In poor countries technology can make big improvements to education

<i>&quot;In poor countries technology can make big improvements to education</i><p><i>Teachers are often unqualified, ignorant or absent; tablets show up and work&quot;</i><p>I reached the article limit, so I could only read this, and I disagree.<p>I live in Brazil and my wife works in a big NGO focused on education. She visits schools in poor regions all over the country. Her current understanding is that she sees no evidence that technology helps at all. And the NGO piloted lots of tech initiatives on lots of schools.<p><i>&quot;Teachers are often unqualified, ignorant or absent; tablets show up and work&quot;</i><p>The first part is definitely true, the second one not so much.<p>What seems to make a difference is a prepared and motivated school principal.<p>EDIT:<p>I just read the whole article (thanks to <i>ivm</i> letting me know about Outline).<p>The title is kind of clickbaity. Big programs, with a lot good things going on, and they focus on the small part that use tablets and I don&#x27;t think it is even an absolute necessity.<p><i>&quot;The coach-and-tablet element is just one part. A curriculum based on synthetic phonics (widely used in developed-country schools) has been designed and 23m books distributed, along with detailed lesson plans to make life easier for teachers. But the technology is crucial to supporting them and providing their bosses with data about their performance.&quot;</i><p>It is <i>&quot;crucial&quot;</i> for a small part of the program with good results.<p>They at least acknowledge some high profile programs that did not work and go on to share a few other few and specific cases that are very interesting and explain how tech could indeed help.<p>I still think it overrates the tech part, but looks like the classic case where the journalist writes a more down to earth article and the editor adds a exagerated title.

It’s important to recognize access to information does not equate to education. No matter what sophisticated tools you have at your disposal, you still need an educator to do the job of teaching, to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to craft some kind of coherent picture that synthesizes connections between what’s being learned. Niel Postman’s <i>Technopoly</i> puts forward a pretty good argument for why we can’t simply replace teachers with sophisticated tools and hope the information sticks. Technology is a great boon and enabler in the field of education, but’s it no replacement for teachers or communities, which remain integral to the pedagogical process.<p>The same logic, at its extreme would suggest you could replace parents with sophisticated tooling and come out with children that are just as well developed and ready to contribute to society in meaningful ways.

One major problem is that in poor countries, opportunities are few, so a lot of effort is spent in you competing against your peers.<p>Until i arrived in the West, i didn&#x27;t realize what&#x27;s possible with the collaborative approach instead of competing against each other.<p>In west, average people were teaming up and achieving better result as a group than couple of sharp kids in my country where they spent a lot of effort killing competition.<p>This is my experience, excuse if it&#x27;s full of bias.

I don&#x27;t live in a poor country, but as a college student every time I&#x27;ve had a class that relied heavily on technology it&#x27;s been miserable. The math classes where homework was done on paper, from a math book were pleasant.<p>I also always like to think about Dijkstra and his opinion on technology vs paper for teaching. He seemed to avoid it&#x27;s use when it replaced a more personal teaching style <i>but</i> he also seems to be a pioneer in distance learning[1]. I think a lot of people could learn a lot from him.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=GX3URhx6i2E" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=GX3URhx6i2E</a>

Although this article addresses the situation in rural areas of poor countries, I have personal experience that access to technology contributes to better education even at undergrad level of the education. I personally went to a college which was trying to mitigate the lack of good professors and instructors. I had the idea of doing assignments, recitals and lectures(if necessary) from Edx. I personally believe that completing and doing good in courses from MIT on Edx certainly if nothing else contributed to my self confidence.

&gt; Paying teachers more is not likely to improve the situation. As research by Justin Sandefur of the Centre for Global Development shows, poor-country teachers tend to be remarkably well-paid, by local standards (see chart). And evidence from countries as diverse as Indonesia and Pakistan suggests that teachers’ pay levels have little impact on learning.<p>Is it at all reasonable to use units of GDP to compare salaries? That doesn’t seem right to me. The US GDP per capita in USD is about $60k. The Ethiopia GDP per capita in USD is less than $800. The only way to claim that teachers are “remarkably well-paid” by using units of GDP, while in reality 7 * GDP &#x2F; person in Ethiopia (about $5,400 per year) is not enough to buy food or pay rent.<p>If the cost of living in Ethiopia were 1% of the cost of living in the US, then teachers would be better off. But the cost of living there is only slightly lower, so teachers’ buying power there is a tiny fraction of what it is here. They’re getting a lot less than our minimum wage in <i>relative</i> dollars.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.numbeo.com&#x2F;cost-of-living&#x2F;country_result.jsp?country=Ethiopia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.numbeo.com&#x2F;cost-of-living&#x2F;country_result.jsp?cou...</a>

The missing piece in the technology puzzle for rural education is broadband satellite internet. Iridium Network&#x27;s bandwidth will be able to support HD video and rich internet applications. The key difference: every student, teacher and indeed every member of the village community will be able to use their connections <i>in parallel</i>. Rather than one person at a time or each sharing a single conn. Low-power, low cost ARM based hardware running linux or chromeOS, especially in networked appliance configurations for classrooms, could become standard. We&#x27;ll witness a ton of emerging user scenarios: live video teaching, IoT, telemedicine. The future is already here. And it is about to get distributed everywhere ;)

I like the idea of holograms being projected to schools <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.standard.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;london&#x2F;holograms-of-teachers-beamed-into-london-classrooms-from-around-the-world-a3449181.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.standard.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;london&#x2F;holograms-of-teachers...</a><p>This could be useful for general teaching, while the role of face-to-face teachers may change for more one-on-one teaching. Something that many parents long for their children in an age where schools are being shut down and combined into &quot;megaschools&quot; (UK)

I live in 3d richest county in US in my kid&#x27;s middle school it&#x27;s not super uncommon for a teacher to just put on some YouTube video that covers what they are studying ...

In (some) poor countries, public teaching pays poorly and tend to have strong unions. Unfortunately this combination attracts bad actors that politicize education putting the interests of the children last. Technology can&#x27;t do much about this.<p>That said, is unbelievable what kids are getting on their own from access to what is available on the internet. It is truly transforming rural areas.

I can confirm from first-hand experience that access to technology can make big improvements at the university level too. Tens of thousands of people from developing countries use one of Citationsy’s features to access scholarly research and papers that their universities do not pay to provide them access to.