Low-Cost ICT Devices Are Driving Proprietory and Open Education Resources
Question: how are low-cost ICT devices transforming the creation and distribution of open content in the developing world?
The short answer is “very slowly”!
In spite of all the hype, the vast majority of students in the developing world cannot afford suitable ICT devices. And, while low-cost mobile phones are becoming more widespread, they are of limited value in terms of the creation and distribution of open content.
The second problem is connectivity. Most universities and schools either do not have broadband, or their bandwidth is inadequate. Also, the ratio of lab based computers to students is very low. The result is that internet access is painfully slow, and on-line reading of e-books is not an option.
The third problem is relevance. While much good work has been done to develop local context Open Education Resources (“OERs”), and to adapt internationally available resources, this has so far only scratched the surface. And local language resources are almost non-existent.
The fourth problem is culture. The scarcity and cost of physical books has led to a non-reading culture; it has also let to the prevalence of “content” teaching from photocopied extracts instead of “conceptual” teaching, in which students learn how to learn.
And the fifth problem is capacity. Most academic staff at universities are too busy to search for relevant OERs and proprietory e-books, let alone develop new OER content. Also, large numbers of teachers at primary, and to a lesser extent secondary, schools are not even computer literate.
The solutions to these problems are asymmetrical at each of the country, institution, and staff levels, and they include:
- providing subsidized hire purchase facilities for students to acquire low-cost Notebook computers, or building the cost into the educational fee structure,
- replacing the high-cost-low-volume model for e-books with a low-cost-high-volume model (the IADP has recently reached agreement on this with a core group of the world’s leading publishers),
- downloading e-books and OERs onto ICT devices so that they can be viewed off-line,
- giving academic staff who develop and/or adapt OERs institutional recognition and financial rewards in addition to the normal practice of attribution, and
- developing sustainable communities of practice among “pioneering” academic staff, and extending their influence through the hub and spoke principle.
Question: 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?
The short answers are “yes, and maybe”.
There are no technical reasons why OERs cannot be developed, adapted, and viewed on ICT devices – subject, of course, to system and format compatibility. The challenge is to make these resources mainstream, and integrate them into the curricula and pedagogy.
The first issue is quality and usefulness. Common standards and appropriate tagging of metadata are a given, but quality and usefulness require a review process. Committees usually don’t work because they create an obstacle and/or a bottle-neck. The best model is a periodic virtual peer group review, including a star rating system, in which individual and institutional reputations are placed on the line. Wikipedia has some of these elements, but in my view it doesn’t go far enough. A further point to emphasize is the importance of high quality abstracts.
The second issue is awareness. Busy academic staff do not have the time or inclination to search through the universe of OERs and e-books; equally, they don’t like the “all or nothing” approach of content aggregators. The best model is a well researched package of resources from which academic staff can choose, including the ability to step outside the package when desired.
The third issue is: who pays? The popular belief among some stakeholders is that OERs are, or should be, “free”. In reality, however, they are not. Quite apart from the fact that the platforms upon which they reside need to be maintained, most of the developers, editors, formatters, promoters, and reviewers of OERs are paid.
The only difference is that they are paid directly or indirectly by governments, universities, or NGOs, rather than by sales to the end users. It is therefore open to question as to whether authors and publishers of proprietory resources offer good value for money compared with those that produce OERs.
I personally believe that both proprietory resources and OERs will have a continuing place in the future, and that convenient and affordable access through the advent of ICT devices will improve the quality of selected resources and enhance competition.
Question: should this content focus on e-books and other electronic media that replicates existing content? Or is this an opportunity to change the way in which content is created, teachers educate, and students learn?
The short answer is “both”.
Much good work has been done to archive physical resources in a digital format. Also, publishers are beginning to make e-books available in developing countries at an affordable price. As a result, academic staff and school teachers are at last beginning to have affordable access to high quality educational resources. But much needs to be done to improve awareness and integrate this into curricula and pedagogy.
The advent of low-cost ICT devices is indeed a wonderful opportunity to change the educational landscape. Apart from teaching computer literacy, which is an essential component of education in today’s world, it brings the prospect of higher education and technical training closer to the millions of prospective students who cannot attend, or cannot afford to attend, campus.
It also facilitates the creative use of digital technology to make the content more compelling, and to enhance the learning experience by bringing an interactive and visual dimension to voice and text. The constraint, however, is the capacity of teachers to use the technology and to participate in the development of the resources, which points to the overriding need to improve standards through teacher education.
A very interesting and analytical argument which raises some important issues. Coming at the issue as an economist, I tend to look at the role of incentives which, in the field, come in two main forms: financial (e.g., being paid to prepare content, or receiving royalties from sales) and psychological (the satisfaction that comes from seeing your name on a piece which is widely downloaded, cited and well-reviewed). As you say, if Open Educational Resources (OERs) are to offer a viable alternative to proprietory resources, then suitable incentives need to be put into place. But this works much better for widely-spoken languages, such as English, than for local languages. Clearly they will both coexist, but the wider use of OERs might reinforce the pre-eminence of English as a teaching medium.
Agreed about the incentives. The assumption has been that teachers would, in substantial numbers, create content if the conditions were right. While to some extent this is happening in higher education in developed countries, it is not happening at school level. And the joyous anarchy that reigns in the creation of on-line content for general audiences is not a working model for education. So how can we create the proper incentives in developing countries?
There will be phases in this process.
1. A Basic Courseware Package. The first phase is to get some really good courseware, in any language, that covers the basics of learning to read and to manipulate numbers. This needs to be a set of complete courses — lesson plan, textbook, workbook — not just some interesting stuff. The Shuttleworth Foundation has accomplished this by purchasing a commercial publisher of k-12 courseware and placing it online for free. That gives people something to work with.
I believe the rewards from knowing one has contributed to the common welfare are sufficient for a lot of this core content to become available. We see that happening at the university level and it is beginning to happen at the k-12 level.
2. Translation and Contextualization. The second phase is to download the core courseware, translate and contextualize it. In many cases this is being done by a partnership between an NGO and the government agency responsible for curriculum development. Most developing governments seem to have such a body. The resulting courseware is, or should be, in the public domain. Such materials need to be a mix of high-end interactive resources as well as printable materials for those places that do not have access to such technologies. The key to this phase, it seems to me, is to enable developing countries to have access both to core content, such as the Shutleworth content, and to the software tools required to convert that content into something appropriate for their region.
3. Teacher development. A key in this entire process is to provide teachers the opportunities they need to learn how to use high quality learning resources effrectively. Getting good courseware in the hands of teachers and students is not enough.
Those who have enjoyed a good business in providing commercial content for the k-12 sector, in developed as well as less developed; areas of the world will not be happy with this development. They will need a different model for their future businesses.
Tim,
Maybe. It does seem that English is becoming the common language of the world, not because it is linguistically strong but because the world's economy is choosing it as its common language. (Despite the growth of China, Mandarin is not likely to replace English as the common language.) As an example, the Rwandan government recently decreed that English will be the primary language for elementary and secondary schools despite the fact that the majority of their teachers do no currently speak or read English.
However the Open Learning Exchange (OLE) model is to provide each country-based center the tools they need for translation and localization into the languages of their region. It is not simply a matter of translation but of localization that goes well beyond a good translation. Ideally this model, supported by effective tools, will enable literally thousands of local languages, with English as the second language.
A centralized system for such translation and localization would, indeed, lead to an almost exclusive focus on English.
Point taken, though I think the Rwanda example says more about their attitude to the French, which was very much affected by what happened there in 1994.
Angus,
Today we learn that Sony will take a common eBook format. Could this be the beginning of a unified content publishing system? Might it drastically lower the costs and barriers to entry for new content and seed Libraries of Alexandria to sprout across the developing world?
That would be great. However Sony is way behind the Kindle with its eBook Reader. Their latest system, even the "pocket-sized" device still requires a wired link to a computer for downloading. That is a no starter in my book.
As the eBook-reader market is just starting to evolve, prices are way too high for a sustainable usage in most developing countries. Prices must come down below 50$ before we should start to consider eBook-reader as proper tools for education. Why do I propose 50$?
When we analyse the "Base of the pyramid" (cp. Hammond et a. 2007) segments with an annual income between below 3000 US-$, and look at their expenditure for education and ICT, we can get an idea on how much they would be able to afford for ICT devices. For example, in Colombia we have around 25 million people living at the BoP segment with a mean annual expenditure of 1.745$ per person, and they spend 1.4% for education and 1,8 % for ICTs. Taking this numbers as a very generalised basis we can assume that they will be able to afford a nonrecurring investment up to 55$ for an educational device. For other countries it is even less: e.g. Nigeria: about 15$ only.
The discussion comes at the right time as we really have to think how eBook-reader and eBooks can support education, especially at the Base of the pyramid.
As the eBook-reader market is just starting to evolve, prices are way too high for a sustainable usage in most developing countries. Prices must come down below 50$ before we should start to consider eBook-reader as proper tools for education. Why do I propose 50$?
When we analyse the "Base of the pyramid" segments (cp. Hammond et a. 2007) with an annual income below 3000 US-$, and look at their expenditure for education and ICT, we can get an idea on how much they would be able to afford for ICT devices. For example, in Colombia we have around 25 million people living at the BoP segment with a mean annual expenditure of 1.745$ per person, and they spend 1.4% for education and 1,8 % for ICTs. Taking this numbers as a very generalised basis we can assume that they will be able to afford a nonrecurring investment up to 55$ for an educational device. For other countries it is even less: e.g. Nigeria: about 15$ only.
The discussion comes at the right time as we really have to think how eBook-reader and eBooks can support education, especially at the Base of the pyramid.
Peter,
I agree with your general point of view. The US$50 is the figure I have had in my mind for some time as the maximum affordable. That assumes at least a five year life ($10 per year) and close to zero interest on the payments over those five years. The World Bank could do that provided we can get the hardware to that level. But we are not there yet.
However, as I have said in my conversations here, many other elements must be present for something like an eBook to be cost/effective, even at US$50. Good content must exist, linked to educational tests used by each country and teachers must learn how to use ICT's effectively. Finally to be really effective, the "eBooks" must be more than just passive transmitters of words and numbers. Learners need feedback loops to support their learning and today's eBooks do not have that feature. That's why I am impressed with the TeacherMate that approaches the requirements we agree upon and, on top of that, is interactive. I am confident we will see more such tools soon but, in the meantime, we need to focus on those things that can be done: pedagogically sound courseware built as courses, not just bits and pieces of interesting stuff, and helping teachers increase their skills at helping children learn. There is no need to wait on hardware for these tasks to be undertaken.
talking about digital literacy why are they not any project to teach teacher how to Google ???
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Who actually have piloted these concept. Whose doing walk the talk?
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It seems best project in the world have been done by Turkey.
16 million K12 students
National curriculum
All etextbooks free
16 million tablets are being provided to 16 million students
Free course contents for every course from grade 1 to grade 12
Free internet at school and home broadband.
Total cost to government is $ 5 billion in 3 years .
It is the greatest IT for K12 project in the world .
Higher education have been solved by MIT.
Now MIT and Harvard will provide online courses to 1 billion people of the world.
They will provide certificates per course ( like credits) later probably degrees too .
Cost is about $ 10 per course.
First course about Electronic Engineering at MIT http://mitx.mit.edu
Course is free but exam has a small fee.
Look also http://www.edxonline.org to follow MIT+Harvard venture .
Would you give us a link to the project in Turkey? I do not find it in a Google search. Bangladesh appears to be the first country to put its textbooks on line for free use by anybody. Links on the page
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Open_Education_Resou…
Bangladesh National e-Content Repository in Bangla. Story: PM opens e-content repository. 30,000 teachers, 148 government organisations and 50 local and foreign non-government organisations. 50,000 pages, planned to increase to 5,000,000.
e-Book ::. ই-বুক জগতে স্বাগতম in Bangla. Story: PM opens online version of textbooks Access to Information (A2I) Project of the PM’s Office and the National Curriculum and Textbook Board (NCTB) jointly transformed 33 primary level and 73 secondary level textbooks into e-books in collaboration with the UNDP.