The EdTech Hub had just finished a seven-month planning phase when COVID-19 hit. A profound sense of urgency swept over us. We realized that the planning we had done for a gradual ramp-up was now feeling insufficient to fulfill our mission, given the new global reality of kids being away from school, and the potential for EdTech to help.
When COVID-19 reached Rwanda, the Ministry of Education (MINEDUC) was quick to shut schools and make use of technology to support and enable distance learning. This includes e-learning platforms and the use of private and public media channels. The first teaching radio programmes were introduced just two weeks after the schools closed, followed quickly by TV programmes. The content of these TV and radio programmes includes learning materials presented as written text, audio, images, animation and streamed video content for pre-primary, primary and secondary level children. Data suggests that these programmes reach 70% of primary school students and 11% of secondary school students. One of the reasons for this low number among secondary school students is that most of the secondary subjects are broadcast via TV, rather than radio, as television ownership is low (10%) in the country.
By Tom Power, Open University
An equitable educational response to the COVID school closures must recognise that, in low and middle-income countries, as shown by UNICEF data most children affected by such closures do not have access to the internet. Policymakers and educators must then find ways to provide learning opportunities offline. Learning does not happen just by giving children educational materials—children also need time, space and support.
The EdTech Hub has undertaken a large-scale search for publications on technology use in education in low- and middle- income countries. During this process, we created an internal research database. This is searchable through the use of a variety of filters, such as country or intervention of focus. Analysis of the database helps us to ground our wider research, innovation and engagement activities as a Hub within the scope and quality of the evidence base.
This is the third in this series about our sandboxes. If you haven’t already, read about our approach to experimentation and how we tested our sandbox strategy out in Malawi.
Written by Alice Carter
This is the second in this series about our sandboxes. If you haven’t already, read about our approach to experimentation.
Across the Hub, we’re proponents of using our tools and approaches on our own thinking. For innovation, that meant testing the assumptions we were making about how and if the sandboxes would work.
Lea Simpson
Director of Innovation, EdTech Hub
What’s a sandbox you ask? First in the series, this blog explains what you need to know about the Hub’s approach to experimentation and innovation.
A sandbox is a real-life location used for experimentation. As you might have imagined, a sandbox creates a small and contained space to test with a proposed intervention. It allows us to safely learn and adapt in a small space before rolling out promising ideas more widely. The term itself comes from software engineering and was originally used to describe a space that allowed developers to safely test new code before using it across the board.
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.
Molly Jamieson Eberhardt
Director of Engagement, EdTech Hub
If you have spent time working in the education sector, you’ll know that even marginal gains are worthy of celebration. Those of us involved in launching the EdTech Hub know this well — from our experience as teachers, researchers, advisers, programme implementers, and civil servants. Nevertheless, we have the ambition to help accelerate progress toward quality education at an unprecedented rate.
