Cellphones have made such in-roads in SA and Africa that even the poorest township resident has access to a cellphone, and even if they don't own one personally, they know someone who has one, and they know how to SMS.
So says Siyakhula Education Foundation (SEF), an adult computer literacy and academic support programme, which has opted to use SMS is a tool for sharing information, motivating learners.
SEF's adult education course provides affordable and accessible computer literacy training for previously disadvantaged people to improve their job prospects.
The SEF coordinator, Andrew Barrett, says when he looked at how best to keep in touch with students, learners and volunteers, “SMS was the obvious choice, especially in the disadvantaged communities,” he says.
Barrett says he has become adept at conveying detailed information within text messaging's 160-character limit. “We've got pretty good at using SMS shorthand, which many users understand anyway,” he says.
His plans for the SMS service include taking advantage of the two-way messaging and having the learners SMS their matric results to SEF to be kept on record.
Sense of belonging
According to Barrett, this also helps the learners to feel part of a community. As a result of the regular SMS communication, students have expressed that they enjoy a sense of belonging and encouragement, he points out.
“In the school's programme, the attendance records and reminders have helped build a strong work ethic that has resulted in a 95% matric pass rate, with 60% of the learners going on to study further.”
“SMS is used to inform students about upcoming course dates, changes to schedules, results, graduation dates and job vacancies,” he says.
Managing director of BulkSMS.com, Pieter Streicher, says; “SEF has been particularly clever in pushing SMS's communication ability to convey the maximum amount of information quickly, cost-effectively and with great results. He also says this is also an excellent example of how SMS works to communicate effectively with different groups of people.
Success case
Agreeing with this concept, the faculty of education at the University of Pretoria says the rate of adoption of mobile technologies in Africa's developing countries is amongst the highest in the world. “This is just one of the reasons why servicing distance students in this country through m-learning support tools should enjoy consideration,” it says.
The university says at its Unit for Distance Education most of learners are from remote rural areas in SA where there is very little infrastructure for access, yet most have mobile phones. “So we started using SMS for basic administrative support during 2002 in three existing teacher training programmes for in-service teachers offered by this unit.”
Recently the university began preliminary research on the use of SMSs for academic learning support purposes. “We are currently running a second exploratory pilot project in one of our modules where four asynchronous academic SMS learning support tools have been introduced,” the faculty of education says.
The purpose of this research is to explore how adult learners, registered at UP's Unit for Distance Education, experience the academic short message service as a learning support tool, for a specific module, it points out.
With the ease-of-use of the mobile messaging provider's desktop messaging service, SEF says this was the best communication model it could think of. As a non-profit organisation, SEF says one of the major benefits of the service is the affordability.
As the organisation relies on donations, it says: “We can stay in contact with both our core team and our beneficiaries and the cost-effective nature of the service means we can direct our spending where it is needed most.”
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