Research questions about technology use in education in developing countries

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Research questions about
technology use in education in
developing countries
SUBMITTED BY MICHAEL TRUCANO ON WED,
05/27/2015
Back in 2005, I helped put together a 'quick
guide to ICT and education challenges and
research questions' in developing countries . This
list was meant to inform a research program at
the time sponsored by the World Bank's
infoDev program, but I figured I'd make it public,
because the barriers to publishing were so low
(copy -> paste -> save -> upload) and in case
doing so might be useful to anyone else.
While I don't know to what extent others may
have actually found this list helpful, I have seen
this document referenced over the years in
various funding proposals, and by other funding
agencies. Over the past week I've (rather
surprisingly) heard two separate organizations
reference this rather old document in the course
of considering some of their research priorities
going forward related to investigating possible
uses of information and communication
technologies (ICTs) to help meet educational
goals in low income and middle countries around
the world, and so I wondered how these 50
research questions had held up over the years.
Are they still relevant?
And :
What did we miss, ignore or not understand?
The list of research questions to be investigated
going forward was a sort of companion
document to Knowledge maps: What we know
(and what we don't) about ICT use in education
in developing countries . It was in many ways a
creature of its time and context. The formulation
of the research questions identified was in part
influenced by some stated interests of the
European Commission (which was co-funding
some of the work) and I knew that some
research questions would resonate with other
potential funders at the time (including the World
Bank itself) who were interested in related areas
(see, for example, the first and last research
questions). The list of research questions was
thus somewhat idiosynscratic, did not presume
to be comprehensive in its treatment of the
topic, and was intended meant to imply that
certain areas of research interest were 'more
important' than others not included on the list.
That said, in general the list seems to have held
up quite well, and many of the research
questions from 2005 continue to resonate in
2015. In some ways, this resonance is
unfortunate, as it suggests that we still don't
know answers to a lot of very basic questions.
Indeed, in some cases we may know as little in
2015 as we knew in 2015, despite the explosion
of activity and investment (and rhetoric) in
exploring the relevance of technology use in
education to help meet a wide variety of
challenges faced by education systems,
communities, teachers and learners around the
world. This is not to imply that we haven't
learned anything, of course (an upcoming
EduTech blog post will look at two very useful
surveys of research findings that have been
published in the past year), but that we still have
a long way to go.
Some comments and observations,
with the benefit of hindsight and when looking
forward
The full list of research questions from 2005 is
copied at the bottom of this blog post (here's
the original list as published, with explanation
and commentary on individual items).
Reviewing this list, a few things jump out at me:

1. Challenges in extrapolating research findings
from one (highly developed) place to another
(less developed) place
The operating hypothesis when formulating this
list was that answers to some of these questions
might be different in environments and contexts
often found in less developed countries ('LDCs')
than they would be in highly industrialized
countries where related issues had been largely
'solved' -- or at least where there was expert
consensus on the best way forward (even if that
consensus was not having demonstrable impact
on actual practice). Related to this, it was
assumed that certain questions might be more
important or relevant to ask when considering
circumstances in less developed countries
(research questions around 'interactive radio'
might still be quite useful to explore in Sub-
Saharan Africa, for example, even if the use of
educational radio had largely died out across
Europe). Given what has been learned over the
past decade, I think that this hypothesis holds up
rather well -- in fact, failed efforts to simply
export 'solutions' from education systems in
'highly developed' countries to developing
countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America
underscore for me the need for applied research
on educational technology approaches and
applications tailored to meet the needs and
contexts of decisionmakers in less developed
countries . What works well in Oslo may not work
well in Ouagadougou -- and vice versa.

2. The link between research & policymaking
Another rather important assumption (perhaps
'conceit' is the more appropriate word) that
animated this list of research questions was that
research can play an important role in informing
policy decisions related to technology use in
education. As someone who spends a lot of time
helping to translate research findings into
language that policymakers can understand and
act on, and to communicate knowledge needs of
policymakers to the research community, I of
course would like to believe that this assumption
holds. Unfortunately, though, based on
observations of hundreds of educational
technology projects over the past decade, it is
pretty clear to me that, in too many cases,
investments in educational technologies remain a
largely faith-based initiative in many places
around the world.

3. Equity issues
The number of research questions highlighting
issues related to marginalized communities and
the potential for differential impacts upon groups
within those communities (related to e.g. gender,
ethnicity, socioeconomic status, language and
geography) is notable. Unfortunately, these still
remain areas with insufficient research attention,
especially as may relate to findings that may
impact policymakers and/or which may inform
the daily work of practitioners and local
stakeholder groups.

4. A growing amount of research, but ...
There has been notable growth in academic
research investigating uses of education
technologies in developing countries over the
past decade, both on the part of academics in
'developed' countries, and those in developing
countries themselves. This is no doubt a good
thing (especially the growth in local research and
practitioner communities). Events like eLearning
Africa provide valuable fora for research and
practitioner groups to network with each other
close(r) to home (as opposed to having to meet
in London or Washington or Berlin in order to
share findings with a critical mass of like-minded
groups and people). That said, the most
remarkable change in this regard for me has been
the amount of corporate-sponsored research
which has grown up over the past ten years to
investigate issues related to technology use in
education in developing countries. This is largely
a consequence, I think, of the increased
recognition by companies that many markets
which were once considered 'frontier' are
growing rapidly, and that many of them
increasingly represent places where there is
money to be made in the near term. The heady
growth and diffusion of mobile telephony in most
of the developing world is the most obvious
marker of the fact that, for many companies,
countries in Africa and Asia are no longer
'emerging', but rather increasingly occupy places
front and center in corporate investment
strategies. One of the occasional benefits of my
job is that, even though I refuse to sign NDAs, I
from time to time get peeks into internal
corporately-funded research that is never
published. Some of it is really quite good, it is a
shame that so much of it stays locked away
within companies even after the point where it
no longer would convey a competitive advantage
to the firm that sponsored it. What's released
publicly as 'white papers' often reads to me
more like it was written by the marketing
department than something that can inform
decisionmaking by other groups in useful ways.

5. What is (was) trendy (and what's missing)
Specific mention of a number of things (e.g.
'community telecentres') appears rather quaint
from the vantage point of 2015 , but there aren't
too many buzzwords in evidence in the list from
2005 that are no longer relevant a decade later. I
am asked often to provide input on 'emerging
research topics in educational technology around
the world', and I note that a lot of things that
feature prominently in such efforts are wholly
absent from the 2005 list. For example, the
earlier list of research questions contains:
no mentions of mobile learning (although
handheld devices are mentioned, research
question #29)
no mention of MOOCs
no mention of open education resources , or
OER (although open source software is
mentioned in research question #32; while
there is no specific mention of intellectual
property issues, these were actually meant
to be considered as part of investigations
into questions related to digital content,
see research questions #39-41)
no mention of data privacy or security (this
is a *huge* omission from the perspective
of 2015, in my opinion, even if as a
practical matter it remains largely off the
radar screen of educational policymakers
in most countries)
no mention of child digital safety issues
no mention of game-based learning (or
gamification)
no mention of the potential use and impact
of social media in education
no mention of '21st century skills' (there is
mention of 'computer literacy' in research
question #2)
no mention of how ICTs might be relevant
to discussions of things like ' grit' or
' mindset ' (which are of increasing
research and policy interest in 2015), nor
of 'big data' or sensors, 'learning
analytics' or 'personalized learning', nor of
many other topics considered hot topics for
exploration today (Audrey Watters has a
useful list of other current educational
technology 'buzzwords' ; one item that
doesn't make her list, but which I have
seen crop up in a number of research
proposals lately, relates to the potential
use of drones in education)
no mention of power or electricity (these
were of course certainly well known at the
time, but they were not identified for
specific attention in the 2005 list; despite
improvements in electrification over the
past decade, increased demand as a result
of the increase in availability and use of
electronic gadgets has in many ways made
this even more important today than it
was back then)
*no specific attention to specific Internet
connectivity options (one suspects that
'satellite provision' would have been
mentioned as part of such a question)
and finally,
*no consideration of technology use within a
wider systems approach to education (as
features prominently in the World
Bank's education strategy , for example,
and its work under its flagship
SABER analytical initiative)
---
So:
Is this list of research questions related to ICT
use in education in developing countries
comprehensive?
No, certainly not. For better or worse, there is a
lot missing, especially when one considers
certain categories of edtech-related research
that are popular in certain circles.
Does it reflect the 'top' or most pressing, most
urgent research questions?
No: It did aspire to do so in 2005, and it still
does not do so from the perspective of 2015.
That said, there appears much in this list of
research questions that is relevant today -- and
indeed remains under-explored.
---
By far the most common research-type question
I am asked today is some variation of: What is
the impact of (this type of) technology on
education? This is a fair question, to be sure. I
often find that my reflexive reply to this
seemingly simple question ("it depends: what are
you trying to accomplish?") is often not viewed
as tremendously satisfying by many people.
While I increasingly come across academic
papers which attempt to identify the 'impact' of
the use of a particular educational technology or
technology-enabled approach, I remain quite
frustrated that there is comparatively little
interest in a related but, from the perspective of
the people who make huge and often very costly
decisions about such stuff, far more important
and practical questions related to understanding
how or why this 'impact' occurred: under what
specific contexts or circumstances did it take
place; what was the related enabling
environment or key factors that led to failure ;
what were the costs of achieving this impact;
etc. (A recent interesting paper examining The
Effect of Access to Information and
Communication Technology on Household Labor
Income: Evidence from One Laptop Per Child in
Uruguay is one of dozens of examples of
research that identifies and investigates 'impact',
but offers little guidance for policymakers on
specific circumstances, contexts or explanations
of why and how such impact may have been
achieved.)
---
Last week global leaders in education, ministers,
policy-makers and representatives of civil
society, teachers, experts and the private sector
met in Korea at the World Education Forum to
take stock of successes and failures over the
past quarter century related to the achievement
of initiatives aimed to help bring about Education
For All and to jointly chart a way forward over
the next decades. The resulting Incheon
Declaration identified a series of principles and
steps "towards inclusive and equitable quality
education and lifelong learning for all".
Whatever the future holds for educators, learners
and education systems in the years ahead, there
can be little doubt that considerations of, and
decisions about, education models and practices
will increasingly include contemplations of the
use of a variety of information and
communication technologies, in a variety of
ways, to help meet a variety of goals and
objectives. Even if their use is not (yet) relevant
or cost effective in certain contexts and
circumstances, 'ICTs' will increasingly be part of
discussions about the 'future of education'.
Whether or not related decisions will be
evidence- or faith-based will rest in part on the
existence of a rigorous and context-relevant
research base which can help inform the
development of educational policies; related
implementation plans; and administrative,
teaching and learning practices 'on-the-ground'.
Note : The image used at the top of this blog
post of the acclaimed Dutch phycologist Anna
Weber-van Bosse ("let's investigate this
systematically") comes from the Special
Collections of the University of Amsterdam via
Wikimedia Commons . It is (c) University of
Amsterdam, Artis Library and is used according
to the terms of its Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license .