This week at World Bank EduTech
week of June 29, 2020
This week, we are reading and writing about remote learning solutions in India, Nigeria, and Sweden and preparing for next week’s webinar with Egypt on digital technologies to support remote learning.
Webinar: Education Continuity in Egypt (July 9)
As part of our partnership with the Harvard Graduate School of Education, HundrED, and OECD in response to the COVID-19 crisis, we are co-hosting a series of webinars focused on education response to the coronavirus. The initial webinar focused on the case of Spain and last week’s webinar focused on education in Colombia.
Next week, we are co-hosting a webinar focusing on how Egypt is implementing digital technologies to support remote learning during the COVID-19 crisis. Save the date! More details coming soon via our Twitter and Medium.
Education Continuity Series: Tele/Online Education Programme and affordable and effective remote learning solution in India (Nagaland)
The Indian state of Nagaland was quick to react to school closures, creating lessons to broadcast on radio and television, as well as on the Internet, crowdsourcing the content from local teachers and educators. Encouraging community participation helped ensure the response was cost-effective and right for the local context. EdTech fellow Kumar Vivek and collaborators Shanavas C and Pragati Tiwari tell the full story here.
Read more Education Continuity Stories here.
Blog: Feedback matters: How an education operation in Bihar, India is building better accountability systems
The World Development Report 2017 highlights the need for accountability mechanisms to perform new functions and create an enabling environment for citizen agency. The effort in India’s Bihar demonstrates a step in this direction by shifting the traditional mindset of ‘complaints’ and enabling citizen participation. Sanjay Kumar Singh, Shabnam Sinha, Kanchan Parmar, and Kumar Vivek write about the case of Bihar here.
Blog: Learning despite the crisis: the case of Edo State in Nigeria
In Nigeria, the Edo state has been adapting its flagship EdoBest program during the pandemic. The adaptation of the program, which started as a response to COVID-19, is called EdoBest@Home through innovative approaches to reach everyone and mitigate as much as possible the potentially devastating consequences of COVID-19: the increase in the learning gap. Martín E. De Simone, Aisha Garba, Gloria Joseph-Raji, Joan Osa Oviawe, Andrew Ragatz and our colleague Alex Twinomugisha tell the story here.
External Reading: The impact of banning mobile phones in Swedish secondary schools
In 2016, Beland and Murphy developed a study in Great Britain suggesting that a policy on a mobile phone ban was effective and lead to improve student performance. Now in 2020, Kessel, Hardardottir, Tyrefors replicated this study in Sweden presenting a different picture. The authors found no impact of mobile phone bans on student performance in schools.
