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A World Bank Blog on ICT use in Education

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Exploring issues related to the use of information and communication technologies to benefit education in developing countries

February 2009

Cyberabad Dreams ...

Submitted by Michael Trucano on Fri, 02/27/2009 - 16:42

spotlight on Hyderabad | image from Azgar Khan used according to terms of its CC license, see below for infoHow do you develop the skills in your workforce necessary to compete in dynamic, fast-moving sectors of the global economy?  I just returned from India, where I joined colleagues from Africa in a series of site visits, learning events and presentations in the Indian IT hubs of Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bangalore in seeking answers to this (and related) questions.  More specifically, the trip provided a rich opportunity to learn more about the 'India success story' of the last 20 years in the areas of IT, IT-enabled services and business process outsourcing (BPO), gathering policy and practice lessons of potential relevance and application to Africa.  In many countries, including many African countries, proposals for the widespread introduction of computers in schools is explicitly tied to goals to develop so-called 'knowledge workers' to work in nascent IT industries. How explicit is this link in reality?

In with the Outsourcing Crowd: Learning from Nasscom

Submitted by Michael Trucano on Fri, 02/20/2009 - 22:08

an empty call centre in Florida ... did all the jobs leave to India?The Nasscom India Leadership Forum in Mumbai is the annual meeting platform at which senior representatives from firms in the Indian software and Indian BPO industries share information, discuss and debate issues.  The Forum is well-covered in the Indian press, and increasingly internationally as well, and the event web site's group blog is a rich source of divergent opinions and perspectives.  Key note speeches from people inside and outside of the industry (including Narayana Murthy, C.K. Prahlad and Shashi Tharoor) were of notably high quality.

It is an interesting time for Nasscom: How will an industry that has only known good times deal with the current economic downturn?  How will individual Indian firms fare?  While the mood at the conference itself was notably serious (especially for an industry event), some tier one Indian companies actually expect to benefit from the downturn.  Many European countries (far behind the US and the UK in terms of outsourcing) are expected to examine costs more closely, which is expected to open up these markets more to Indian BPO providers.  At the same time, new outsourcing destinations are emerging, within India and internationally.  This is happening not just because of the hunt for lower prices and new talent, but also to gain a foothold in new emerging markets. 

The Use and Misuse of Computers in Education: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Colombia

Submitted by Michael Trucano on Fri, 02/13/2009 - 18:17

super random sampling or random supersampling? you be the judgeWorld Bank Economist Felipe Barrera-Osorio, working with Leigh Linden of Columbia University, has just published a very useful and rigorous study on the impact of ICT use in Colombia.

The Use and Misuse of Computers in Education: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Colombia (PDF) looked at  97 schools and 5,201 children over two years of participation in the Computers for Schools program.

While some readers may immediately latch onto the finding that the program "had little effect on students’ test scores", I found the potential explanation for this lack of positive impact to be even more valuable:

"The main reason for these results seems to be the failure to incorporate the computers into the educational process. Although the program increased the number of computers in the treatment schools and provided training to the teachers on how to use the computers in their classrooms, surveys of both teachers and students suggest that teachers did not incorporate the computers into their curriculum."

An update on the new $10/$20 computer for education in India

Submitted by Michael Trucano on Fri, 02/06/2009 - 08:07

the Kingfisher arrived in India long ago ... we'll have to wait for the R500 laptop a little longer | image attribution at bottomEn route to Mumbai, I thought I'd pass around some summary information about the new "$10 education laptop" officially announced this week in India.

This has received a great deal of press attention, much of which appears to be (after doing some further investigation) ill-informed / speculative.

Lost in much of the hype has been what is perhaps the more interesting story -- the apparent public commitment by the Indian government to provide subsidized connectivity for schools, colleges and universities, and a related large investment in the development of "e-content", as part of a new "National Mission in Education through Information and Communication Technology (ICT)".  Part of this includes the development of a new national ICT in school education policy.