Education and Smart Phones

This page is written by Ben Goldsmith

Improving education is of the utmost importance in growing the economy and improving the quality of life, whether the countries be small and developing, or economic superpowers. Mobile phones, thanks to their ubiquity and familiarity, present an incredible opportunity to assist in education in ways that can rapidly grow economies.[1]

While cell phones are often much maligned in schools for distracting students, many education researchers are coming around to try to see the ways that cell phones can be used to help inside and out of classrooms. Organizations such as the International Youth Foundation, the BBC, and even Stanford University are approaching this problem from a variety of angles, and have come up with some truly remarkable programs that take cell phones from a distracting necessity to a truly useful partner for educators. These programs are all individually producing fantastic findings. However, the field of m-learning, as some educators are calling it, is still nascent, and thus, it's hard to find long-term, community-level outcomes from programs such as these. Instead, I'll describe the individual projects' different approaches to m-learning in order to give a broad overview of the state of the field.

The Bridgeit program is a targeted educational intervention sponsored by the International Youth Foundation and Nokia. They partner with local governments to help use technological solutions in rural classrooms. The program initially launched in the Philippines under the name text2teach, and through a very clever setup of TVs, satellites, and set-top boxes, they created a system with which teachers could browse catalogs of educational videos, and through a text message, pull a video up on a TV screen at the front of the classroom. The program was a great success compared to schools without text2teach, schools with the technology showed significantly higher learning gains.[2]

The success in the Philippines led to the extension of the intervention to Tanzania, where 2G/3G mobile internet was widespread enough that instead of having to use the complicated satellite and set-top box setup, teachers were able to download videos directly to the Nokia N95 phones they'd been provided, and plug those phones directly into TVs. As before, the program was so well received by teachers and showed such significant improvement that the project is considering expanding. text2teach brings an interesting perspective to mobile learning it assists teachers in the jobs they have in the classroom, as well as augmenting infrastructure in a cheap, expandable way. Videos are easy to modify or add to the service, and the teacher doesn't need to order a full set of new video tapes to do so.[3]

However, a very different approach to m-learning has been to try to engage students outside of the classroom. For example, one program in rural India, called MILLEE (Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies) offers educational games to help teach literacy and English on cellular phones. In general, rural residents who can speak English in addition to their regional language are at a much higher economic advantage than residents who don't. These games are not fashioned after the Western style of gaming, but are instead based on local games played in targeted regions, so that the games remain culturally appropriate. They found that there was a decently high level of engagement with the devices, but due to various other cultural barriers (for example, boys were often allowed by parents to monopolize the devices), the results were not quite as dramatic as they might have hoped. While a good target for secondary language vocabulary acquisitions might be around 500 words per year, participants in the program were only learning at the rate of approximately 150 words per year, leaving much room for improvement.[4]

Similarly, the BBC launched a service for Bangladeshis of all ages to learn English. The service, called BBC Janala, made two to three minute audio lessons available by calling a four-digit shortcode. While very simple technologically, the service has clearly gained some traction in less than 3 years, the service has logged over two million accessed audio lessons. Additionally, 46% of first-time users return to the service, compared with the typical 5% rate for mobile value-added services in Bangladesh. This clearly demonstrates that many adults are interested in using anytime, anywhere services to learn English, an exciting prospect for Economic Development in Bangladesh.[5]

Lastly, Stanford's Human-Computer Interaction group launched a project called Avaaj Otalo (literally, voice stoop) in India that allows rural small-scale farmers to exchange agricultural information in order to stay competitive given new diseases and pests, droughts, and global-scale competition. By navigating through simple audio prompts, farmers in India can access a wealth of agricultural information in a variety of ways. For example, there is a weekly radio show in Gujarat, India broadcast by the Development Support Center, and users can call into the Avaaj Otalo service to access archived episodes of the popular program. Or, if farmers have specific questions, they can record questions, respond to other farmer's questions, and often get feedback from agricultural experts. The enthusiastic response in Gujarat meant that the program was then deployed across the state so that rural farmers can access educational resources relevant to their trade, and support each other in a peer-to-peer manner.[6]

These projects all show huge promise and demonstrate the exciting and new educational element that cell phones can bring to developing nations. They offer the promise of ubiquitous and instantly accessible educational tools for any person with a device as simple as a cellular phone. Additionally, developed countries are examining m-learning from often different perspectives, often taking advantage of the relative abundance of smartphones and tablet devices to offer educational applications. While slightly different approaches, the two face much the same problem how can we turn the most distracting element in a child's pocket into one actively develops their knowledge? It seems the future is bright with answers.

References

  1. ^ Education and Economic Growth: From the 19th to the 21st Century Cisco
    This is a report produced for Cisco Systems that explores the connection between education and economic development, and shows in no uncertain terms the very strong connection between the two.
  2. ^ Summative Evaluation of the ELSA Text2Teach Project: Final Report USAID
    This is the final report on the effectiveness of the Text2Teach project in the Philippines, before it became adopted nationwide and spread to Tanzania. She finds that the project helps, but in certain regions more than others.
  3. ^ BridgeIt International Youth Foundation
    Here, the IYF describes the history and present status of the BridgeIt program in the Philippines, as well as describing preliminary efforts in Tanzania.
  4. ^ An Exploratory Study on Unsupervised Mobile Learning in Rural India Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    This is the original paper describing the MILLEE project to bring English literacy to rural India through mobile games.
  5. ^ Learning the Queen's English ... on Your Mobile Phone? Edubank
    ere, Michael Trucano profiles the BBC Janala project to bring short educational lessons on English to Bangladesh for the World Bank's blog on technology in education.
  6. ^ Voice4All: Voice-based Social Media for Rural Developing Regions Stanford
    Voice4All's website describes the Avaaj Otalo project, which brought agricultural education to farmers through simple phone-based interfaces.