We are excited to announce that there is now increased funding available for projects through our Call for Research Proposals: EdTech responses to Covid-19, which closes on Friday 27th November 2020. As part of this window, additional funding, up to a total value of £50k, may be available to a small number of applications, particularly where they allow for comparison…
This blog was originally posted on the Center for Global Development blog with data used from the EdTech Hub’s database of interventions. Our database, which was initially limited to sub-Saharan Africa, now has a global scope. As the blog suggests, there is a need to increase the database’s representation of interventions in other regions. Please add your EdTech intervention to help us grow it!
With schools closed for hundreds of million students around the world, many have hoped that ‘EdTech’ can help keep children learning via internet, apps, and mobiles. A new database published by the “EdTech Hub” shows that though use of edtech products serving African countries has doubled in the last month, the total number of users is still very low, and most were viewers of one TV show. That, coupled with the fact that most firms come from just a few countries, suggests that edtech in Africa is far from maturity.
This is part of our coronavirus (COVID-19) and EdTech series.
On 21st April, we launched a call for ideas for EdTech in responses to coronavirus and the lockdown of schools around the world.
Three weeks later, we’ve taken a slice of the first 100 responses and analysed the data. Combining this with conversations our team is having every day with technologists and innovators around the world, we’ve sought to answer: what do these innovators need right now? In future blogs, we’ll cut the data in different ways to answer other questions.
This is part of our coronavirus (COVID-19) and EdTech series.
While technology is a potentially powerful tool in low-resourced contexts, technology use is not always possible or appropriate, as previous Hub blogs have asserted. The following blog emphasises the particular role that communities can play in supporting continued learning opportunities for the billions of children whose education has been disrupted by the COVID-19 crisis. This blog post also appears on the UKFIET site.
This is part of our coronavirus (COVID-19) and EdTech series.
With more than 1.5 billion children now affected by school closures, ministries of education and decision-makers around the world are urgently in need of fast, evidence-based, context-specific advice about out-of-school learning. Teachers, caregivers, parents and policymakers are tirelessly working to ensure that learning doesn’t stop. Faced with one of the biggest global disruptions to schooling in living memory, already overstretched ministries and their advisers are looking for resources and guidance. The EdTech Hub’s Helpdesk will immediately launch to respond to this need.
We hope you saw our recent blog post responding to questions we often get about interesting large-scale EdTech initiatives. Another question we are often asked is: “What EdTech research should I know about?”
As Sara’s blog post explains, one of the Hub’s core spheres of work is research, so we ourselves are very interested in the answer to this question. Katy’s latest blog post explains how the Hub’s research programme is addressing this question through a literature review to create a foundation for further research. While the literature review is in progress, we thought we would share an initial list of EdTech papers that we often reach for. At the Hub we are fortunate enough to have authors of several papers on this list as members of our team.
During the EdTech Hub’s inception phase so far, one question we hear a lot is: “What interesting or notable EdTech initiatives are you seeing?” Another question usually follows: “Which ones are reaching scale?”
This week we have joined the global education community in London for the Education World Forum and BETT meetings. This is a chance for education leaders and decision-makers to come together to discuss and share how best to improve and accelerate learning outcomes. In the spirit of sharing ideas, we thought we would put forth some examples of large-scale EdTech initiatives that are on our radar.
