Reflecting on 2020

week of December 21, 2020

As learning has moved from the school to the home with the day spent in front of a TV, listening to radio, or perhaps in front of a laptop screen, the EdTech Team wanted to take the chance to reflect and learn from what has happened during these past 12 months. Special thanks to all of our partners and friends for their support and collaboration in 2020. Bring on 2021!

We launched our EdTech strategy.

On December 2, we launched our EdTech strategy Reimagining Human Connections: Technology & Innovation at the World Bank with the paper “Realizing the Future of Learning” at a high-level World Bank Live event moderated by Andrew Jack, Global Education Editor at the Financial Times, and with the participation of HDVP Mamta Murthi, INFVP Makhtar Diop and our EDU GP Director Jaime Saavedra.

The strategy is guided by 5 principles and 3 Ds:

5 Principles

1. Ask Why
2. Design and Act at Scale for All
3. Empower Teachers
4. Engage the Ecosystem
5. Be Data-Driven

3 Ds: Discover, Deploy, Diffuse

Read the full strategy here.

We created global public goods and formed critical partnerships to address the pandemic.

Global public goods

• Guidance Note on Remote Learning and COVID-19 (April 2020)
• EdTech Knowledge Packs (From April to November 2020)
• Remote learning, distance education and online learning during the COVID19 pandemic: A Resource List by the World Bank’s EdTech Team (April 2020)
• Compilation of remote learning options being used by governments (June 2020)
• Lessons for Education during COVID-19 (World Bank Group, OECD, Global Education Innovation initiative, HundrED, June 2020)
• Learning continuity stories (World Bank Group, OECD, Global Education Innovation initiative, HundrED, Ongoing)
• Workshops with Ministers of Education (OECD, Harvard, Global Education Innovation Initiative and HundrED, Ongoing)
• 22 EduTech Podcasts available on: Anchor; Apple Podcasts; and Spotify
• Weekly updates for This week in EdTech on Medium.

Partnerships

• Global Partnership for Education provided a grant of $25 million to the World Bank, UNESCO and UNICEF (acting as a consortium) for “Continuous and Accelerated Learning in response to COVID-19” program.
• The Global Education Innovation Initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, OECD’s Directorate of Education and Skills, and HundrED are collaborating to produce Lessons for Education — combining their expertise to provide the countries with information and resources from around the world on the education response to the crisis, including guidance notes, Continuity Stories, webinars, and a repository of online resources.

We spoke about the need for greater connectivity to bridge the digital divides.

While countries instinctively thought of delivering lessons online as a first step to address remote learning for students, the reality of limited and/or expensive internet penetration (across and within) countries has come to the forefront and revealed glaring inequalities. Our review of 54 Low Income and FCV countries reveals that only 3 have internet penetration rates above 50%. In countless conversations with TTLs, Client Countries and Donors, the cost and availability, or rather the lack thereof, of decent broadband internet has been highlighted. There are many steps that public and private entities are taking to address this issue and expect it to become a top priority going forward.

The work that our Digital Development colleagues are doing to address national broadband access and the (joint) Education GP work on National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) to connect all educational institutions will be critical going forward. NREN organizations are specialized internet service providers dedicated to supporting the needs of the research and education communities within their own country or region. NRENs have played a critical role during COVID by providing stable backbone connectivity, hosting Learning Management Systems and collaboration tools, providing technical support and helpdesks to not only higher education but to the entire education sector.

Beyond connectivity, the education sector also needs to address the other digital divides: the lack of devices, content and software; human capacities- digital skills as well as other foundational for teachers and students and organizational capabilities to acquire, deploy, manage digital technologies and use data for evidence based decision making.

• Blog: COVID-19 reinforces the need for connectivity
• Blog: How countries can work with mobile operators and others to increase access

EdTech team’s Bob Hawkins and Alex Twinomugisha spoke with Mike Jensen, two renown connectivity experts and advocates for connectivity in Africa.

• Broadening Connectivity: A Conversation with Steve Song and Mike Jensen — Part I, available on Apple, Spotify, and Anchor.
• Broadening Connectivity: A Conversation with Steve Song and Mike Jensen — Part II, available on Apple, Spotify, and Anchor.

We spoke to public and private sector about keeping teachers, parents, and students engaged while using remote learning.

Education is a social endeavor and the quantity and quality of engagement and interaction with the student either through teacher, parent, or other educator is essential to the learning process. Ministries are expanding the human resources available to support student learning. For example:

• Argentina has introduced through Seguimos Educando the concept of combining the teacher with a conductor (journalist, artist, scientist) for radio and TV broadcasts.
• Israel has introduced the i-scientist program — a “dating” app in which teachers can book a webinar with a scientist.
• In the Kyrgyz Republic the Ministry of Education and Science announced a campaign, “Reading Family”. Parents read and discuss books together with their children, post information on Facebook and pass on a baton to their friends via social networks. The most active families will be given gifts and nominated with the title “Akurman Uy-buloo” (“Erudite Family”).

Ministries are identifying programs that incorporate storytelling, interactivity, and games to engage and motivate students.

• On April 22, the EdTech team hosted a converation with African Education TV creator Ubongo. See full video here. On our podcast, World Bank’s EduTech team member Sharon Zacharia speaks with Ubongo Co-founder and CEO Nisha Ligon and Ubongo Head of Education Cliodhna Ryan about what we can learn from Ubongo’s work in edutainment in Africa. Listen to the podcast here.
• Poland supports many innovative content initiatives including Grarantanna, which included the setting up of a dedicated educational Minecraft server.

Additionally, interventions targeted at teachers or parents using SMS are both low-cost and low-tech and can be used to reduce parents’ information gaps and improve student attendance (in Chile: Berlinski et al, 2017), improve teachers’ attendance through monitoring SMS which resulted in increased motivation of both teachers and students as well as decreased rates of likelihood of student dropout (In Niger: Aker & Ksoll, 2018). Additionally, text messaging interventions may benefit from differentiated and personalized messages which may increase trust and encourage parents by providing specific information on their child’s learning gaps (in the US: Doss et al, 2017). A recent intervention in Ghana is introducing SMS to improve parents’ engagement in educational activities, and promote gender parity in education through messages promoting girls’ education and addressing some common stereotypes around gender roles during the school closures (Tsinigio & Samanhyia, forthcoming)

Main highlights regarding teachers include:

• In collaboration with HundrED, and with financial support from GPE, we launched the campaign “Teachers for a Changing World: Transforming Teacher Professional Development.” The World Bank Group, and HundrED are teaming up to identify and share leading solutions from around the world that are helping teachers thrive in an ever-changing classroom. This project aims to identify and promote impactful and scalable solutions that support teachers’ professional development. This campaign is part of a larger project (GPE grant) called Technology for Teaching (T4T). See our World Bank announcement here. Share your innovation here. On our World Bank EduTech Podcast, Danny Gilliland from HundrED, Manal Bakur N Quota, and Cristobal Cobo, talk about this new global campaign. Listen here.
• We hosted a virtual workshop with 5 countries (Brazil, Kenya, Pakistan, Tanzania and Turkey) aiming to support teachers to adapt to the new challenges of remote and blended learning during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

In conclusion, EdTech it’s not an add-on anymore but an essential part of education systems going forward.

Education and Technology in an Age of Pandemics examined this topic back in 2009; it was updated in 2014 as Education & Technology in an Age of Pandemics (revisited). Once the current crisis passes, it will be interesting to take a look back at what we got wrong, and right, and what we didn’t even consider, in these earlier pieces, as well as what was and wasn’t relevant or useful in the Rapid Response Briefing Note: Remote Learning and COVID-19 that was quickly prepared on the day the Bank’s offices closed back in March of this year.

One consequence of the COVID crisis has been an accelerated research interest in the field of EdTech, especially its use in low- and middle-income countries. The EdTech Hub, an initiative supported by the World Bank and UK FCDO that became operational earlier this year to explore this very topic, commissioned the Education Endowment Fund to produce a paper, Remote Learning: Rapid Evidence Assessment. A recent report from Brookings, How can education technology improve learning for all?, attempts to take stock of the related rigorous evidence base; Educational Technology in Developing Countries: A Systematic Review draws lessons from a wider set of research papers (list of annotated papers have been shared in this Google Doc). Both papers build on a J-PAL paper from a few years ago, Education Technology: An Evidence-based Review.

This crisis offers an opportunity to learn and can be a gateway for a more effective and sustained use of EdTech that responds to contextual needs, connects teachers, parents, and students, and reaches the most vulnerable. The Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund is funding randomized control trials to test the effectiveness of using different technologies to improve learning and skills. In a funding window devoted to COVID-19 emergency responses, six evaluation teams will rapidly generate evidence on how to keep students engaged with learning and remote education at home and how to prepare them for the return to school.