April 2009

Perhaps the most well known, and biggest, program exploring the use of mobile phones in education in a developing country is the text2teach project in the Philippines (part of the larger 'BridgeIT' initiative). 

28% of Africans now have a mobile phone subscription, according to data released by the ITU earlier this year, part of a larger trend that sees two out of every three mobile subscribers around the world living in a developing country.  The flagship ITU publication  Measuring the Information Society (pdf) notes that two-thirds of the world's cell phone subscriptions are in developing nations, with Africa, which has a 2% subscriber rate as recently as 2000, growing the fastest. And it is not only adults who are making use of this new technology.  Survey work at a low-income high school in South Africa's Samora Machel township suggests that mobile penetration among youth in some places might be higher than one might suspect.

While the explosive use of mobile phones in developing countries is well-documented -- and undeniable -- and evidence is emerging that phones are slowly making their way into the hands of teens, just what this might mean for the delivery of education in developing countries is a little less clear.  This topic first started to get serious attention among small groups of people in international donor agencies around 2005, with a 'mobile learning' workshop in Tokyo sponsored by ADBI and UNESCO serving as a sort of landmark event for the topic.  The workshop report (published as Mobile Learning for Expanding Educational Opportunities) is in many ways typical of work around this time, focusing largely on the possible usage models and relevance for using mobile phones in a variety of ways to support new teaching and learning processes.  Further afield, Dfid began to support work in this area in Africa, and papers written on mobile learning in Africa sounded similar notes to what was being discussed in Asia, as revealed in titles like The Potential for Using SMS to Support Learning and Organisation in Sub-Saharan Africa (pdf) and Transforming learning through technology: the case of using SMSs to support distance students in South Africa (pdf). 

While the evidence base is still quite spotty, some lessons (largely of the anecdotal variety) and usage models are slowly emerging from pilot projects in places as diverse as Thailand and Mongolia.  The increasing ubiquity of mobile phones has helped enabled pilots looking at mobile gaming to support literacy in India.  Even the World Bank has got into the act, through Development Marketplace funding for a small pilot in Bangladesh.

Perhaps the most well known, and biggest, of these pilot programs is the text2teach project in the Philippines (see video at the top of this blog post), which provides a way for teachers to request educational videos via text message, with the videos delivered to a television at the school via satellite. 

Exploring what might be possible should smartphones drop greatly in price in the coming years, projects like Dunia Moja, a joint initiative of Stanford University (USA) and partner universities in Southern and Eastern Africa, are exploring how communication and joint research between students and faculty on environmental issues can be facilitated and supported. 

A slew of new publications and resources are emerging to help us sort through all of the initiatives.   Canada's Althabasca University (editor: Mohamed Ally) has just published a very useful general survey on Mobile Learning: Transforming the Delivery of Education and Training (free e-book available).    IRRODL has published a short article by Scott Motlik reviewing what we know about Mobile Learning in Developing Countries, which serves as a nice complement to a short article on the same topic by John Traxler that the Commonwealth of Learning published back in 2005. 

When we talk about the use of mobile phones in the education sector, it is clear we are still in the very early stages of developments, and I expect that this will be an area of major research interest and activity in the coming years -- and a recurring topic on this blog.