Can eBooks Satisfy? Creating Content for ICT-enabled Classrooms
During the Human Development Network webinar, “eBooks & Affordable Access to Digital Content for Teachers, Health Care Workers & Agricultural Extension Agents in Southern Africa“, which looked at lessons from the IADP Affordable Access Initiative Partnership with African Universities, a sidebar conversation came about on the instant message board that was associated with the webinar.
From this conversation came a very interesting question:
What is the impact of open access resources for primary schools on the current educational content creation models?
Now this question has many angles to it, but for the August Educational Technology Debate, let us focus on how low-cost ICT devices are transforming the creation and distribution of open content in the developing world.
Will educational systems, and the stakeholders that support them, be able to adapt existing and new content onto these devices? Might this adaptation facilitate a more egalitarian content creation structure, challenging the existing pricing structures and vested interests of current curriculum production & dissemination models?
In addition, should this content focus on ebooks and other electronic media that replicates existing content? Or is this an opportunity to change the way in which content is created, teacher’s educate, and students learn?
To lead us in this conversation will be two respected discussants:
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Richard Rowe
Richard Rowe is the Chair and CEO of the Open Learning Exchange, a network of nation-based NGO’s committed to achieving Quality Universal Basic Education by 2015 . Dr. Rowe has served as Director of Test Development and Research for the West African Examinations Council, Associate Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Technology and Education. -
Angus Scrimgeour
Angus Scrimgeour is the President of the International Association for Digital Publications, a program to provide university students and academic staff in developing countries with affordable access to e-books, and support for the identification, development, and effective use of open access e-learning resources. Mr. Scrimgeour is also a former Vice President of the World Bank Group a member of the Knowledge and Learning Council.
Please join us for what we all expect to be a lively and informative conversation – your input can start right now in the comments below, and Richard and Angus will post their opening remarks beginning Monday, August 10.
It's going to be incredibly difficult to support less popular languages – one of the first things I did when coming to South Africa was check the native language Wikipedias. As you might expect, Xhosa and Zulu have only a few hundred entries, while Afrikaans has more than 10,000, and English, of course, has millions.
I suspect that the correlation between average income of primary speakers of a language and the size of their Wikipedia is very strong… meaning that the problem for content creation is poverty, something far more intractable than content creation.
Poverty need not be seen as intractable. Education, especially basic education, is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for eliminating poverty. Without it, people are assured to remain in poverty. And today the ability to communicate across cultures is a key to moving up the economic ladder. Thus, like it or not, English, with all of its mixed history and linguistic weaknesses, has become the de facto lingua franca of the world. A well educated person will be skilled at several languages, including their own indigenous language. But, as Wikipedia demonstrates, incresingly English needs to be one of them to engage in the world economy.
I think that the real question is 'Can new technologies make learning more accessible, especially for those who do not have access to a quality basic education now?'
It is clear to me that the cost of delivering learning material will eventually be less via the internet onto low-cost ICT devices than paper books. I am just not clear if it is cheaper yet.
In any case, the cheaper it is to deliver the material the more time, money and energy can be spent on the content creation. Whether it is developed by volunteers or by paid staff, more materials will be available in all languages.
Additionally, by having materials in a digital form, computer translations can be used to make materials more accessible across languages.
For all these reasons I think it is important for people to start using these low-cost ICT devices to learn how they can be best used to improve and expand learning as well as to learn more about the real costs of implementing them effectively.
My suspicion is that it'll be easier to generate content, for Wikipedia or e-texts then you think. Incomes and telecommunication access is moving along much more quickly then doleful predictions implying another couple of millennia of ignorance, poverty and isolation would lead on to think.
A great deal of time could be saved, I believe, by finding those individuals and institutions that might be particularly inclined to assist in the function of both translation of other-language materials and the generation of new materials.
How much e-books would benefit from such an effort though is open to question since the crucial requirement of open standards isn't, to the best of my knowledge, met. Not to say that closed standards can't be made to serve but to most people with a technical bent closed standards impose costs, both financial and other, that make open standards strongly preferable.
Its not really about "eBooks" its about Internet access. Clearly, the younger the child, the greater the probable need for some kind of filtering of that access and for an external guide. But as the child grows older, there's a big wide world of information out there to explore
Tim,
I think we should be careful in assuming Internet connectivity in schools. Even in commercial environments, where people can and want to pay for good access, bandwidth is lacking. Here in Nigeria, I have agonizingly slow Internet at my hotel and not found anything faster than 28 kbps (dial up speeds from 1995). No way that antsy kids will sit through a long Internet content download.
Better would be something locally cached, and books are the best organization method for information we have – just look at how many books there are. eBooks would be a natural progression for students ans schools to take for the next decade at least.
Are books necessarily the best organization method for information we have? Or are they the physical result of a specific production technique? I think that it is likely that a new medium will have new tendencies for the fitting form factor (taking advantage of links, for one).
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Idea seems to be good but there are so many factors and issues around it. Especially developing country need to address level of monetary,accessbility and utility of sources(e-books) by children and teacher.
Internet access in the developing world is truly a challenge given the limited availability, aside from bandwidth and transmission speed. In some of the remotest island provinces in the Philippines, TV broadcast either via satellite or cable coupled with mobile communications such as SMS and MMS as a response mechanism to make learning programs interactive are other options that ICT experts can assess impact of such convergence which addresses problems in reach and content delivery. But this needs some research and data gathering to verify claims against facts, unless some prototypes are modeled for case studies.
Openness of the teachers is very important. Some teachers view e-learning as a competitor for them rather than assisting them.
They welcome e-books with animation (to explain the physics and maths). For more than a year i was trying to sell a automated software for question paper generation and evaluating answers based on different criteria like…analytical, memory, imaginative etc.,etc., Teachers got offended and some made comments like "why don't u replace US with computers"…. I could not sell even a single piece of the software. But could sell only the finance module of the whole education package.
I strongly believe a good set of animation, textual and pictorial explanation of physics, Chemistry and maths will suffice for the next generation to come.
Connected and interactive learning can be the next. Whether internet or mobile should be next phase. Aiming high is good but reality will sometimes bite and leave the "dream as dream" and not reality.
So my answer to the question (title) is …Yes … ebooks with great contents, pictorial, animated explanation would suffice.
A single computer (may be a projector) for every class room is sufficient … Laptop for every kid is too ambitious and may never see a light.
Let us think of each classroom rather than thinking of each student to make things possible.
Kasi
In the USA, Ebook is only a FORMAT which is more appropriate for older age children and adults who are literate; have been technology trained and have that fluency; have access to the downloadng wireless networks; don't have vision challenges, or hardware accessibility challenges; accept the (current) inability to make a hard copy of the material and the limit of materials available; and the potential loss of notes made on study materials should the vendor decide to retract the download.
I perceive the biggest immediate contribution for the Ebook FORMAT is to replace the heavy, back-breaking public school textbooks that require regular updating (new editions) and the costs associated to our public taxpayers. These costs, or monies, that can be better allocated to services supporting the success of our English Language Learners. Services that are currently being paid from the normal, non-weighted allocation per child—the impact of which has diminished our public school education to minimal focuses on mathematics and english language arts without enrichments of Librarians, Computer Lab Teachers, Visual Arts, Music, Band, P.E., Organized team sports, and Fieldtrips.
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Could we get back to the question (impact, OER, current content creation models)? I am of a project working to enhance the use of ICTs to empower teachers. We know that access to Internet, and to technologies in general are a problem. But when that problem is solved for some teachers and some schools, what happens to stimulate teachers to create and/or use new materials? Who has concrete experience and examples?
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Could we get back to the question (impact, OER, current content creation models)? I am part of a project working to enhance the use of ICTs to empower teachers in Africa. We know that access to Internet, and to technologies in general are problematic. We know that language issues loom very very large. But after those problems are solved for some teachers and some schools, what happens to build capacity and desire of teachers to create and/or use new materials? Who has concrete experience and examples?
Alex, I tried to address your question in my second post that is just up. Part of the question concerns the goal. OLE's goal is to figure out how to assure Quality Universal Basic Education quickly — by the UN goal of 2015. Technology is only a part of that equation — in many cases a small part. So there shuld be a lot of attention given to low-tech solutions. However I believe appropriate technology can and should be included in any lomng-term strategy for achieving QUBE. Over time, technology is likely to have a major role in education at all levels and the developing countries should use it whenever and wherever it make sense.
I believe we should not expect teachers to create high quality materials themselves. if we can provide teachers in developing countries well crafted courseware that includes essentially everything they need to help their student learn — including guides on how to use local materials from the school yard — then we will make real progress quickly.
Alex, I tried to address your question in my second post that is just up. Part of the question concerns the goal. OLE's goal is to figure out how to assure Quality Universal Basic Education quickly — by the UN goal of 2015. Technology is only a part of that equation — in many cases a small part. So there shuld be a lot of attention given to low-tech solutions. However I believe appropriate technology can and should be included in any lomng-term strategy for achieving QUBE. Over time, technology is likely to have a major role in education at all levels and the developing countries should use it whenever and wherever it make sense.
I believe we should not expect teachers to create high quality materials themselves. if we can provide teachers in developing countries well crafted courseware that includes essentially everything they need to help their student learn — including guides on how to use local materials from the school yard — then we will make real progress quickly.
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