For a developing country like Nigeria to realize the potential of ICT in education, it must become an integral part of the learning and teaching process. Approaches to Consider when Planning to Introduce ICTs into School becomes a vital tool for schools.
In the last few years, Nigeria have witnessed remarkable improvements in physical access to schools. The primary education enrollment rate increased and as government interest in education increases, more enrollment will happen.
The problem is not access to education but rather its quality and relevance, as well as students’ capacity for lifelong learning. These all remain significant challenges in developing Nigeria. The good news is that information and communication technology (ICT) has enormous potential to address those challenges.
ICT can enable students to manage and monitor their studies and promote lifelong learning. Many ICT-enabled courses help students to develop soft skills, such as creativity, discipline, decision-making, and cognitive flexibility, among others, that will matter greatly for future jobs in the era of automation and artificial intelligence.
There are, broadly speaking, two strands of concurrent thinking that dominate discussions around the use of new technologies in education around the world. At one end of the continuum, talk is dominated by words like ‘transformation’. Call for “applying the advanced technologies used in our daily personal and professional lives to our entire education system to improve student learning, accelerate and scale up the adoption of effective practices, and use data and information for continuous improvement.”
This is, if you will, a largely ‘developed’ country sort of discourse, where new technologies and approaches are layered upon older approaches and technologies in systems that largely ‘work’, at least from a global perspective. While the citizens of such countries may talk about a ‘crisis’ in their education systems (and may indeed have been talking about such a crisis for more than a generation), citizens of many other, much ‘less developed’ countries would happily switch places.
While talk in some places may be about how new technologies can help transform education, in other places it is about how such tools can help education systems function at a basic level.
The potential uses of information and communication technologies — ICTs — are increasingly part of considerations around education planning in both sorts of places. One challenge for educational policymakers and planners in the remote, low income scenario is that most models (and expertise, and research) related to ICT use come from high-income contexts and environments (typically urban, or at least peri-urban). One consequence is that technology-enabled ‘solutions’ are imported and (sort of) ‘made to fit’ into more challenging environments. When they don’t work, this is taken as ‘evidence’ that ICT use in education in such places is irrelevant (and some folks go so far to state that related discussions are irresponsible as a result).
Steps School should follow to Switch to ICT
– The best technology is the one you already have, know how to use, and can afford
The introduction of a new technology is considered on its own to be ‘innovative’ in many circumstances. Parachuting in the ‘latest and greatest’ device or gadget may have strong political appeal, and fatten the bottom lines of certain firms, and may possibly even be effective in some cases, but instead of instinctively trying to ‘innovate’ using new technologies, which bring with them lots of challenges, it may be useful to ask, How can we innovate using what we already have?
In poor, rural, isolated communities, the technologies already at hand are almost always mobile phones and radios. Before considering the latest and great new gadget, why not see what quick gains might be made by utilizing technologies which already exist (and are being used, and sustained) in such communities? It might be that using such technologies in complementary ways (an interactive radio program, for example, supported by SMS-based outreach to and between teachers) might achieve many of the objectives that a single, ‘new’ technology can. Or maybe not. But it’s worth asking the question.
– Start down and out, and then move up and in
What types of educational technology projects are most likely to scale — those that are piloted in relatively ‘privileged’ environments until they ‘work’, and then expanded to reach other, less advantaged communities, or projects that take the opposite approach? If it (the technology, the model, the approach) works in a privileged environment, success may be a product of a number of factors that that don’t apply in other, less advantaged places.
If you want to go to scale with your educational technology initiative, first start down and out before you move up and in. Your learning curve will be steeper in the short run. The ‘model’ you end up with may have more modest goals when compared with what can be achieved in some of the most privileged and advantaged schools and communities. But it just might work *everywhere*. Or, if not everywhere, at least it might work in a lot more places than if you had started ‘up and in’, and then tried to move ‘down and out’.
– Treat teachers like the problem … and they will be
Over the years I have talked with lots of people who see teachers (and teachers’ unions) as a ‘problem’ that needs to be ‘solved’. One ‘solution’ increasingly considered is to figure out ways to use ICTs as a sort of metaphorical stick with which to prod teachers into various sorts of actions.
– It’s the content, not the container
All too often, educational technology initiatives focus largely on the technology itself. It is possible to become so enamoured with the technology (and so distracted by device-related questions: should we buy tablets or laptops?) that insufficient attention is given to how to use whatever devices are eventually deployed to their full effect.
As we move to a greater proliferation of devices, combined with the fact that we will be accessing more content from multiple places, a greater value will be placed on the content, and how that content is used, rather than on any one particular device. Viewed from this perspective, the future of education is in the content, not the ‘container’.
It’s about more than just content, of course — it’s also about the connections and the communities (students collaborating with each other, teachers supporting other teachers) that technologies can help enable, catalyze and support as well.
– If you are pointed in the wrong direction, technology may help you get there more quickly
In many cases, ‘technology’ can be seen as the ‘solution’ — but it is not exactly clear what problem the technology is meant to help solve, and how exactly it will do this. As the ICT in Education Toolkit states, “Technology is only a tool: No technology can fix a bad educational philosophy or compensate for bad practice. In fact, if we are going in the wrong direction, technology will get us there faster. Providing schools with hardware and software does not automatically reform teaching and improve learning. Much depends on educational practices and how ICTs are used to enhance them.”
– Anticipate, and mitigate, Matthew Effects
A Matthew Effect in Educational Technology is frequently observed: Those who are most able to benefit from the introduction of ICTs (e.g. children with educated parents and good teachers, who live in prosperous communities, etc.) are indeed the ones who benefit the most. Just because investments in educational technology use are justified by rhetoric claiming that such use will benefit ‘the poor’ doesn’t mean that this will actually happen. In fact, the opposite many well occur.
Too many planning efforts related to large scale investments in ICT use in education dwell too long on what is possible, while ignoring much of what is predictable, and in the end what is practical to do doesn’t benefit the poor and disadvantaged all that much. It doesn’t have to be that way — but you may need to take some proactive steps (and monitor the impact of what you’re doing regularly) to mitigate these potential effects.
– To succeed in doing something difficult, you may first need to fail (and learn from this failure)
Trying to help isolated, poor communities improve their schools and the education that they offer to their children is a nontrivial endeavor. If the related challenges were easy to overcome, one expects that more of them would have been. Unfortunately, such places may be no stranger to ‘failed’ projects of various sorts, and the reasons for such failures may be varied and complex.
The history of the use of technology in education also features lots of ‘failures’. Indeed, ‘failure’ is a defining characteristic of many educational technology projects … including the successful ones. A key ingredient for success is often an ability, and willingness, to recognize and learn from failure — and then change course as needed. How can one learn from failure? A commitment to learn through experimentation and iteration, supported by robust and regular monitoring and evaluation, can certainly help. The flexibility to be able to make changes, and the humility to admit that you may not know everything at the planning stages of whatever it is you hope to accomplish, doesn’t hurt either.
– Put sustainability first
Often times, the first goal of an educational technology project is to show that it ‘works’. Only once this is demonstrated does attention turn to issues of sustainability. Sustainability should be a first order concern — especially in remote, low resource communities. If you design something to work for two years, and it does indeed work for two years, what have you really accomplished at that point? The incentives, tools and mechanisms for sustainability should be considered up front, and introduced and tested from day one.
Donations of equipment can be vital in helping to initiate an educational technology project — they can rarely be counted on to sustain one. If something can break — it will. If a dependence is created on outside expertise — inevitably this outside expertise will disappear at some point. Plan for equipment to break, plan for outside expertise to withdraw, plan for novelty to wear off — what will happen then?
– We know a lot about worst practices — we should make sure we don’t repeat them
While there is still much to learn about ‘what works’ related to cost-effective, locally appropriate, impactful uses of ICTs in education in poor, isolated communities around the world, there is a significant body of knowledge and experience about what doesn’t work.
Dumping hardware in schools (and hoping that ‘magic’ will happen), thinking about educational content only after you have rolled out your hardware, making a big bet on an unproven technology or single vendor without planning about hope to avoid ‘lock-in’ — these sorts of things are recipes for heartache. Working in challenging environments is difficult, there is no need to make it more so by repeating the sorts of mistakes that others have made time after time, in place after place. Not only is there no need to ‘re-invent the wheel’ in this regard, (as Alan Kay advised) don’t re-invent the flat tire!