Digital Dividend from Analogue Investment

The World Bank (2016) released their "World Development Report" on 12 January. The Report concludes that maximizing the benefits of ICT requires "analogue" measures of accountability, support business, good governance and investment in education and health. Here I focus on the education aspects of the report.

Sector 2  of the report is headed "Education" but this is mentioned through the report (World Bank, p. 146, 2016). Sector 2 starts by pointing out that there was little evidence to show that providing laptops to children improves education:

"The One Laptop per Child project in Peru provided hundreds of thousands of pieces of low-cost computing equipment to students in rural schools. But early research found no evidence of increased learning in math or language. 1 This is one high-profile example of the difficulties faced in introducing hardware-centric educational technology projects conceived in highly developed environments into less developed places without sufficient attention to local contexts." (World Bank, p. 146, 2016)

While I agree that there is little evidence that the OLPC project improved children's literacy or math skills, this was not the aim of the project:

"The mission of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child." From: OLPC Mission.

While OLPC claimed to be an education project, it really was not: it was a technical hardware project, to design a low cost rugged computer, deliver it to children and hope somehow this would "empower" their learning. Not surprisingly, like other such "build it and they will come" hardware projects, the project failed to deliver improved education. What perhaps is surprising is that One Education, a Sydney based organization is now attempting to repeat this process: building a low cost laptop computer called the Infinity Kids Laptop/Tablet.

The report cites more positively an "SMS Story" project in
Papua New Guinea (World Bank, p. 146, 2016). This sent short text messages with teaching tips for teachers. In my reading of the literature about "open" and on-line education for developing nations, I notice that many of the success stories involve in-service teacher training. This could be partly because teachers provide a literate, motivated and easy to teach, cohort of students. Also teacher training is seen as a worthwhile investment for national development and a way to leverage investment in education. This is supported by OECD research, indicating the most effective way to improve education is with better trained (and paid) teachers.

raising teacher quality is a more effective measure to improve student outcomes - See more at: http://oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/how-does-class-size-vary-around-world.html#sthash.q29IqeFm.dpuf

A major failing of the Report is that it sees on-line education as outside the formal system. There is no mention of e-learning or distance education as part of of formal education, just "online education" and MOOCs as a informal supplement.
It is suggested "Training in advanced ICT skills can also be provided less systematically, and outside of the formal education system. ... through accredited massive open online courses (MOOCs)" (World Bank, p. 268, 2016).

The Khan Academy is highlighted as a "A supplemental educational resource in and outside the classroom" (World Bank, p. 263, 2016). Khan Academy was seen as useful for basic procedural skills, not deeper learning.

The terms "e-learning",  "distance education" and "open university" do not appear at all in this Report. The result could be that digital education initiatives will fail, for the same reason as the OLPC did: they do not fit with the infrastructure, goals and objectives of the education system. It is possible that a digital education revolution will overtake existing education systems, but such revolutions have so far failed. On-line education evolved from old paper based distance education, and run by existing educational institutions, is not as exciting as new startups, but may have more of a future.

The report is 359 pages (10.6 Mbytes PDF) and clearly is not intended to be read by those on low bandwidth links with small hand-held devices. ;-)

References

World Bank. (2016). World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends. Washington, DC: World Bank. doi:10.1596/978-1-4648-0671-1. Relieved from http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2016

Global Learning XPRIZE and Apps for Education

Harry Longworth, co-founder of the OATSEA Foundation, will speak on "Educational apps for free education" at a meeting of the ACS e-Learning Special Interest Group, Australian National University, in Canberra, 5:00pm 5th August 2015.

Teachervirus.org is the OATSEA Foundation's Open Source approach to addressing the problem of how do we provide high quality free education to those who can't afford to pay for education; and don't have access to the internet, teachers or schools.  It's also our entry into the Global Learning XPRIZE - an international $15 Million dollar competition to meet this challenge.

They are building a community of like minded educators, developers, teachers, parents and students who want to make the world a better place through the power of education.

Harry Longworth is one of the co-founders of the OATSEA Foundation Ltd - an Australian charitable not for profit based in Canberra dedicated to Open Access To Self Education and Assessment (OATSEA).

Harry has a strong background in innovation, technology, projects, startups and international capacity development and is passionate about solving the big problems. He has spent the last 5 years traveling the Asia Pacific region on behalf of the Australian government providing advice and conducting assessments of IT capacity and capability whilst working on a multi-million dollar technology project delivering capacity in PNG.

E-learning in developing countries

Dr Tim Turner and Dr Ahmed Imran will speak on "E-learning in developing countries" at the ACS e-Learning Special Interest Group, 5pm 6th May 2015, Australian National University in Canberra.

ACS e-Learning Special Interest Group

E-learning in developing countries

Unlike 1st world countries, e-learning in developing country has a different connotation, which is not readily understood without in depth research and experience of the context. We would like to share two cases: a study of a Regional Public University in the Philippines, and an e-learning portal on E-government management for public sector officials of developing countries. More at: http://www.ictforldc.com/pslp/

Biography

Dr Tim Turner is Director of Undergraduate Studies at the School of Engineering and Information Technology, UNSW Canberra. Dr Turner has been involved in the IT industry for over 20 years, with the focus on e-commerce, and particularly e-government, for over 15 years.

Dr Ahmed Imran is an Information System (IS) researcher at UNSW Canberra, whose research interest largely emerged from his personal experience that includes ICT adoption in public sector, e-government and ICT in developing countries.

ICT for Development

Greetings from day two of the University of NSW Canberra, where I am attending the ICT for Development Symposium. This started with a video about the "eGovernment for Bangladesh" project by ANU and UNSW Canberra. This trained Bangladesh civil servants in how to use ICT for better administration. One frustration with this is while there are some academic papers produced from the project and a book (eGovernment for Bangladesh: a strategic pathway to success / Ahmed Imran, Tim Turner and Shirley Gregor, 2008), these are very difficult to access.

The first speaker is Professor Robert M Davison, City University of Hong Kong and Editor in Chief of the Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries (EJISDC). He explained the difficulties which researchers in developing countries have in having their work published in "international" journals. The researchers may not having training in the terminology used by journals and the journals are not so much "international" as "western". The theories which the journals require the authors to mention are not really "universal" but are developed by western researchers  in a western context. Non-western forms of thinking are relegated to being "indigenous knowledge".

Professor Davison estimated that 99% of papers from developing nation authors are screened out at the pre-review stage, as not being relevant. He admitted that editors have biases, but that papers have to be relevant to the journal they are submitted to. I have had to face this myself as a conference paper reviewer, with some papers not being on the topic of the conference and so being rejected (about 20% in my case).

Professor Davison commented that many researchers in developing nations do not study their own country and so may be missing opportunities. He also questioned the value of studies which just take an existing methodology from a western study and replying it in a developing country. He also criticised studies of intentions, such as if studies where favourably disposed to e-learning. I don't agree with these criticisms, as something useful can be learned from such studies, even if they are not ground-breaking.

Professor Davison called for the development of new theories in ICT, rather than borrowing them from other disciplines. He also criticised studies which claim to be using "Grounded Theory" but are just presenting data with no theory to make sense of it.

Professor Davison  pointed out that ICT4D researchers are by their nature interested in practical outcomes to help development, rather than theoretical considerations and this view might be shared by the editors and reviewers.

This was an excellent presentation and worth attending the whole two day symposium for.  It highlights the important role which editors of journals play in academia. This role is not often mentioned in discussions of the quality of universities and education. Apart from academia, Professor Davison comments have great relevance to business, discussion for example, "Why eBay Lost to TaoBao in China".

I noticed that the the Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries uses the Open Journal System (OJS) free open source software and provides its papers free online. It can be very frustrating when learning of an interesting paper and then finding it is hidden behind a pay-wall and so inaccessible. The OJS based free journals have made a significant contribution to academia by making papers freely available.

ps:  Professor Davison mentioned that City University of Hong Kong uses my ICT Sustainability course materials. I hadn't realized this, but then found it mentioned in Global Information Systems (IS5600), Green IT (IS6600 - 11)

Where Does Information Systems in the University?

Greetings from the the University of NSW Canberra, where I am attending the ICT for Development Symposium. I thought this was going to be about how ICT could be used to help developing nations. However, so far it seems to be about where Information Systems (IS) fits as a discipline within academia and what forms of research are acceptable in the discipline.

At ANU Information Systems is within the College of Business & Economics, and at University of Canberra the School of Information Systems & Accounting is within the Faculty of Business, Government & Law. These are separate from the computer science and engineering faculties. Being a computer science practitioner, who deals with some governance, environmental and development issues, I don't see how academia could be divided up into neat unchanging atomic units. There needs to be overlap and change.

The question of what forms of research are acceptable seems a curious choice of topic for an event attended by experienced researchers. I can understand that new graduate students need training in different approaches to research, but this is a topic for a compulsory graduate course (such as "Research Methods in Distance Education" at Athabasca University), not a symposium.

At the end of the day I asked if the last speaker thought that interpretive research had particular benefits for ICT for development. They seemed to be reluctant to say it was relevant, which seemed odd, as they were speaking at a conference on ICT for Development, so why were they there?