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EdTech in Pakistan: A Rapid Scan (EdTech Hub Country Scan No. 10)

Baloch, I., & Taddese, A. - 2020

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EdTech Hub country scans explore factors that enable and hinder the use of technology in education. This includes policies, government leadership, private-sector partnerships, and digital infrastructure for education. The scans are intended to be comprehensive but are by no means exhaustive; nonetheless, we hope they will serve as a useful starting point for more in-depth discussions about opportunities and barriers in EdTech in specific countries and in this case, Pakistan. This report was originally written in June 2020. It is based primarily on desk research, with quality assurance provided by a country expert.

Pakistan Distance-Learning Topic Brief: Primary-level Deaf Children (Helpdesk Response No. 16)

Lynch, P., Kaye, T., & Terlektsi, E. - 2020 - EdTech Hub

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The COVID-19 crisis has severely impacted the ability of national education actors to provide access to education services for all students.This brief provides guidance and recommendations on how to support the education of deaf children in Pakistan using alternative learning approaches. It presents the rationale for adopting certain teaching and learning strategies when supporting the learning and well-being of deaf children during global uncertainty. Children with deafness and hearing loss are particularly vulnerable now that schools are closed. They are isolated at home and unable to access information as easily as when they were attending school. This brief presents some of the practices that are reportedly working well for deaf children in different contexts.

One of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG-4) adopted by the United Nations focuses on ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education for all. Most research on impact of technology on learning outcomes depends on designs that require low student-to-computer ratio and extensive retraining of teachers. These requirements make the designs difficult to implement on a large scale and hence are limited in terms of inclusivity and ability to ‘provide equitable opportunity for all’. Our paper is the first to evaluate an intervention design that is aimed at dealing with these concerns. We conduct a large-scale randomised field experiment in 1823 rural government schools in India that uses technology-aided teaching to replace one-third of traditional classroom teaching. Even with high student-to-computer ratios and minimal teacher training, we observe a positive impact on student learning outcomes. The study thus presents a low cost, resource-light design, which can be implemented in a developing country on a large scale to address the problem of poor learning outcomes, thereby making the intervention inclusive and equitable in line with the spirit of SDG-4.

EdTech in Jordan: A Rapid Scan (EdTech Hub Country Scan No. 6)

Khalayleh, A., & Taddese, A. - 2020

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EdTech Hub country scans explore factors that enable and hinder the use of technology in education. This includes policies, government leadership, private-sector partnerships, and digital infrastructure for education. The scans are intended to be comprehensive but are by no means exhaustive; nonetheless, we hope they will serve as a useful starting point for more in-depth discussions about opportunities and barriers in EdTech in specific countries, in this case, in Jordan. This report was originally written in June 2020. It is based primarily on desk research, with quality assurance provided by a country expert.

While educational media can affect young children's development, rigorous studies rarely occur in low and middle income countries. Using an experimental design, researchers investigated the effect of an educational television series (Galli Galli Sim Sim (GGSS), the Indian version of Sesame Street) with 1340 children in 99 preschools in Lucknow, India. Boys and girls, ages three to seven and mostly from low income households, saw 30 min of television five days a week for twelve weeks, varying how much Galli Galli Sim Sim versus other programming children watched. Assessments occurred at baseline, endline, and six weeks later. Hierarchical models showed that Galli Galli Sim Sim receptivity, an independent variable that combines exposure and recall, significantly improved literacy, numeracy, socio-emotional strategies, and nutritional knowledge. Locally-produced educational media should be encouraged as it can positively affect potential school success and child development.

Cloud computing is becoming a leading trend worldwide, due to its enhanced reliability, scalability, flexibility, availability and processing throughput. However, the decision related to adoption of the cloud computing model is often complicated by challenges and uncertainties about the expected business value and its overall impact on the organisation. Till date, different contemporary technology acceptance theories and models have been used to test and validate adoption chances of cloud computing at organisational and individual levels. However, no experimental study has been conducted to provide a holistic evaluation of the determinants of cloud computing in the Asian world particularly in the context of the Indian school education system. Due to lack of such studies, we propose a theoretical model based on the TOE framework to explain the role of technological, organisational and environmental factors on the adoption of cloud computing in the Indian school education system. The data was collected from fifty-six 56 randomly selected secondary schools through questionnaire based survey to examine the relationship between the variables employing 5-points Likert scale. Reliability and validity measures were used to establish the quality and the usefulness of the collected data. In addition multi co-linearity test was also conducted. In order to test the research hypothesis, multiple regression analysis was conducted. The results indicate that relative advantage, compatibility, and complexity representing technological factors; top management support representing organisational factors; and competitive pressure, external expertise and attitude towards change representing environmental factors were found to have an positive and significant influence on the adoption of cloud computing services in the Indian school education system. The findings have a great significance since they can provide knowledge about cloud computing factors as well as insights and directions to the education policy planners and decision makers for successful adoption of cloud computing technology in India.

We study the impact of a personalized technology-aided after-school instruction program in middle-school grades in urban India using a lottery that provided winners with free access to the program. Lottery winners scored 0.37 sigma higher in math and 0.23 sigma higher in Hindi over just a 4.5-month period. IV estimates suggest that attending the program for 90 days would increase math and Hindi test scores by 0.6 sigma and 0.39 sigma respectively. We find similar absolute test score gains for all students, but much greater relative gains for academically-weaker students. Our results suggest that well-designed, technology-aided instruction programs can sharply improve productivity in delivering education.