How is technology helping education

From lessons learned during this disruptive time, they can implement solutions now for the future. For example, administrators could give teachers a week or two to think carefully about how to teach courses not previously online. In addition to an exploration of solutions, flexibility during these trying times is of paramount importance.

Below are examples of how important technology is in education and the benefits it offers to students and teachers. Educational technology can foster collaboration. Not only can teachers engage with students during lessons, but students can also communicate with each other.

Through online lessons and learning games, students get to work together to solve problems. In collaborative activities, students can share their thoughts and ideas and support each other. At the same time, technology enables one-on-one interaction with teachers.

Students can ask classroom-related questions and seek additional help on difficult-to-understand subject matter. At home, students can upload their homework, and teachers can access and view completed assignments using their laptops. Classes can take place entirely online via the use of a laptop or mobile device.

Hybrid versions of learning combine the use of technology from anywhere with regular in-person classroom sessions. In both scenarios, the use of technology to tailor learning plans for each student is possible. Teachers can create lessons based on student interests and strengths.

An added benefit is that students can learn at their own pace. When they need to review class material to get a better understanding of essential concepts, students can review videos in the lesson plan.

The data generated through these online activities enable teachers to see which students struggled with certain subjects and offer additional assistance and support. Through engaging and educational content, teachers can spark inquisitiveness in children and boost their curiosity, which research says has ties to academic success. Curiosity helps students get a better understanding of math and reading concepts.

Creating engaging content can involve the use of AR, videos, or podcasts. A few look bored. Some are talking to their neighbors. One appears to be sleeping.

Classrooms today do not look much different, though you might find modern students looking at their laptops, tablets, or smart phones instead of books though probably open to Facebook. A cynic would say that technology has done nothing to change education.

However, in many ways, technology has profoundly changed education. For one, technology has greatly expanded access to education. In medieval times, books were rare and only an elite few had access to educational opportunities.

Individuals had to travel to centers of learning to get an education. Access to learning opportunities today is unprecedented in scope thanks to technology. Opportunities for communication and collaboration have also been expanded by technology.

Traditionally, classrooms have been relatively isolated, and collaboration has been limited to other students in the same classroom or building. Most developing countries massively expanded access to schooling in recent decades by building new schools and making education more affordable, both by defraying direct costs, as well as compensating for opportunity costs Duflo, ; World Bank, Consequently, a large number of learners perform well below grade-based curricular expectations see, e.

In this respect, technology is uniquely positioned to complement traditional teaching. This use of technology could help learners master basic skills and help them get more out of schooling. Although many software products evaluated in recent years have been categorized as CAL, many rely on a relatively coarse level of differentiation at an initial stage e.

CAL initiatives complement an initial diagnostic with dynamic adaptation i. Existing evidence on this specific type of programs is highly promising. Most famously, Banerjee et al. This program improved math achievement by 0.

Consistent with the promise of personalized learning, the software improved achievement for all students. In fact, one year after the end of the program, students assigned to the program still performed 0.

More recently, Muralidharan, et al. After only 4. While all learners benefited from the program in absolute terms, the lowest performing learners benefited the most in relative terms, since they were learning very little in school.

We see two important limitations from this body of research. First, to our knowledge, none of these initiatives has been evaluated when implemented during the school day. Therefore, it is not possible to distinguish the effect of the adaptive software from that of additional instructional time. Second, given that most of these programs were facilitated by local instructors, attempts to distinguish the effect of the software from that of the instructors has been mostly based on noncausal evidence.

A frontier challenge in this body of research is to understand whether CAL software can increase the effectiveness of school-based instruction by substituting part of the regularly scheduled time for math and language instruction.

Recent improvements in the speed and quality of videoconferencing, as well as in the connectivity of remote areas, have enabled yet another way in which technology can help personalization: live i. While the evidence on in-person tutoring is scarce in developing countries, existing studies suggest that this approach works best when it is used to personalize instruction see, e. There are almost no studies on the impact of online tutoring—possibly, due to the lack of hardware and Internet connectivity in low- and middle-income countries.

After 10 months, program beneficiaries performed 0. To our knowledge, similar initiatives within a country have not yet been rigorously evaluated. A third way in which technology may improve the quality of education is by providing learners with additional opportunities for practice. In many developing countries, lesson time is primarily devoted to lectures, in which the educator explains the topic and the learners passively copy explanations from the blackboard.

This setup leaves little time for in-class practice. Consequently, learners who did not understand the explanation of the material during lecture struggle when they have to solve homework assignments on their own. Technology could potentially address this problem by allowing learners to review topics at their own pace.

Technology can help learners get more out of traditional instruction by providing them with opportunities to implement what they learn in class. This approach could, in theory, allow some learners to anchor their understanding of the material through trial and error i.

Existing evidence on practice exercises reflects both the promise and the limitations of this use of technology in developing countries. For example, Lai et al. After four months, the intervention improved math achievement by 0. Many other evaluations of comparable interventions have found similar small-to-moderate results see, e.

We hypothesize that these programs do little for learners who perform several grade levels behind curricular expectations, and who would benefit more from a review of foundational concepts from earlier grades.

We see two important limitations from this research. First, most initiatives that have been evaluated thus far combine instructional videos with practice exercises, so it is hard to know whether their effects are driven by the former or the latter. In fact, the program in China described above allowed learners to ask their peers whenever they did not understand a difficult concept, so it potentially also captured the effect of peer-to-peer collaboration.

To our knowledge, no studies have addressed this gap in the evidence. Second, most of these programs are implemented before or after school, so we cannot distinguish the effect of additional instructional time from that of the actual opportunity for practice. The importance of this question was first highlighted by Linden , who compared two delivery mechanisms for game-based remedial math software for students in grades 2 and 3 in a network of schools run by a nonprofit organization in Gujarat, India: one in which students interacted with the software during the school day and another one in which students interacted with the software before or after school in both cases, for three hours per day.

This study suggested that computer-assisted learning is a poor substitute for regular instruction when it is of high quality, as was the case in this well-functioning private network of schools. In recent years, several studies have sought to remedy this shortcoming. They evaluated an initiative in Shaanxi, China in which students in grades 3 and 5 were required to interact with the software similar to the one in Lai et al.

The main limitation of this study, however, is that the program was delivered during regularly scheduled computer lessons, so it could not determine the impact of substituting regular math instruction.

Similarly, Mo et al. Yet, the key shortcoming of this study is that the teacher-directed version added several components that may also influence achievement, such as increased opportunities for teachers to provide students with personalized assistance when they struggled with the material. Ma, Fairlie, Loyalka, and Rozelle compared the effectiveness of additional time-delivered remedial instruction for students in grades 4 to 6 in Shaanxi, China through either computer-assisted software or using workbooks.

This study indicates whether additional instructional time is more effective when using technology, but it does not address the question of whether school systems may improve the productivity of instructional time during the school day by substituting educator-led with computer-assisted instruction.

This, combined with the fact that many developing-country classrooms include a very large number of learners see, e. Technology can potentially increase learner effort and understanding of the material by finding new and more engaging ways to deliver it. They can increase understanding by breaking the material into smaller units and tackling common misconceptions. In spite of the popularity of instructional videos, there is relatively little evidence on their effectiveness.

Yet, two recent evaluations of different versions of the Khan Academy portal, which mainly relies on instructional videos, offer some insight into their impact. First, Ferman, Finamor, and Lima evaluated an initiative in public primary and middle schools in five cities in Brazil in which the teachers of students in grades 5 and 9 were taken to the computer lab to learn math from the platform for 50 minutes per week.

The authors hypothesized that this could be due to the reduction of teacher-led math instruction. Students in this study received 90 minutes per week of additional math instruction effectively nearly doubling total math instruction per week through teacher-led regular lessons, teacher-assisted Khan Academy lessons, or similar lessons assisted by technical supervisors with no content expertise. Importantly, the first group provided differentiated instruction, which is not the norm in Salvadorian schools.

All three groups outperformed both schools without any additional lessons and classrooms without additional lessons in the same schools as the program. The teacher-assisted Khan Academy lessons performed 0. Together, these studies suggest that instructional videos work best when provided as a complement to, rather than as a substitute for, regular instruction.

While the software does not provide the type of personalization discussed above, learners are asked to take a placement test and, based on their score, educators assign them different work.

There are very few studies on the effects of games and gamification in low- and middle-income countries. Recently, Araya, Arias Ortiz, Bottan, and Cristia evaluated an initiative in which grade 4 students in Santiago, Chile were required to participate in two minute sessions per week during the school day with instructional math software featuring individual and group competitions e.

After nine months, the program led to improvements of 0. However, it had mixed effects on non-academic outcomes. Finally, given that one of the weekly sessions replaced regular math instruction and the other one represented additional math instructional time, it is not clear whether the academic effects of the program are driven by the software or the additional time devoted to learning math. Here are five specific and sequential guidelines for decisionmakers to realize the potential of education technology to accelerate student learning.

Take stock of how your current schools, educators, and learners are engaging with technology. Carry out a short in-school survey to understand the current practices and potential barriers to adoption of technology we have included suggested survey instruments in the Appendices ; use this information in your decisionmaking process.

For example, we learned from conversations with current and former ministers of education from various developing regions that a common limitation to technology use is regulations that hold school leaders accountable for damages to or losses of devices. Another common barrier is lack of access to electricity and Internet, or even the availability of sufficient outlets for charging devices in classrooms.

Understanding basic infrastructure and regulatory limitations to the use of education technology is a first necessary step. But addressing these limitations will not guarantee that introducing or expanding technology use will accelerate learning. The next steps are thus necessary. The continent is creating a digital divide between cities, where there is fiber, and the rural areas. In deploying this, we are finding that again, teachers are unfamiliar with it.

And existing policies prohibit students to bring their own tablets or cell phones. The easiest way to do it would have been to let everyone bring their own device.