CREATING BETTER E-LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: LOOKING AT EXPERIENCES IN MANY COUNTRIES

Discussions around eLearning in developing countries are fraught with conflicting tensions and expectations as policy makers and advocates argue about costs, resources, program designs and the benefits of integrating ICT into schools and communities as a means to improve education for all. Educational technology or eLearning initiatives are inherently complex, expensive and challenging; they are not just about hardware and software but always require changes in policies, creation of new education resources, and provision of training and on-going support for educators. It should not be surprising, then, that research finds that technology interventions in developing countries can impact students' academic growth but that many technology programs, especially large scale programs, fail [1,2]. Over the last 15 years, Intel has funded researchers from the Education Development Center (EDC) to undertake multiple case studies of active eLearning programs in the US and across numerous countries. These studies have helped provide insight and guidance for Intel's many educational partners around the world. In our professional experience we have come to understand that ICT is important because of what it enables educators to do for their students; it is the educators who make the day-to-day decisions to use these technology tools to create the learning environments they envision. Thus, an information technology (IT) infrastructure is important because it provides the platform from which teachers can create dynamic, engaging and impactful classroom learning environments. In this article we build off our experience in schools all over the world to discuss key IT elements that seem to be important for educators to make changes in teaching, learning and even the structure of schooling. EDC has been a research and evaluation partner for Intel's teacher training programs and educational initiatives in the US since 2000 and supporting Intel international efforts since 2003 [3, 4, 5, 6]. Over time we began doing more in-depth case studies on classroom and school-based uses of IT tools in diverse national contexts. We started these comparison studies with Costa Rica, Vietnam, Nigeria, Brazil and China [7], India, Turkey and Chile [8], and a look at Web2.0 in multiple states in the USA [9]. We have accompanied local researchers on site visits for other eLearning initiatives: Conectar Igualdad in Argentina [10], Computer for Every Child in Macedonia [11], Project Dositej in Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina [12], SPARK in Kenya [13], One Computer Per Child in Turkey [14] and E-Schoolbag Project in China [15]. Our most recent set of case studies looked at different innovative IT projects combining student devices and easy Internet access: one-to-one initiatives of Todos en la Red in Argentina [16], and school-based programs in Russia [17], the eCADEMY blended high school in the USA [18] and Khan Academy in Chile [19]. Looking across all these case studies, we began to see five broad components of the larger IT ecosystem that combined to support teachers and students in making those innovative changes. Clearly these countries have different levels of economic development, different education systems, and different needs and challenges. The educational contexts we looked at across all these countries also had very different IT resources available, and teachers often used those resources in different ways. Yet, despite all of the variation, these experiences suggest there are some critical combinations of these components of the IT ecosystem that open up more opportunities for teachers to use IT in their classrooms. The five technology components that come together to create a powerful technology ecosystem for learning are: children's access to devices; teacher computers; Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs) or projectors; Internet access and networking capacity; and virtual learning environments or learning management systems. If one objective is to change the learning environment in the classroom, our experience suggests that computers become more powerful learning tools when they are embedded in a technology eco-system that uses the technology to overcome other deficiencies in the school.