and how ICT impacts society.

It is an opportunity to change learning, from this rote, “I put this stuff into your brain and you spit it back out to me,” to actually having children think about what they are learning -so when they become our age they are cognizant adults. They can think, they can debate, they and they can make their own decisions.

As well it actually creates a lot of passion in the education. Could you hold up the XO laptop? This little green thing… I don’t know about you, but it definitely got a lot of people excited about technology in the classroom. I mean, we all have our opinion about what it is and how good it is in the classroom, but people actually have an opinion now. People actually care. In 2000 everybody cared about IT, in 2004 if you tried to talk about IT in education, they said that was the dot com – its over. Now people are excited again.

Last but not the least, and I think ICT is our present and our future.

We have to leverage it now. We will make mistakes, there will be problems, there will be failures, but how are you going to have success unless you try? If you don’t try, I can tell you what you are doomed to – is repeating the past – in the exact same way again, and again. So the worst case is we can do is to do nothing. So I call on you to continue support to be against the motion. In the last voting, please vote against the motion, as I will, in the belief that ICT is good for education. Thank you

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Dr. Kelly: Wayan , you sort of challenged us to look beyond computers, you talked about the telephone tree a school might use to pass out information, and the Internet. Can you actually look at computers themselves and tell us at least one example where technology has, through a rigorous evaluation process, where technology has been well invested in schools.

Well, actually, I am going to turn that question around a little bit and say that if we found an assessment of ICT and it’s use in schools, and then we made investments outside of passion, and outside of pure politics, it would be the first ever.

We had a really interesting debate on the Education Technology Debate about ICT4E assessments and their validity. I thought the most explosive post, which turned out to have the least comments, which tells me that it wasn’t explosive at all, that everybody already accepted it, was that ICT4E assessments themselves are a waste.

Either we should stop wasting children on more assessments. Because whether we think of it as good, or bad, or whatever, ICT in schools is great politics, and parents love it.

Every politician long time ago realized, you could talk about putting a chicken in every pot, or put a car in every garage. Well currently, and very excitingly for a lot of people, inside and outside this room, is I want to put a computer in front of every child.

So assessments are great and it is wonderful to have them, because we can learn from our mistakes and be better in the finite, in the detail. But at the aggregate, on a large scale, schools are doing it, parents want it, and politicians are making it happen. So we really should make sure that we are with the game, trying to steer the ship, instead of standing in front of it and saying “NO NO NO” and just get run over

So if we keep on the boat and ship metaphor if you will, I think we all can agree that technology can actually be an icebreaker. We can actually break through the rocks.

Often times we think of technology as a thing that we put into existing system and it gets absorbed and the system keeps moving the same. My real hope and my real dream, is what I see technology is able to do, is change this system and change the ship. So instead of ship being slowly sinking Titanic, it becomes a hydroplane flying ship.

So we can have a change here from this concept of education being a very boring and very rote activity. I mean let’s be honest. Making them memorize a list and regurgitate the list back on a test, and the test is a multiple choice, which is easier to grade with a Scantron or through some other automatic grading system – that is horrible. That is wasting children’s life and that is wasting all of our time.

We really need to change this way that we teach so that we have children that are excited about learning, and learn the way that we all work. When was the last time your boss said “Hi, I would like you to regurgitate back what is already in this manual to do your job, and as long as you regurgitate back correctly I will give you a raise.” I have never even heard of that kind of a job.

So the idea is that we want to have children who can learn better and learn in a way that they use as adult, and a way that improves their lives. And for me I feel that technology is one way to break through the logjam. It is an icebreaker through this wall of inertia to say the least.

The Universal Platform Problem

Each nation, developed or developing, has its own context of technology and technology availability. While I am an advocate of use of mobile technology, it would be foolish to assume that all mobile phones are created equal and that access to mobile phone technology is equal across the world. Socioeconomic divides combined with technology cost accounts for striations within a nation itself – the disparity between techno-haves and techno-have-nots is arguably greater in the developed countries due to the greater variance between economic classes within a society.

In the United States, someone may walk into class with a pristine iPhone or Blackberry where another may have a very basic phone and another may not have one at all. In developing nations, the same divides exist though perhaps at a lesser level – and the advantage within such a nation is that a curriculum can be more easily adapted to an accessible platform. It is far from perfect.

Attempts to create a universal platform haven’t necessarily met with success or failure. The OLPC advocates will hold up their successes to the world like a proud parent and yet the metrics for such successes do not in and of themselves aren’t definitive. In fact, it is hard to state that eLearning even in developed nations has had a positive effect – and if so, how much.

So what, exactly, is a universal platform? Internationally there does not seem to be one but there are advocates for each platform. Lobbyism in education must make way for reality in education. Where mobile phones in use can provide platforms for a curriculum, mobile phones could be a good platform. For nations willing to spend money on the OLPC instead of a more modern infrastructure rivaling developed nations, the OLPC may be the right option. No option is perfect – but the core of the problem remains adapting the curriculum to the device(s). That the devices are often seen as largely incompatible is one issue that, when considered, answers the Universal Platform Problem.

The Universal Platform Solution is not a hardware solution. It is not a software solution. It is an issue of standardization across hardware and software platforms. Educational materials consisting of text, video, images and all possible combinations are the basis for any transmission of material. Fortunately, the Internet has provided tools that handle this quite well – XML and HTML. Technology problem solved, use whatever hardware and software you want that complies to the standards of the world wide web.

So there is no technology platform problem. There is simply an implementation problem created by advocates of specific technologies.

But that doesn’t solve the problem. A curriculum must be adapted, and for a curriculum to be adapted there have to be educators that adapt the material to the universal platform. Since educational systems and their related curricula vary across the world, the options are to make standard curricula around the world or to have specific adaptations of curricula across the world.

With specific adaptations of curricula across the world, the global incompatibility of education becomes extended. If there is any doubt about this, go to the Wikipedia and research any topic in two or more languages: the results vary on language alone (something that both advocates and critics of Wikipedia typically fail to realize). Do we wish to extend these differences in education? In information? In knowledge? Yet there is a freedom to be found in specific adaptations that cannot be argued.

Internationalization standardization of curricula comes with heavy bureaucracy, will (at least at first) be slow to adapt and will have a lag time. There will be claims of bias in education; in the United States alone the science of Evolution is an issue for a culture that disagrees with it. ‘Teach the conflict’, some say, but do we want to teach how to be in conflict or how to resolve it? The point is that international standardization seems very far off when even a developed nation cannot resolve its own internal conflicts of a curriculum. To extend that debate internationally seems counterproductive.

Specific Adaptations of Curricula

Who then will adapt curricula for eLearning? It must be the local educators that adapt the local curricula; communication and work with other educators around the world will be useful in implementations but cannot define them. And the trouble with adapting the curricula is that it will require more than knowledge of tools and knowledge of material – it will require the foresight and imagination to combine the two.

And it must have metrics. To have metrics, there must be goals. And this, for better or worse, is where eLearning inherits from traditional education. Maybe the core of the problem is exactly that – and maybe we need to redefine some of the goals, and thus metrics, of education as a whole before we can do it properly with eLearning.