Harnessing the Power of Technology for Learning
A math instructor in Bangladesh stands in her classroom struggling to teach her students fractions. “How would another teacher approach this lesson?” she asks herself.
The mayor of a rural Moroccan town sits at his desk with a thick manual of new public procurement laws before him. “What do these laws mean for my job?” he wonders.
Around the world, teachers, mayors, and people of all ages and occupations daily encounter information gaps that interrupt their learning and slow their productivity. To help span these gaps, RTI International has evaluated, designed, and implemented sustainable information and communication technology (ICT) interventions.
“Because access to technology is growing everywhere, ICT is a tool that we can leverage to address development challenges even in the most remote areas of the poorest countries,” said Carmen Strigel, ICT for education and training team leader at RTI.
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| RTI provided high school teachers in Bangladesh with smartphones (as pictured) to study how it enhanced their professional development and peer learning. [Photo: RTI study team] |
ICT Enhances Training and Learning
ICT can increase access to training by overcoming geographic, social, or security barriers. It can be the sole conduit for content delivery, as in “eLearning,” whereby the student receives training materials and support in electronic form. Or it can enhance the delivery of face-to-face training, drawing on video technology, mobile phones, or the Internet to incorporate distance learning elements into a curriculum.
Under a contract with the Asian Development Bank, RTI studied a blended approach to continuous professional development for teachers in Bangladesh. RTI equipped trainers and high school math and language teachers with smartphones that had video, speakerphone, and three-way calling capabilities to supplement six-week distance learning with self-guided print study materials. Meanwhile, a control group received the same content from the same trainers but in a two-week face-to-face format. Pre- and post-tests revealed equally satisfactory content knowledge gains by both the distance-mode and face-to-face trainees.
“Feedback after the training demonstrated that teachers strongly prefer the distance mode because it allows them to immediately apply the concepts they’ve learned in the classroom and it doesn’t disrupt their family lives,” said Sarah Pouezevara, RTI eLearning specialist. “The main value of the phones was the person-to-person communication that it allowed between trainer and teacher and between fellow teachers to foster a culture of peer learning and to overcome the sense of isolation that often causes self-guided learners to fail.”
ICT Enhances Communication and Planning
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| Moroccan Ministry of Interior personnel learn to use an open-source tool for making simple multimedia presentations to communicate new policy updates to staff across the country. [Photo: LGP staff] |
In Morocco, RTI adapted concepts from eLearning to help the Ministry of Interior improve communications with civil servants through “micro-learning.”
“Micro-learning is an informal way of consuming little chunks of information while you go about your daily business,” said Pouezevara. The Moroccan Ministry’s usual practice was to update counterparts around the country on relevant local government policies by mailing out thick manuals full of jargon that proved difficult for everyone to digest.
So, under the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) Local Governance Project (LGP), RTI customized an open-source content-authoring tool to help the Ministry create short multimedia “communication objects” that it could disseminate via CD-ROM and Internet to support official, printed documentation. RTI trained Ministry personnel in using the content-authoring tool to create some of these new products. For example, the Ministry developed a jargon-free multimedia slideshow on the new local finance regulations to illustrate key concepts that local government officials need to know. The slideshow included audio clips for illiterate users.
But with the aid of ICT, data can flow from the ground up, as well. In Indonesia, RTI is leading a pilot promoting quality data management by schools and districts to strengthen the national Education Management Information System under the USAID Decentralized Basic Education 1 project. The activity uses smartphones for school administrators to log data—such as numbers of teachers and students, or condition of classrooms and chairs—and transmit it instantly over the mobile phone network to district education offices, which compile data from across the district to inform planning and policy making.
Sustainable ICT
Because technology brings a new set of responsibilities, RTI builds sustainability into every ICT project. This may include adapting royalty-free open-source software, helping governments plan for and assume the total cost of ownership (including responsible disposal or recycling of obsolete equipment), or brokering partnerships with local service providers.
In Egypt, RTI is providing an equipment package—computers for teacher training and for school administrators’ use, and shared laptops and projectors for classroom instruction—to about 140 schools under the USAID Girls’ Improved Learning Outcomes (GILO) project. The computers will be loaded with Arabic language software for teacher training and student literacy and numeracy learning, which RTI sourced from within the regional software market. In addition, GILO is working with the school boards of trustees to put together technology plans for managing access to the equipment and budgeting for the recurrent costs of technical support and maintenance.
“In most of these schools, there is a dependence on outside actors for maintaining the computer equipment, which is a big break in the sustainability chain,” Strigel said. So, GILO is helping the schools and the boards of trustees plan for the long-term upkeep of their school’s technology by leveraging community resources, such as technical support from local Internet cafés; or by making plans for training school and community representatives in basic troubleshooting.
“If we can promote the sustainable use of technology to enrich and facilitate learning, then we’re helping people succeed in school, perform on the job, and elevate their standard of living,” Strigel said.
e-mail cstrigel@rti.org