Fair Comment

By Mike Trucano, Education Specialist, info Dev

As the attention of the international donor community focuses more sharply on work for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals over the next decade, especially those related to Education for All (EFA), the credibility of those involved in the information and communications technologies (ICT) community is increasingly treated with great suspicion by many educators. This should not be surprising, given the chequered results of many ICT-related investments to help reform education over the past decade, and the understandable but regrettable tendency to substitute the "photo opportunities" for rigorous attention to impact and costs.

The power of ICTs as enablers of change - for good, as well as for bad - is undeniable. However, given the potentially grave risks and high costs that may be associated with ICT use in education in many developing countries, especially the "poorest of the poor", why should we even be devoting energies and efforts to investigating such uses?

Simply put: we need to train massive numbers of teachers if EFA goals are to be met. Contrary to some of the overheated rhetoric and promises of some in the ICT community, ICTs are not the answer to problems afflicting the education sector in developing countries. But they can help. Indeed, how can so many teachers be reached without the aid of ICTs?

When asked about the role of ICTs in the EFA process, the consensus at most development agencies seems to be: there isn't much of one. We need to build classrooms, build schools, they say, and equip them with books and blackboards and latrines (and many other things). Fair enough, there is no question here. But there is also no question that this will not be sufficient.

Back in 1996, UNESCO labeled the situation of teachers around the world a "silent emergency". A decade on, things haven't improved much. As efforts to achieve universal completion of six years of quality primary education adds tens of millions of new students to the school rolls, efforts to recruit and train new teachers (let alone to upgrade the skills of current teachers, who often received inadequate preparation themselves) have not kept pace. Few would argue that student:teacher ratios in excess of 80:1 found in some Africa countries are conducive to delivering high quality education, and indeed, data show that, as school enrolments quickly increase, educational quality appears to be nose-diving in many places.

Countries struggling to meet EFA targets do not need ICTs, of course. They need to better train and support their teachers. Given the need to get teachers into the classroom quickly, and to support and re-train them regularly to upgrade skills and content mastery, coupled with the fact that the greatest needs are often to be found in geographically remote areas far from existing training facilities, it is difficult to see how such challenges can be met without extending the breadth and depth of pre-service and in-service teacher professional development utilising ICTs.

In the ICT world, there is currently much talk of serving the "next billion", (which will most likely be the emerging middle classes of China, India, Brazil and elsewhere). Given the pressing challenges related to Education for All, the focus on the "next billion" should not obscure the potential utility and relevance of extending ICTs to the "last billion", as appropriate.

Despite current scepticism related to their use in donor agencies, in many developing countries it appears that (for better and for worse) there is increasing demand for the use of ICTs in education by policymakers and parents in developing countries, and this demand could be harnessed to aid in EFA-related teacher training initiatives. It is important that any potential deployment of ICTs be evaluated as a tool to help meet specific challenges, and not as an end in itself. Computers, TV, the Internet and especially older (and currently unfashionable) technologies with proven track records of cost-effective deployment, such as interactive radio, can play a role in helping to meet the challenges associated with training and supporting the large numbers of teachers necessary if EFA targets are to be achieved.