INTERNET OF THINGS AND BIG DATA ANALYTICS TO ESTABLISH FIDELITY IN EDUCATIONAL INTERVENTIONS

Large amounts of funds are spent every year to implement social and educational interventions in developing countries. Realizing such educational interventions is a complex task spread out over months or years, and involves negotiating a variety of logistic issues while relying on various stakeholders to play their stipulated roles. Intervention fidelity is a measure of how faithful an educational intervention is in implementing the processes prescribed in the program. A number of studies have shown that better "fidelity" leads to stronger effects which simply means that interventions with better fidelity show statistically superior results to those that do not. This paper uses a framework for fidelity for educational interventions called FOI and Nelson's five-step model of intervention fidelity assessment to analyze a technology-based educational intervention based on a learning van. In this educational interventions, a variety of educational technologies including learning management systems, mobile devices and satellite-based virtual classrooms were used to train teachers, include parents and society, and to provide teachers one-on-one mentoring based on formative assessments and classroom observation videos. A total of over 350 public schools were involved. Based on the FOI and Nelson's model paper evaluates the type of fidelity that was compromised during three years of implementation. The paper provides future guidance on how each of these classes of fidelity violation can be potentially mediated via scalable and cost-effective use of mobile devices, Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data analytics.