Education – Page 2 – Integra LLC

How Technical Literacy Barrier is Widening the Mobile Phone Gender Gap: 3 New Reports to Consider

Photo credit: DIPTENDU DUTTA/AFP/Getty Images

With International Women’s Day this week on March 8th, several prominent aid and research organizations working in the developing world are releasing some fascinating new reports that explore how ICTs and gender impact each other. Creating a startling picture of the realities of gender disparities within an already gaping digital divide, the reports identify a technical literacy barrier that is hindering development for women at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP), or those living on less than $2 a day. It’s currently estimated that a woman is 21% less likely to own a mobile phone than a man, and of the large population of women that do not own phones, one report revealed that 22% of them claimed the main reason was that they “wouldn’t know how to use it”.

Termed the “mobile phone gender gap” by mWomen, a GSMA program which aims to reduce it by 50% by 2014, this inequality has recently been examined from several different perspectives: four case studies from India compiled by the Cherie Blair Foundation and International Center for Research on Women (ICRW); a research report that offers a narrative glimpse into the lives of BoP women, framework for designing business models and a set of research tools for conducting studies, all created by the GSMA mWomen Program; and an analysis of the results of several ICT gender focused projects conducted by the Swedish Program for ICT in Developing Regions (Spider).

Photo credit: Kelake.org

1. Connectivity: How Mobile Phones, Computers, and the Internet Can Catalyze Women’s Entrepreneurship

The Cherie Blair Foundation, a charity that supports women entrepreneurs in developing and transition countries, and the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), an organization which aims to improve gender equality and reduce poverty in the developing world, teamed up to investigate four initiatives to target women and observe how technology is helping them to earn income. Through in-depth research and analysis, the report focused on the opportunities and challenges involved to reach several important conclusions:

Women will utilize ICTs to develop their businesses when the technology is available to them, increasing both efficiency and social status
Out of all of the ICTs currently available, mobile phones are the first choice for successful business ventures, with portability and adaptability being the biggest draws
Women using ICTs in their businesses promote their benefits amongst friends and family
Out of the few thousand women highlighted in the case studies, there’s still a lot of potential — perhaps half a billion women — for new entrepreneurial ICT initiatives in India
Partnerships are essential between the public, for-profit, non-profit and social enterprise sectors
Sustainability is still a challenge but could be improved with more multi-sectoral partnerships bolstered by the economic and social benefits
ICTs are attracting women entrepreneurs for their efficiency and time-saving capabilities though exploring new ways the technology can foster support and communication between women entrepreneurs still needs to be explored

Photo Credit: Reuters

2. Portraits: A Glimpse into the Lives of Base of the Pyramid Women

To provide a snapshot of what life is like for women living on under $2 a day, the GSMA mWomen Programme, a global public-private partnership between the worldwide mobile industry and the international development community including USAID and AusAID, created Portraits, a summarized version of a larger research report entitled Striving and Surviving – Exploring the Lives of Women at the Base of the Pyramid, due to be released on March 8th. To represent the mass of quantitative data and information collected from one-on-one interviews during the research, the report presents 8 fictionalized life stories from varying regions, each representing a different important aspect of life for BoP women. Here are just a few of the statistics that can be found in the report:

Of the women who did not want to own a mobile phone, 22% said the main reason was that they “wouldn’t know how to use it”
74% of women chose “a good education for my children” as one of their top five life priorities
83% of the women surveyed had not completed secondary education. 31% had no formal education at all
47% of mobile owners said they had been taught to use their handset by their husbands, while 34% had taught themselves
Only 6% of the women in the study knew (without being prompted) you could access the Internet through a mobile phone, and less than 2% had done so. Amongst young BoP women ages 16-21, 39% had some awareness of the mobile web, though only 5% had used it

Photo credit: womendeliver.org

3. Empowering Women Through ICT

Summarizing the outcomes and conclusions from five different projects using various ICT platforms carried out in five countries — Bolivia, Kenya, India, Rwanda, Vietnam, and Bolivia — this report created by the Swedish Program for ICT in Developing Regions (Spider) focuses on how ICTs can support women in the rural regions of the global south. By observing the impacts of the projects on the lives of each group of women, Spider researchers considered the implications of how technology affects gender just as gender affects technology through:

2 projects in Bolivia: one focusing on empowering female community leaders and one supporting victims of domestic violence through a safe virtual environment
A project carried out in both Kenya and India which focused on ecological sustainability, diversification of livelihood, basic training in ICT through self-help groups
A project in Rwanda which explored the use of ICT in small business development through a women’s basket weaving initiative
A research project in Vietnam which considered gender in the development of ICT.

March 8, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

From Classrooms to Economies, INTEL White Paper Says eLearning is Making a Postive Impact

Photo credit: Kitguru.com

Intel’s recently released white paper entitled “The Positive Impacts of Learning”, provides new research data that concludes that eLearning is improving the quality and effectiveness of education. An updated version of the 2009 paper, it offers a comprehensive glimpse at some key research findings aimed at helping educational leaders identify relevant eLearning benefits to make well-informed decisions for developing eLearning strategies.

Intel realizes, along with much of the ICT sector, that with an endless array of both failed and successful examples of implementation strategies for eLearning — and few published results of strictly controlled experimental studies — it is difficult for researchers to produce valid data that can actually prove the efficacy of improving the quality of education through the use of ICT. By comparing data from a spectrum of different studies conducted in the US and various countries, the paper draws several important conclusions supporting the theory that eLearning is in fact positively impacting not only students and teachers, but also their families, communities, societies, and economies.

Students:

Research has shown that there are three major areas of student learning affected by eLearning: engagement, motivation and attendance. Teachers that were surveyed or consulted in many of the studies reported that student motivation was improved the most out these three areas, as much as 76% of low achieving students involved in 1:1 computing programs in one teacher survey.

Access:

Access to technology is a large factor in student performance levels. Studies have found that 1:1 computing programs are much more beneficial than computer labs. Through analyzing 13 different countries, researchers have found that students with easy access to ICT in the classrooms or involved in 1:1 programs are significantly more likely to use ICT than students who only had access to computer labs. Not only do these students use the devices more, but another study showed that academic scores and attendance improved significantly.

Quality of Learning:

When deciding how deeply the technology should be integrated into the learning process, Intel concludes that the more opportunities and easier accessibility that students have to the technology, the greater the effects. Intel has found that student-centered teaching methodologies coupled with blended learning, a strategy that mixes different educational environments, is the most effective way of ensuring that students fully value and explore all learning possibilities available through the technology. With similar advantages found in differentiated instruction methods, students are then able to learn at their own pace and adopt strategies to develop skills needed for self-regulated learning.

Performance:

Photo credit: anonymous from blogspot.net

The white paper suggests that various aspects of student performance, particularly 21st century skills needed to compete in a developing global economy, are significantly improved through the use of ICT. For example, “in one two-year study of upper elementary classrooms with 1:1 computing access, students outperformed non-laptop students on English Language Arts (ELA) literary response and analysis and writing strategies, (Suhr et al., U.S.).”

Teachers:

Access:

Research shows that giving teachers computers or helping them to purchase them is incredibly valuable to these programs. Through boosting teacher confidence in the validity of the information that they are teaching and offering various ways to plan lessons efficiently, teachers can become empowered through technology. Intel suggests that by creating learning management systems, software applications for managing online learning, and training teachers how to use them, educators can share and contribute to a growing body of open educational resources (OER).

Performance:

Besides visible improvements in the quality of student learning, teachers management skills improve as well. Better organizational skills and levels of productivity were reported in most of the studies referenced in the report. In one study, “68 percent of teachers with 1 to 3 years of experience say that technology has increased their effectiveness by making them more productive, (Project Tomorrow, U.S.),”

Society and Community:

A number of studies suggest that eLearning is creating benefits for students across all social classes but that disadvantaged, at-risk, and disabled groups of students benefit more. For example, “the Texas Technology Immersion Pilot showed that economically disadvantaged students reached proficiency levels matching the skills of advantaged control students, (Texas Center for Educational Research, U.S.).” At the broader social level, Intel suggests that by improving basic education, eLearning can indirectly reduce levels of criminal activity and increase students’ involvement in improving their communities.

Photo credit: impactlab.net

As policy makers use eLeaning to improve basic education, they are focusing on the larger effects on the economy. Emphasizing this fact, the report highlights the creation of more job opportunities and developing a workforce better able to fill these jobs. For example, “The OECD estimates the demand for employees with technology skills is growing at a pace that most labor markets struggle to satisfy, stating that approximately 16 million people are employed by the ICT sector, and representing approximately 6 percent of the OECD business sector employment. Furthermore, the estimate is that this sector is growing faster than most other business sectors.”

The full report and bibliography for the studies referenced above can be accessed here.

March 1, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Delivering a Library of Books with Every E-Reader: How Worldreader is Improving Literacy in Africa

Worldreader, a market-oriented, not-for-profit NGO, is making subsidized e-readers available in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and already seeing improvements in literacy rates. That’s just one of the many positive results that Dr. Jonathan Wareham, a member of Worldreader’s board of directors and Vice Dean and professor of Information Systems at ESADE – Ramon Llull University in Barcelona, Spain, discussed last week during a presentation at the World Bank headquarters here in Washington, DC.

Dr. Wareham and others at Worldreader are concerned about the growing book famine in Africa. According to a World Bank study conducted in 19 sub-Saharan African countries, only one of those countries, Botswana, “had anything close to adequate book provision in schools”. Using e-reader technology which can hold more books than most school libraries have in such countries — and with no added distribution costs — Worldreader has launched several pilot studies in schools in Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda. As of now, over 75,000 e-books have been distributed wirelessly to over 750 students.

The pilot study in Ghana, called iREAD, which received financial and research support from USAID, compared the rise in literacy rates over the course of one year for three groups of students: a group given e-readers without training on how to use the devices, another that was given out-of-classroom pedagogical interventions, and a control group without e-readers. Literacy scores for students with e-readers and no training improved 12.9% vs 8.1% of the control group, and students with e-readers and additional training improved 15.7% vs 8.1% of the control group.

Results from the study have proven the efficacy of the technology with the programs to support it and Worldreader plans to expand the Uganda initiative by doubling the number of students with e-readers within the next year. Besides improving student literacy scores, the project team also expects to see improvements in adult literacy rates since many of the students share the devices with their families and communities.

Unlike device-based projects such as the One Laptop Per Child program, Worldreader doesn’t produce its own e-reader — so far, it only distributes Amazon’s Kindle. Dr. Wareham describes Worldreader as device agnostic. “There’s no real need to be publicly aligned with either Apple, or with Amazon, or with Android — it doesn’t matter. What matters is bringing literature into the classrooms and as the devices converge and the prices drop, there will be more options to choose from.”

Also unlike most device-based projects, Worldreader invests manpower and on-the-ground support to ensure project sustainability. With the approval and support of government officials and the Ministry of Education in each country, the project so far works with teachers, students, and community leaders to provide training on how to use the the devices and make certain that the technology is fully understood and valued. Though high breakage rates and incidents of theft remain a concern for project implementation, Worldreader believes that providing more training on how to care for the devices, building relationships within each community to promote the device’s educational value, and discouraging theft will help to lower these rates.

Worldreader is looking to build on the success of the pilot studies by partnering with other organizations to expand to an estimated total of 10 projects in 2012. Dr. Wareham said that scaling remains to be a major challenge for the project but plans are underway to provide organizations with what he termed “Worldreader-in-a-box” — kits that will enable training programs to be developed where Worldreader project implementers are not able to go. In addition, the organization is working to expand an ePub platform that allows local authors’ works to be published and accessed on e-readers, creating opportunities for local authors and offering literary works that can help to foster national identity.

February 28, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

An ICT4E Lesson Learned: Offline Content is Key

I recently made one of the biggest ICT4D mistakes in the book. Pay close attention, and see if you can pick it out.

When I was in Arusha, Tanzania last month, I was working with a primary school that recently set up a learning lab with 13 donated computers. The technology was not being used because the teachers were not sure how it could be leveraged for education. The computers were simply collecting dust.

The semester before the trip I wanted to develop something that would allow the school to use the computers effectively. I began searching for online educational content relevant to the Tanzanian curriculum and found all sorts of learning materials, games, and software downloads. Once I had collected a good chunk of quality content, I created a website and placed links to each of my findings alongside the specific curriculum objective that they addressed.

Did you catch it? My big mistake, I mean…

The school wasn’t connected to the Internet yet. How could I possibly have overlooked something like that?

To make a long story short, even though I was told the school would be connected when I arrived, there were some bureaucratic problems that slowed the process of getting Internet access there. About three weeks into my trip, the Internet was finally hooked up, but the wait had cut into the majority of the time that I had allocated for teacher training.

Moral of this story: Do not rely on the Internet. Offline content is key.

While Internet access is spreading rapidly throughout developing countries, it is important that ICT4D projects do not place all of their trust in its availability. There are still countless communities throughout world without access, and many of these communities have several obstacles preventing them from obtaining access. Even when rural communities have the infrastructure to connect, Internet subscriptions in these areas can constitute a large percentage of per capita income. Individuals simply cannot afford Internet access.

It’s important to note that access is not the only issue. Let’s imagine for a second that the school I was working with did have Internet when I arrived. This still would have been problematic since bandwidth in most developing countries remains limited – definitely not conducive to streaming online educational games and videos.

Relying on Internet content also makes projects less transferable. If I found that my idea was successful, and I wanted to scale it out to other schools, I would likely run into the same Internet issues elsewhere. In using the cloud as a solution, remember that weather is always local. Having offline content is much more reliable and practical.

The good news is that there is tons of content that can be downloaded from the Internet in order to accumulate offline content. Wikipedia allows you to download entire libraries of information, and I found plenty of open source educational games that proved to be very helpful to the instructors at the school.

So how did I fix my project?

By the end of my trip, the entire focus had shifted from allocating online material on the website to installing offline content on the computers. This proved to be a much more reliable means of technology use in the school.

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February 24, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Education, Education Partnerships, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Attention ICT Innovators: Have you Considered Peace Corps?

No, I don’t actually mean you should commit to 2 years of service in the Peace Corps (though if you have the time, “life is calling” as the PC recruiters say), but what about joining forces with them? With over 9,000 volunteers, 40% of which focus on education and another 12% in business and ICT, and spanning the globe in about 76 developing countries, isn’t that a resource worth exploring?

I’ve been thinking about this lately since there seems to be a growing amount of speculation about how new innovations in information communication technologies (ICT) are being introduced into classrooms throughout the developing world without enough, or any, teacher training to ensure sustainability. Take for example the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program. It drew a lot of criticism after it first released the XO 1.0 laptop for lack of teacher-focused training programs on how to use the devices and it is soon to become even more controversial with the release of the much talked-about XO 3.0 tablet.

Amidst reading the numerous critical blogs and some rather heated debates, I’ve started to wonder: What on-the-ground research is being done to assess the need for some of these new innovations in a specific country in the first place? What resources, particularly people, are already available to help introduce and support the teacher training needed for local teachers to deem the technology useful and relevant within the unique cultural context?

In Cambodia, where I recently served as a Peace Corps Volunteer at the Prey Veng Regional Teacher Training Center (RTTC), the Khmer have a saying: “Don’t take the straight or winding path. Take the path your ancestors have taken.” And new innovations in ICT can be seen as just that — a long winding path of new and confusing devices, unfamiliar to an aging population of school officials and teachers that think they have fared well enough as educators without the help of new gadgets.

Last month, leading experts and stakeholders in the field of mobile learning discussed how people’s perceptions of mobile phones are impeding progress in mobile learning in the recently released UNESCO Mobile Learning Week report:

Perhaps due to the intellectually-light and entertainment-heavy content that has been optimized for mobile devices over the past decade, the primary social challenge is convincing people that phones are NOT a barrier to learning.

Even in American classrooms, mobile phones can often be thought of as a distraction, most commonly used for texting and watching YouTube videos, rarely ever thought of as a valuable teaching aide that teachers could already be using if they had the training or interest to explore its potential on their own.

And mobile devices are just the tip of this growing iceberg of ICT, OER, FOSS, and a plethora of other acronyms used in this field. So once the need and appropriateness of a technology is determined useful for a particular country and educational environment, who might be able to help train teachers how to use and develop it? Who has three months of intensive language training and culture-sensitivity seminars, works and lives with the locals, has a wide range of connections within the school system, and strives to understand the complexities of the education system? That’s right — the tech-savvy Peace Corps Volunteers.

Now that’s an assumption and generalization that all PCVs know and care about what’s going on in the ICT4D field and have any interest of being involved in such endeavors — dealing with stray dogs and gastrointestinal diseases is a challenge enough. But why not reach out to the volunteers in your ICT-destined country and give them a chance to use some of those international relationship building skills that they spent hours cultivating during training.

And Peace Corps is just one of several organizations that send volunteers into the developing world. VSO UK and VSO International, Volunteer Service Overseas organizations, are quite similar to Peace Corps volunteers in regards to their culture and language immersion and 26% work in the education sector. The interactive map below shows where Peace Corps and VSO volunteers are currently serving and the program sectors that they work in. Almost every country has volunteers working in the education sector and some have already launched information technology-related projects:

View Volunteer Programs in Education and ICT in a larger map

February 23, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Women in Development

Girls in ICT Portal: ITU Inspires Next Generation of Women

Pictures of leading women in information communication technology (ICT) from around the world scroll across the main page of the UN International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) new Girls in ICT Portal, launched just last month. Profiles like Sara Adams, Senior Software Editor at Google Germany, are accompanied by inspirational stories of each woman’s entry into the largely male-dominated field, just one of several ways the website aims to inspire a new generation of girls to explore career opportunities in ICT.

ITU, the United Nations specialized agency for ICT, created the new portal as part of it’s new 3-year campaign, “Technology Needs Girls”. Susan Schorr, Head of the Special Initiatives Division at ITU, discussed the vital role that successful women in ICT can play during a brief presentation at the World Radiocommunication Conference 2012, currently being held in Geneva.

“It’s very important for women and girls to have role models,” Schorr said. “We have already over 20 profiles of women spanning the globe from practically every region around the world and representing all kinds of ICT career paths because our message is that a career in the ICT sector can take many different forms.”

The Girls in ICT Portal also features an ICT studies and careers database. Users can search over 400 programs including scholarships, contest and awards, trainings and internships, online networks, tech camps, and Girls in ICT Day activities, even refining the search by geographical region. Because the portal is targeted towards young women from around the world, the website can also be read in Arabic, Spanish, French, and Russian.

In addition, a number of studies and white papers surrounding the prevalence of women in ICT can be found in the Trends, Analysis, and Profiles section of the website. Over 100 regional and private sector organizations active in the ICT sector are also featured which include a link and brief description of each.

Along with the web portal, ITU is planning to promote the new “Technology Needs Girls” campaign through two major events: An advocacy event in New York on International Girls in ICT Day, April 26, and the World Telecommunication and Information Society Day 2012 (WTISD): “Women and Girls in ICT”. Aiming to raise awareness to the possible uses of ICT in bridging the digital divide, these two events will focus on encouraging young women, educators, and the industry itself to promote education and careers paths in ICT for girls.

“Technology can help people,” said Doreen Bogden, ITU’s Chief of Strategic Planning and Membership at the World Radiocommunication Conference. “What we find is that girls often pursue careers where they think they can make a difference [by] becoming a doctor, becoming a teacher. We believe the same is true for ICT. It can make a difference, it can change people’s lives, and it can empower people.”

February 16, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

One Tablet Per Child: Walter Bender Discusses Future of OLPC

While listening to Walter Bender, founder and executive director of Sugar Labs, speak last week at USAID’s Mobiles for Education (mEducation) Monthly Seminar Series in Washington, DC, it was difficult to decide if he was more interested in discussing the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)program’s new XO 3.0 tablet, or the educational philosophy that has spurred its development.

By the end of his presentation, however, it was clear that both are inherent to launching an effective and sustainable program utilizing the new technology. As former co-founder of OLPC, Mr. Bender now focuses his time and energy on developing and improving Sugar, an open source desktop environment which promotes learning through connectivity, collaboration, and what Mr. Bender calls “off the grid accessibility”, the ability to take the computers into virtually any learning environment.

And the new tablet promises to do just that. Upon first look, the tablet doesn’t seem much different from the original laptop besides being thinner since there’s no keyboard. The lack of keyboard is a feature that Mr. Bender seemed torn about saying that keyboards are needed for developing writing skills but that the device should evolve with the introduction of new technologies, tablets being the big new innovation in mobile computers.

The easily recognizable bright green and white rugged exterior is still present but now the 8-inch screen is protected by a green silicone cover. The child-friendly tablet was designed with the same consideration for durability, cost, and conservation of power that has made the OLPC program so well known, but now it features solar panels on the inside of the cover to power it in addition to the power adapter and hand-crank powered battery from the previous laptop.

Of course, the education-specific user interface of Sugar still remains and can be baffling to anyone not already familiar with it’s icons, a wide array of small visual representations of each activity that doesn’t resemble Microsoft’s or Apple’s familiar icons. But in Sugar’s design lies Mr. Bender’s philosophy and aim: a simplicity so intuitive that children can understand it as well as modify it and create new programs for their own use.

As exciting as the introduction of the new tablet was for the small group of attendees at the seminar, Sugar was the focus of the discussion and one that Mr. Bender talked passionately about. Designed on OLPC’s principle of “Low floor, no ceiling”, it’s designed for inexperienced users, providing a platform, or low floor, on which to explore, create, and collaborate without any limits to its possibilities.

Exploration is key to Mr. Bender’s philosophy. Designing Sugar and the computers from a “constructivist” perspective, he referred to Swiss developmental psychologist, Jean Paiget, and his learning theory of “learning by doing” when discussing the intuitiveness of the system. “We want to raise a generation of independent thinkers and problem solvers, “ he said after displaying a picture of students taking apart and fixing one of OLPC’s laptops. “Every deployment has students who repair computers and they are designed so that students can fix them themselves.”

Already deployed in over 30 countries, the largest and most well known example is Uruguay with the largest saturation of one laptop per each of 395,000 children in primary school from grades 1-6. Now in its third year, Mr. Bender highlighted a few examples of how kids are becoming empowered through the technology and developing their own programs. Kids like 12 year old Augustine who created his own program called Simple Graph, one that creates just that. Mr. Bender said that innovations like this are examples of how students are becoming self-sufficient. “These are key indicators that something different is happening, something good.”

Walter Bender giving an example of how to create your own program

Photo Credit: Chrissy Kulenguski

But this portfolio assessment, one that emphasizes qualitative over quantitative results and what Mr. Bender calls a powerful and primary assessment tool, is one of several points for criticism of the OLPC program. Others include not providing enough, or any, teacher training and support when introducing the laptops and not being able to meet the original goal price of $100 per laptop that was set when the program first started.

More recently, a new low-cost competitor, the Aakash tablet, has entered this developing market. The Android-based computer has gained a lot of attention since it was first developed by the Indian government as part of the country’s aim to connect 25,000 colleges and 400 universities in an e-learning program and made available at subsidized prices. In accordance with OLPC’s open source philosophy, chairman Nicholas Negroponte already offered full access to OLPC technology at no cost to the Indian team of developers.

Sharing ideas and new innovations is also one of Mr. Bender’s learning goals for the OLPC program: to have students learn through “doing, reflecting, and collaboration”. He believes that the new XO 3.0 tablet has a prominent role in the emerging market of mobile computers for education. Though what that role will be exactly in the coming years of new innovations and innovators, has yet to be seen.

February 15, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Open Education 101: Changing What You Know and How You Know It

If new developments in information communications technologies (ICT) are the bridge for the digital divide, what is the content — and, more importantly, the quality of it — that is going to be delivered?

This question, at the heart of developing any ICT4Education program, seemed more relevant and crucial yesterday while listening to US Under Secretary of Education, Martha Kanter, give her keynote speech at the Open Source Higher Education event at the Center for American Progress here in Washington, DC.

Kanter clearly understands the potential value and opportunities for open educational resources (OER) as well as the government’s role in facilitating and monitoring their use. A long standing advocate for open education and government policies to make it sustainable, she and a panel of experts from several universities and OER interest groups discussed how these resources can impact the affordability and access to education in the US.

Giving a brief description of the current OER field, External Relations Director at MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), Steve Carson, used The Hewlett Foundation’s definition of OER as “high-quality, openly licensed, online educational materials that offer an extraordinary opportunity for people everywhere to share, use, and reuse knowledge.” MIT’s OCW Consortium, a community of over 250 universities that offers roughly 17,000 courses in 20 languages, is just one of several examples of how institutions and education professionals are using this technology to build networks and pool information and resources that can be continually reviewed and revised, essential to setting high standards for the quality of the materials.

But how are OER programs and policies affecting the developing world? Sally Johnstone, Vice President for Academic Advancement at Western Governors University, spoke about a few exciting new initiatives such as the UNESCO/Commonwealth of Learning (COL) Guidelines on Open Educational Resources (OER) in Higher Education, a new framework for using OER in appropriate ways. UNESCO has also created an OER Wiki allowing the global OER community to share and collaborate on developing new resources, as well as an innovative OER Platform for sharing resources between teachers, learners, and education professionals.

In addition, Johnstone mentioned OER Africa, an revolutionary initiative and first of it’s kind in the region which was established by the South African Institute for Distance Education (SAIDE). Focusing on agriculture, health education, foundation courses, and teacher education, the program supports and develops digital materials to increase equitable and meaningful access to knowledge, skills and learning across the African continent.

It was clear by the end of the panelist’s discussion that open education is changing the way that classes and textbooks are being developed and accessed in America. However, some issues still need to be addressed such as creating standard quality evaluation techniques and developing policies for a sustainable market. The US government has already taken a step in this direction when the Department of Labor and the Department of Education created an education fund in January 2011 that would grant $2 billion to create OER materials for career training programs in community colleges.

Perhaps with more government initiatives such as this, as well as guidelines that encompass both OER and ICT technologies, open education will create more networks and cross more borders to make education accessible on a global scale. When discussing the government’s role in open education, Under Secretary Kanter quoted president Obama from a speech he gave at Macomb Community College in Michigan in 2009. “Even as we repair brick and mortar buildings, we have an opportunity to build a new virtual infrastructure to complement the education and training community colleges can offer. We’ll support the creation of a new online – and open-source – clearinghouse of courses so that community colleges across the country can offer more classes without building more classrooms.”

February 9, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Education, Education Partnerships, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Learning, Freedom and the Web: Mozilla’s eBook Explores and Offers How-Tos

Mozilla published a book last month that offers a glimpse at how open-source technology is shaping the field of education. The book entitled Learning, Freedom and the Web written by Anya Kamenetz and some of the 400 participants of the first Mozilla Festival held in Barcelona in 2010, explores possible answers to the questions: How can the ideas of the open source movement help foster learning? What are the most effective ways to bring learning to everyone? How does openness help the spread of knowledge?

The book contains session notes from the festival, quotes and blogs from leading experts, key-findings from current projects, as well as several how-tos including how to create your own ebook. The format of the book itself follows the ethos of the minds which collaborated to create it so that printed copies are available for purchase but it can also be downloaded as a PDF for free or accessed in an easy-to-use web version that includes video clips.

Exploring ideas such as the concept of industrialized education, the future of the physical library, and the quality and sustainability of open content, contributors include promising new ideas and tools that can be used to develop and share educational resources. For people who are unfamiliar with these concepts or are interested in developing their own open educational resources (OER), the book’s easy-to-follow instructions and format make it a great introduction to open-source technologies and their applications.

Helpful how-tos include difficulty level, amount of time to develop, who they involve and benefit, as well as steps. Topics include:

Creating an open education resource
Contract grading
Adopting an open textbook
Creating your own how-to
Creating your own ebook
Creating your own festival
Teaching and learning with Wikipedia

Learning, Freedom and the Web, both the book and the festival, might well serve as a barometer for the level of involvement and development of this new open source movement. When faced with the question of the movement’s future, authors leave the reader with a need to contribute and collaborate. “What really keeps a community going? Shared work, shared goals, shared fun, shared vocabulary, and shared rituals. There doesn’t have to be one ultimate unified vision. The idea of what learning will mostly look like in ten years, 50 years, or 100 years remains fuzzy, and that’s by design, because one definition of an improved future is one that has a greater diversity of choices than in the past.”

January 31, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

UNESCO Mobile Learning Week Report: 3 Projects for Policy Development

UNESCO released a report last week introducing three exciting new projects that promise to shape how policies are developed for mobile learning programs. Within the year, UNESCO will develop and release a set of policy guidelines, commission and publish ten working papers, and introduce four pilot projects in teacher development in Mexico, Pakistan, Nigeria and Senegal.

The report was a summary of project goals as well as an overview of discussions and ideas organized by participants at UNESCO’s first Mobile Learning Week (MLW). The event which was held at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris last month drew approximately 30 experts in mobile learning and 100 participants from the fields of mobile technology and education to discuss the use of mobile technologies in the classroom.

Policy Guidelines:

The most challenging but promising of the three UNESCO initiatives is the development of a set of policy guidelines due to be released by the end of 2012. There are currently many examples of the use of mobile technologies in the classroom but few are supported by – or the result of – effective and sustainable policy-making initiatives. Through discussions between UNESCO, MLW participants, and a growing global community of mobile learning educators and leaders, these new guidelines will be broad enough to encompass different cultural contexts, stakeholders, and technologies so that they can be used by national governments and educators and evolve with new developments in mobile technologies.

Discussions surrounding this topic generated general considerations and challenges including:

Consideration must be given to the perspectives of the stakeholders (mobile network operators, teachers, students, etc.) and their interaction with each other
Guidelines should be flexible and be able to adapt to new technologies and their applications
Costs of internet access and personal-ownership of devices remains a challenge
Efforts should be made to dispel negative views of mobile technologies within the classroom
Lessons should be learned from past examples of successful and unsuccessful projects
Mobile technology should support a well developed curriculum and pedagogy and not become the focus of the content

10 Mobile Learning Working Papers:

To provide research information for the policy guidelines and teacher development projects, UNESCO has commissioned ten working papers: five that will investigate mobile learning policies in the five major world regions (Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, and North America) and five that will investigate mobile technologies for teacher development and support. Drafts of the papers were presented and discussed at the MLW.

Photo credit: http://www.redorbit.com

The five papers on mobile learning policies won’t provide an in-depth analysis of each region but should give a general overview and provide examples of policy development. The papers will explore the pervasive lack of mobile learning policies around the world, observing the misconception by some policy makers that mobile technologies are distracting from learning and should be banned in schools. They will also include lessons learned from success stories of initiatives supported by governments and tech-savvy model teachers.

The additional five papers will examine professional development for teachers using mobile technologies in the classroom as well as how professional development can be delivered through mobile technology to teachers across the five regions. These papers will observe how mobile technologies are being used already, how they can be used in the future, and explore the use of mobile technologies with other educational tools and resources.

4 Teacher Development Pilot Projects:

Finally, UNESCO will launch four pilot projects to explore how mobile technologies can be used to provide support and professional development for teachers in Mexico, Pakistan, Nigeria and Senegal. Though the projects are still in the planning stages, MLW participants were able to provide input to important questions such as “What guidelines and understandings should steer the projects? What does the organization need to do, address, and keep in mind to best ensure the projects it launches are successful?”

To learn more about the MLW participant’s comments and ideas about these new projects and mobile learning policy development, see the full report here.

January 27, 2012/by actualize

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