MobilesForGood: EDU

Together with the students, parents, and teaching team, we did it. Ten years of the Rainbow Primary School. Our school is a government-funded, local-language (Telugu) school that serves 230 children every day absolutely free. We celebrated by opening  an after-school center last month with the best education NGO in the world, Pratham.

For the past five years, I've worked on research projects and helped NGOs that have an interest in developing mobile tools for learning. Globally, there are three populations of students that need to close the education gap.

1. 52 million children globally not in school at all. Most are out of school for one or more of these reasons: conflict/no public services (fragile state), lack of legal papers, migrants, or they are female. Migration is a big issue in our area around the Rainbow School.

2. 200 million children globally are in school, but suffer from poor in-class teaching. These students cannot read at grade level. The most common reasons are national no-fail policies (no child can be held back) coupled with overly ambitious national curriculum and too few teachers to offer remedial classes.

3. 70 million youth globally are out of school and never got what they needed, which includes basic literacy and math skills, along with critical thinking to do things like conduct transactions.

Since 2010, I’ve pursued research on how mobile phones can help these three populations. Today, I design text-based literacy tools for simple mobile phones. I also work on apps for basic Android phones. My driving motivation was that my Rainbow School kids, as well as my own 13 year old daughter, definitively prefer this tech tool over all others. I also know mobiles disintermediate access to information which increases user agency, a critical characteristic for engagement. I also like that mobiles are on-demand, which reduces the usual barriers of time and place to learning. Finally, mobiles are addictive, prestigious, and social; anthropologists find these characteristics increase the motivation to learn and I agree.

MobilesForGood: EDU (2015)

For all three populations, the statistical data suggests there is bleak future. They will join the already huge number (1.5 billion) of chronically unemployed or underemployed adults. What if mobiles could help?

They already are.

1. On barriers to entry for 52 million children, my colleagues and Stanford and I just published on how mobiles can help with securing national IDs. Other colleagues are working in conflict zones and use mobiles for education with fruitful results (including one randomized control trial Niger), but the total data set remains small. For girls in developing countries, the picture looks better than we thought — they have much more access to mobiles than assumed and as programs roll out (Girl Effect has one) peer-reviewed studies will give a sense how useful mobile learning tools are to bridging the gender gap.

2. On those 200 million children in school, but not learning well, there are better data sets. Eneza has both simple text and Android-based tutoring tools, reaching 600,000 in East and West Africa. Students report 25% higher test scores after using Eneza’s fee-based tutoring/ peer-to-peer platform. EkStep (India) launched this year and aims to reach millions in India, for free, in the same way.

3. For the youth, we have large data sets. Janala (Bangladesh) has over 7.7 million users, most youth, who have take English as a second language (ESL) and gone on to successfully use English in their every day life and on the job. Another example is CellEd, which teaches ESL to tens of thousands of young Spanish speakers across American states in the West.

Silicon Valley (2016)

I live and work in Silicon Valley. My peers and I here have more in common with my target populations of children and youth than we realize. My Rainbow School students love lightweight, functional tools. So do I. I wrote this on HackPad, a tool so easy to use and open that anyone can collaborate with me. At work, I love Slack and WhatsApp because these tools do what they do so well; the usability is outstanding and the reliability is amazing. I know we need the same for mobile tools for learning.

More on that next post.

Resources:

Barriers to Education:

PLAN plan-international.org/digital-birth-registration and various examples (Latin America) routledge.com/products/9781138793316
Mobiles for education in fragile states, www.cgdev.org/publication keywords “ABC, 123” and Outernet: blog.outernet.is/we-won-1st-prize-in-all-children-readings-competition
Girls and mobiles: bit.ly/1OuaweS

200 MM Children/ Deficient Learning:

PAL Network (Global out of the UK) palnetwork.org for data on learning.
Eneza (Africa) enezaeducation.com
My first-hand experiences with basic corruption as barriers to quality education: rainbowprimaryschool.blogspot.com/2007/02/india-20.html

70 MM Youth/ Joblessness

youtheconomicopportunities.org review of mobile tools for job training.
Motivation to use mobiles for learning, anthropological evidence (Jamacia) amzn.to/1RNb7J0
Janala (Bangladesh) www.m4dimpact.com/analysis/case-studies/bbc-janala
CellEd (USA) sites.tufts.edu/jennyaker/files/2010/02/CGD-Submission_20may2014.pdf

1.5 BB / Insecure Livelihoods:

IMF, World Economic Outlook:imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2015/01/pdf/text.pdf
World Bank, Human Development Reporthdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/hdr14-report-en-1.pdf

Pratham ensures children learn through a mixed bag of play disguising learning by doing, technology, and “time on task” as in the teachers teach — they stay on task. www.pratham.org