PPPs and getting things done in ICT4D and E

I made an error. Not the first I’ve made ever, and not the most egregious, but among the more opportunistic: A few years ago I developed, in collaboration with the smart, experienced and dialed-in Anthony Bloome of USAID, a a white paper or other kind of publication supporting the design of ICT4E projects *(https://www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/documents/1865/E1-FP_ICT_Compendium.pdf). Ten principles that were intended to help USAID country officers and others engender (that would be design and manage the implementation of) technology projects in schools and education systems. 

Hog wash. Or something. 

I left out the most important principle. I wouldn’t junk any of the others, at least not usually, but just now I don't find them readable and I'm not going to share them here. The entire premise of that paper is that with appropriate support and in collaboration with private-sector and government partners, USAID education officers can achieve effective designs of technology projects. 

learning aid for four cardinal directions, Kabul

We are talking about decisions that require expertise in several fields. One of these is the most dynamic, innovation-oriented fields in human history, and one that has had profound changes on social, economic and individual conditions—the personal computer began its evolution about 40 years ago (1977, date of the launch of Apple II and TRS 80), gaining momentum through the launch of the Maciintosh in 1984, Windows 3 in 1986, and so on. The World Wide Web got its start more recently, about 1992. Since then, we’ve seen the emergence of mobile devices, lower-cost solar, mobile broadband, mobile money, social enterprises. (Premise.com, a social enterprise in Silicon Valley, makes big-data analytics available to development organizations and others.) 

At the same time, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, development has “matured” as a field: bottom-up and participatory solutions (and rhetoric), focus on girls and women, micro-loans and micro-enterprise, education in emergencies, outcomes-based programs and assessments—elements that seem natural, obvious, have required a long time (˜60 years) to be normalized because we’re dealing with a field in which the starting assumption is that having the money and having the power meant having the intelligence to make a difference. Not true. Perhaps we have gotten wiser; perhaps we are casting about for new methods; perhaps economic growth has had impact that outstrips that of development.

 

In any case, how can we expect a list of principles to enable someone to navigate in this dynamic environment? How can we expect a development person to understand the importance of the shit-canning of SCORM and its replacement by Tin Can? We can’t. We shouldn’t. 

The most important element in the design of successful ICT4D and ICT4E projects is the team. That team needs the right combination of expertise and the opportunity to bring that expertise to bear on a significant problem in a significant way. 

(Why do I think this? I’m just finishing my report to USAID on digital library design to support the provision of mother-tongue books to young readers. Cool. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve had to learn a lot. If I were in another position—staff guy, private-sector guy, government guy—that learning would have been impossible. I and USAID and, more importantly, kids asked to learn to read, would be out of luck. More on this by Monday…)

Principle 3—Use ICT to support data-driven decisions

Many decisions about school ICT projects are made based on electoral needs, partners' offerings or other factors. These factors will not disappear. But decision-makers should use available information about what's really happening as their primary guide: What % of teachers has completed teachers college? What's the ratio of textbooks to kids? If these areas pose problems for schools, check the feasibility of using ICT to address them. And, given the fact that we're introducing information tools, think about collecting and reviewing more comprehensive and nuanced information.

OK, the core sub-principles are as follows: 

• Keep tools simple at the school level.
• Collect data that address goals.
• Ensure that data can be easily accessed and shared.
• Develop information-management tools in stages. 
• Support the use of data in schools and communities

These sub-statements all touch, at least tangentially, on theEMIS report card developed for Georgian schools idea that schools themselves should benefit from data. School report cards (there's one from Georgia, the country not the state, below) should help school personnel see where they fall in relation to quality-assurance standards (like, class size, textbooks-per-kid, and so on) and in relation to other schools like theirs. 

But what's interesting (and this links to one of the sub-principles addressed previously, "focus on learning outomes") is that new tools for data collection might open more complex and authentic fields of learning to developing-country researchers and decision-makers. If, for example, teachers were trained to recognize collaborative interactions in small groups, they might be able to use smart phones or tablets to assess kids' interactions in real time. This potential renders a soft, 21st-century skillset, comprised perhaps of cooperation, communication and empathy, into something measurable at both the school level and nationally. 

And in education in developing countries, if you can measure it, and you can pilot-test it, you increase the chances that you can, eventually, maybe, make it happen at scale.

Principle 2—Use ICT to enhance students' knowledge and skills

This principle seems obvious, doesn't it? (Perhaps all principles should seem obvious.) But the key, if there is one, is that programs should enhance students' knowledge and skills. I think we know (no citation, in other words) that as students increase their understanding and awareness of the world around them, including some concepts and information that appear in school curricula, they increase their capacity to build literacy, numeracy and other basic skills. (As E.D. Hirsch says.) 

When you're planning an ICT project in schools in a developing country, there will be plenty of gaps to fill. Even when basic skills and schools' abilities to teach 'em are lacking, look for ways to build conceptual and contextual knowledge. 

As usual in reviewing these principles,* it's best to go straight to the core sub-principles. And those are: 

1. Help students build literacy skills & basic skills in all subjects 
2. Help students build 21st-century life and learning skills 
3. Focus on learning outcomes

Statements 1 and 2 aren't mutually exclusive, or contradictory. 

(*And why, you might ask, review these principles at all?)

This display dresses up the Armenian alphabet

In schools that are really low performing—one teacher shows up, for example, there are few books, kids have nothing to write on or with—ICT can be used to mitigate teachers' lack of capacity and to facilitate PD by providing direct instruction to students in one form (IRI) or another (e-learning). Depending on students' needs and the system's capacity, ICT can support instruction (of students and teachers both) across a range of skillsets running from basic to complex. Students can use an MP3 recorder to listen to phonics instruction; and they can use the same MP3 recorder to make podcasts for their classmates or to share messages with members of a distant team. Don't make the mistakes of assuming that without basic skills kids can't learn anything, or that basic skills will if all else fails and kids leave school be sufficient. 

(If your project is based on IRI [Interactive Radio Instruction—direct instruction in basic skills using audio], include stories. How hard is that?)  

Principle 1—Use ICT to achieve education and development goals

"Technology is a cross-cutting resource that should be seen as a sustainable, accessible, and valuable means of supporting efforts to improve teaching, learning, school operations, and the education sector as a whole. Projects using technology can entail risks that arise from costs, complexity, and resistance to change at many levels. To make such risks worth the reward, technology should be used to address areas where system capacity is poor, schools are underperforming, or there are gaps in student learning."

As mentioned, the bogey-man lurking behind this principle, and some of the others, is the IT curriculum—and more specifically the acquisition of computers and the funding of resources and the Internet to help kids learn how to use computers. It's incredibly inefficient and wasteful. In some countries, kids start taking basic IT classes in junior secondary school (or middle school) and continue through the end of senior secondary (or high) school. In a lot of instances, the kids don't build many usable skills, although they can identify a CPU, provide the definitino of a motherboard, and tell you how many bits are in a byte. And this requires six years of classes? Plus an exam? 

To be fair, integrating the use of computer tools (e.g., laptops, desktops, tablets, smart phones, netbooks, etc) into other subjects is extremely difficult when the kids don't have basic mousing and keyboarding and file-management skills. But these can be learned in a two-week camp. 

But "development goals" deserves a special call out. In poor countries, it's not unreasonable to consider ways in which education might contribute to social and economic development. Hence, "development goals" are something that can and should be considered in relation to the significant costs and risks of an ICT-supported project. Are the kids going to learn something that, eventually, ultimately, with many confounding factors that make evaluation challenging, will increase GDP? Or that will increase participation in government and civil society? Hmmmm? 

(If not, perhaps the project should be reconsidered.) 

What are some of the sub-principles undergirding Principle 1?:

Use ICT to support comprehensive change.
While education-technology projects often focus on single areas of activity, such as introducing digital learning resources, the cross-cutting quality of technology can enable comprehensive approaches that extend to many core components of the education system... information management and school leadership, teacher development, learning-resource distribution, and direct instruction. 

The point, with this sub-core principle (so to speak) is that you are creating infrastructure, and that infrastructure can support change (and hopefully improvement) across the full spectrum of educational services. Primary-grade math-learning supported by multimedia? TVET for adult villagers? The same system, once it's in place, effectively maintained, and overseen by in-the-know leadership, can provide both. 

Here's the idea, graphically:

Address areas of high need.
Given range of areas where technology can support improvement, projects can target specific factors or problems that have the potential to yield high impact or support further improvement...

Uh huh. Interactive Radio Instruction (IRI) is a wonderful tool, partly because it addresses a common problem in developing-country schools—teachers poor mastery of the subjects that they are assigned to teach. 

Conceive of technology as “education infrastructure.”
Projects that establish the use of technology in schools—whether the tools used are radio, video, mobile phones, or computers—contribute to the strengthening of a school system’s education infrastructure. 

OK, I wrote this sub-principle. But I still struggle to understand it. To my way of thinking, education infrastructure includes all the elements that contribute to a system's capacity. These can include, for example, a VPN linking schools (Indonesia), management skills for technology roll-outs (Syria, Pakistan), and a storehouse of digital content (Armenia, one hopes, and in the US, the excellent Hippocampus website offered by the Monterey Institute of Technology and Education [MITE]). 

Ten principles for using ICT in education in developing countries

Following are the 10 first principles presented in the FP document. We'll go deeper into each one over the course of the next couple of weeks. 

First principles: ICT in education

• Principle 1: Use ICT to achieve education and development goals.
  (What's are alternatives? Using ICT to build basic technology skills might be one.) 
• Principle 2: Use ICT to enhance student knowledge and skills.
  (Again, the IT curriculum is the bete noire that gives rise to this principle.) 
• Principle 3: Use ICT to support data-driven decision making.
  (In a lot of countries, it's a challenge to figure out what's going on in schools. Without that knowledge, it's impossible to make effective decisions.) 
• Principle 4: Include all short- and longer-term costs in budget planning.
  (The unanticipated cost of diesel fuel for an electrical generator shut down a school computer lab. So can the cost of a few new power supplies or monitors.)  
• Principle 5: Explore technology alternatives to find appropriate solutions.
  (Netbooks and 3G Internet, solar panels, thin-client networks, smart phones, SMS-to-web—private-sector and civil-society organizations have developed a panoply of new tools that are potential game-changers for developing-country schools.)  
• Principle 6: Focus on teacher development, training, and ongoing support.
  (Seems like a no-brainer? The challenge of getting effective training to teachers across a school system to help them use new tools to engage students is easy to underestimate.)
• Principle 7: Explore and coordinate involvement of many different stakeholders.
  (What are the pitfalls with partners? They might, for example, offer low-cost "one-size-fits-all" solutions that don't necessarily address critical problems the project. Or they might deliver computers to schools at private-sector speed while teacher training moves at the speed of state.)
• Principle 8: Develop a supportive policy environment.
  (A policy that says all kids should have ICT skills, well, that isn't supportive of anything interesting. Of course, the real impact of policy, sound or foolish, gets refracted through the other layers—everything from partners' contributions to power-grid failures to poorly refurbished computers.)  
• Principle 9: Integrate monitoring and evaluation into project planning.
  ("Integrate" in this instance means not only budgeting [key!] but crafting meaningful goals and objectives that can support measurable indicators of impact. Integrate.)
• Principle 10: “It takes capacity to build capacity”—System strengthening precedes system transformation.
  (A tad hieratic, this principle. Whazzit mean? Don't run before you can walk, don't commit to a massively scaled effort to produce 21st-century skills when teachers don't know their subjects or when only a handful of students complete high school. [Credit to education researcher Thomas Hatch for infecting me with a phrase that people don't understand all that easily.]

That's the bunch of them. Next up might be a quick review of USAID's current education strategy to see how well these principles—developed for USAID education officers—match up to the agency's current goals.