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The state and quality of public education systems in many countries leave a lot to be desired. In many developing nations, the numbers associated with failing students are growing larger every year. Teachers are under constant pressure to produce results, while governments continue to allocate bigger budgets to education with little or no improvement in the outcome.

Year after year, calls to revamp public education systems are growing; not just in one specific country, but in many countries developing and developed alike. As an attempt to improve the situation some governments are beginning to engage what is being termed ICT implementation in public education; part of which is to provide basic computer skills to educators and then getting these educators to use the technology as a teaching and learning tool . The second part would then be to deploy computers in classrooms to support the learning environment.

To some people this may sound like a great idea, after all it is what every country is trying to do if they have not already done so; so the implication is that it must have the potential to produce extra-ordinary results. As one educator put it to me “Europeans are doing it, so do Americans and maybe the Chinese too. Somehow it must be working, right?” Well… I disagree for the reasons I will state bellow.

First of all, using ICT to support a flawed system does not produce better results. Many public school systems (regardless of the claims of learner-centered education) are not really centered around the students learning needs, teachers are showing up to teach and get on with the day (sometimes, not by their own fault, but because of the flaws in the system. These flaws are often presented in the forms of lack of quality control and not properly equipping schools with tools to deliver student-centered education). Thus implementing ICT in such education systems may make things a little easier for administrators, but will do very little for students. Students will still heavily depend on their teachers and textbooks as knowledge sources, well that is if they have them; given that there is a shortage of high quality or highly specialized teachers in many countries. In addition to that, most developing nations are being hit with complaints about lack of teaching and learning resources.

How often do we hear or see more than three children sharing a textbook in our schools? Dumping computers in the classrooms won’t help, because how they are used in teaching and learning is actually more important than their mere accessibility. Additionally, many people working in the public education sector are stuck

with the old mentality of one school competing against another, thus they tend to tightly guard the information they have so that others can not get it. They use these tactics to gain competitive advantage (in other words, what you have is a bunch of people with big egos competing against each other at the expense of students and on the tax-payer’s dime). Thus, even with ICT implementation, you are still going to have too many small un-integrated systems with severely incompatible data/information in them and provide no value to the nation as a whole.

Part of the flaw in the school system is that there is little investment in the operations of the system. In other words, the system does not run like a well oiled machine because much of the investment in the education sector is invested in the people and other components that are of little or no value to how we teach and learn, instead of investing in a working system, a system that ensure the same results regardless of who performs the function.

As an example, if you had a good teacher X at school x who for years had been producing exceptional results, it is only fair to expect that at some point that effort has to be rewarded. In many countries such rewards come in the form of promotions. Now, once teacher X is promoted, the chance of getting somebody who can do the job just like teacher X is very slim, after all, who on earth has information or a good understanding of how teacher X did things? Had we invested in the system instead of individuals, we would have captured teacher X’s working habits and use that knowledge to replicate his/her results even long after he/she had been gone.

Proof of this is in the volunteer program in many developing countries, school systems in developing nations are getting a constant flow of volunteers whose whole purpose is to boost capacity for the local workforce. Even after several years of working with such people, many institutions are still failing to replicate their results after they have left, thus starting from scratch with every group that shows up.

Now imagine this for a solution:

Somebody deploys a computer system, this system tracks everything that goes on in the school from administrative part to lesson planning and delivery. Teachers record their observation from the class on how students are demonstrating their understanding of a certain concept and so forth. . Every stakeholder (parents, teachers, community volunteers, students) have access to the software system, although what they can see varies depending on permissions they have.

The whole thing does not end there, the application allow students to teach other students concepts that they have mastered, in real-time!. There is no limitation to geographical area, if a student in one town, country or even continent sees the need to educate other students, there should be no reason why they can not have such an opportunity. In addition to that, engaged parents have the same access and ability to develop and distribute learning material for their children.

The premise to this is that, if these people are expected to help their children with homework, why not tap into the knowledge of how they are going around it? Students are exposed to extensive collection of learning material developed by many other people including professionals in different fields not just their teachers.

Now remember Mr. Y who left the teaching profession for a better paying job in the private sector, even though his passion was teaching? He used to be a good teacher until he took up that job, why not allow Mr. Y to once in a while get into the system and help the learners who are struggling, regardless of their geographical location. Teachers can share teaching materials, ask for help from other teachers and get the response immediately, instead of hitchhiking to the nearest town for help.

While all these fantastic things are happening in the teaching and learning environment, at any given time, administrators can get into the system, check how schools in their districts are doing and offer to help them as soon as they can. They can get on the system, get all the information they need to know before a school visit, thus in the process saving them a lot of time that they spend at schools digging for problem areas. In some cases cut off unnecessary trips to schools that do not need help, save the tax payers fuel costs and the whole cost of the trip.

The same administrator can check the state of every government property deployed to any given school and should students be dropping out of school, even the highest authority will immediately know and address the situation as soon as it occur. If you know what I am getting at, it is enforcing accountability and letting people own their roles. In cases where such functions are not performed, individuals paid and tasked with performing those roles must be held accountable.

The same application tracks down budget allocation for every school, enabling the government who, usually is the biggest investor in public education to track how every dime allocated is spend, which in the process improves transparency.

Smooth system isn’t it? Notice the difference between the approaches? The difference here is not supplementing a flawed system, but slowly replacing it by making ICT not a supporting tool, but “The learning environment”.

Does it work in real life? Yes, but all this can only happen under one condition, that all users/stakeholders be honest and report information as accurately as possible. Thus the investment will then be in making sure that such a learning environment is accessible to all, whether they are in urban or rural areas. Can you imagine, how power of a society this will produce? Can you imagine how fast such a machine, providing access to high quality knowledge and led by not only by teachers, but by the whole professional community; will turn our mostly consumer population to producers of goods and services?

Filed under: Education