EdTech Hub: Clear evidence, better decisions, more learning
Don't miss out on the announcements
and articles below:
You’re invited to our upcoming
learning series: ‘EdTech and
Covid-19: Lessons learned, future
plans’ and ‘Access to learning:
Learning to access’
Coming soon: Our call for
expressions of interest for
at-scale research studies
Read recent publications on
interactive radio instruction and
the use of WhatsApp in refugee
education in Lebanon, as well as
our country case studies.
Don’t forget to share this
newsletter with your colleagues and
networks using
this sign-up link.
You’re invited to the
kick-off event of our
event series:
A year of EdTech and
Covid-19
Speakers include
David Sengeh, Sierra Leone’s Minister
of Basic and Senior
Secondary Education &
Ranjitsinh
Disale
- Global Teacher
Prizewinner 2020
Covid-19 has reshaped our
world. It has been
a year since schools
shut their doors and we are
running a series of events
to reflect on the pandemic,
school closures, and how
these lessons can prepare us
for an uncertain
future.
Sierra Leone’s Minister
of Basic and Senior
Secondary Education, David
Sengeh, and other high-level
speakers will share their
reflections on what they
have learned leading the
education response to
Covid-19. We will also hear
from an expert panel,
including
Ranjitsinh Disale -
Global Teacher Prizewinner
2020
and
Albert Nsengiyumva -
Executive Secretary of the
Association for the
Development of Education
in Africa (ADEA). These panelists have been
on the frontlines of their
education systems throughout
Covid-19.The
panel will consider what
lessons have been learnt so
far and how EdTech can be
used in future school
closures to address the
learning gaps the pandemic
has caused. We will then
open it up to the audience
to get your reflections and
questions.
At the event we will also
launch our latest
publication
‘EdTech and Covid-19: 10
things to know’
transformed into a video
for you to watch here. It is a synthesis of our
research from the last year
and work across the
education sector. You can
also read the publication in
English,
French, and
Arabic.
Another upcoming event in
the series is a discussion
on
March 23rd at 2pm (GMT)
titled ‘Learning to
Access, Access to
Learning’. This roundtable is a
collaboration with the
Cambridge Network for
Disability and Education
Research
(CaNDER) and the
University of
Glasgow. Presenters
will discuss the
findings of our systematic
literature review focusing
on the extent to which
EdTech is supporting the
learning of children with
disabilities in low and
middle income countries.
Join us and
register here.
Watch this space as more
events will be announced
soon...
At-Scale Research -
Call for expressions of
interest
We are getting ready to
launch our next call for
expressions of interest at
the Hub. This funding will
focus on a series of
at-scale research projects
to investigate EdTech’s role
in high-potential but
low-evidence areas in low-
and middle-income countries.
Research projects will
increase the amount of
high-quality research
evidence available regarding
the impact of
technology-based solutions
to improve learning and
education. We will soon be
sending out more detail on
how to apply!
Exploring the use of
WhatsApp for refugee
children in Lebanon Asad Rahman
Over the last two months,
EdTech Hub and Jusoor have
been experimenting with the
use of WhatsApp for
out-of-school refugee children
in Lebanon using EdTech Hub’s
Sandbox method.
We have just completed Sprint
1 of the Sandbox. Activities
included:
We conducted a survey of 196
parents and children to test
the user feasibility of
WhatsApp. 68% reported that
there was only one smartphone
in the family - the biggest
perceived barrier to using
Whatsapp.
To test financial feasibility,
we built a cost model of the
intervention. For example,
providing data cards to
families would cost US$23 per
month per family - the highest
cost component of the
intervention at 39% of the
total.
To inform our upcoming in-depth
research in six focus countries, we
have begun a series of country
scoping reviews, which provide a
rapid and rigorous synthesis of
evidence on EdTech literature in
each country in order to identify
the most salient:
Evidence gaps in the research
landscape
Research opportunities that are
most likely to inform policy and
practice
Priorities of the local research
ecosystem
We completed our first
country-scoping review in December,
on Sierra Leone. Our contextual
analysis required us to contact key
research and policy stakeholders to
understand the environment within
which EdTech innovation is occurring
in Sierra Leone, and what evidence
gaps in the research landscape have
the highest potential for impact.
We identified three promising
high-potential evidence gaps in
Sierra Leone, showing that the
framework helps us complement the
existing research and EdTech
ecosystems:
Use of data systems technology for
education management
Use of radio technology for
learning in appropriate languages
Use of multi-modal technology to
support under-qualified educators.
Forthcoming reviews on Pakistan,
Tanzania, Ghana, Bangladesh and
Kenya will further illuminate the
research priorities we will
collaborate on in our focus
countries.
Why the world needs a curriculum
alignment hub Taskeen Adam
In 2020,
we began collaborating with
Learning Equality, a nonprofit organisation
supporting the creation, adaptation,
and distribution of Open Educational
Resources (OER) in disconnected
environments. We’ve been working
with Learning Equality to develop
the idea of a curriculum alignment
hub where individual efforts to
address some of the challenges in
adopting OER could become more
powerful, receive recognition, and
build upon one another.
Houses a database of consultants
who can support projects
Contains a venue for
discussion
Makes training materials for
alignment efforts accessible
And in the spirit of openness,
we’ve left the note as a Google
Doc
so you can leave your comments!
Please take a read and share your
feedback if you’re interested in
helping us unpack what this hub may
look like.
Our work with
Rising Academies
was focused on how to use radio to
keep marginalised children learning
during school closures. As part of
this work, the team from Rising
adapted their curriculum to create
the
Rising on Air
initiative: a 20-week programme of
radio scripts and SMS content made
freely available to organisations
around the world. Since then, the
initiative has reached over 12
million children in 26 countries at
a cost of less than $0.05 per
student.
Over the past few months, we have
worked with the Rising team to
develop a
guide on implementing and
evaluating radio education
programmes. The guide contains practical
instructions and advice on how to
use radio lessons and complementary
SMS materials to reach out-of-school
children.
What we're reading
Check out these resources
from other people and
organizations:
UNICEF Innocenti
research brief:
Promising practices for
equitable remote
learning. Emerging
lessons from COVID-19
education responses in
127 countries
A blog from
Oxfam:
Right now, it feels
like anything can derail
everything, so are
theories of change still
useful?
which discusses the
importance of the process
of creating a theory of
change, and how to do that
in a virtual world.
RISE paper: Data Visualisations:
Estimating COVID-19
related learning losses
and effects of
mitigation, suggests that
“modelling projected
learning losses and the
learning effects of
different mitigation
strategies can help
education leaders plan for
school reopening that
prioritises learning”
New
World Bank
evidence:
Texting Parents about
Early Child Development:
Behavioral Changes and
Unintended Social
Effects. A paper outlining an
intervention in Nicaragua
that “led to significant
changes in self-reported
parenting practices [but]
it did not translate into
improvements in children's
cognitive development.”
EdTech Hub is a global non-profit
research partnership. Our goal is
to empower people by giving them
the evidence they need to make
decisions about technology in
education.
Read more about the Hub and access
useful tools and resources on our
website: https://edtechhub.org/
EdTech Hub 2021. Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International
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Our mailing address is:
EdTech Hub
Suite 665, Level 6
2 Kingdom Street,
London W2 6BD, UK
Over the last two months,
EdTech Hub and Jusoor have
been experimenting with the
use of WhatsApp for
out-of-school refugee children
in Lebanon using EdTech Hub’s
Sandbox method.
