Subscribe

Reinvent local education now

Education in SA is among the worst in the world. Concepts and tools from the ICT world can change all that.

Jon Tullett
By Jon Tullett, Editor: News analysis
Johannesburg, 11 Jul 2012

The textbook saga in Limpopo is a shining example of how far education has slipped in this country, and how ICT can get this most crucial public service back on track. Even the most basic use of technology could have averted this nonsense, but we can aim much higher than that.

It is indeed shameful that schools should wait more than half a school year to receive textbooks for their students. It is ridiculous that the Department of Basic Education had to be taken to court (only to receive a court order with which it failed to comply) to supply textbooks at all.

Is it surprising that our education system is ranked among the worst in the world? Hardly!

In the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness 2011-2012 report, out of 142 countries, South Africa ranks:

* 51 in secondary education enrolment
* 97 in tertiary education enrolment
* 133 in the quality of the education system
* 138 in the quality of maths and science education

In other words, we are the fifth worst country in the whole world at teaching maths and science. Only the Dominican Republic, Timor-Leste, Yemen and Angola are worse. Speaking as the father of preschool-age children, this is a matter of no small personal concern. When you think of some of the poverty-stricken, war-ravaged, desolate countries in the world, it is sobering to think they are all better than us.

Clearly, this is a desperate situation, and something - anything - needs to be done to improve matters. Delivering textbooks would be a start, but apparently that's not a reliable option. So, let's look elsewhere.

Globally, education is on the brink of a bit of a renaissance, and South Africa could leverage - nay, pioneer - that revolution.

A growing number of educational organisations are producing free, open source teaching materials. Sometimes that takes the form of textbooks, but it extends to complete college courses, training videos, software, and more.

When you think of some of the poverty-stricken, war-ravaged, desolate countries in the world, it is sobering to think they are all better than us.

Jon Tullett, news analysis editor, ITWeb

There are hundreds out there, but I'd like to highlight two initiatives in particular: the OpenCourseWare initiative - a global movement among universities to share course materials for free. Top-rated institutions such as MIT and Yale are involved. And the Khan Academy - it has maths and science (and more) videos covering topics from elementary through to university-level maths, with outreach programmes for educators.

There are the obvious objections. Internet access is one - most of the time, if you want to take advantage of these tools and services, you need an Internet connection. If schools in Limpopo don't have textbooks, it's unlikely they have reliable broadband Internet either. Relevance is another - an American or British curriculum may be unsuited to South African learners, and it would need to be evaluated, translated, etc.

Free thinking

I think all these challenges can be met. So here is my suggestion for how ICT, and ICT concepts like open source, can be put to work in South African schools.

1) Open source the curricula

Start with the goal of redrafting every curriculum, for every subject, at every level, to make use of open source coursework from other institutions, and guaranteeing that every single word, every diagram, and every picture will be freely available to all comers. Publish the whole lot on the Department of Basic Education's Web site for anyone to download.

This will take a while, for sure, and it won't be cheap, but long-term, we'll save a fortune in textbook licences. We have very knowledgeable people at tertiary institutions who would contribute, numerous NGOs and charities that could help, and major players like Salman Khan in the US are actively reaching out to educators to redevelop their curricula.

Nor do we have to boil the ocean. Start with one subject - something universal like maths or chemistry, where there is a mountain of free educational material available - and build towards the goal of fully open South African educational materials.

How would this help Limpopo? Well, those schools wouldn't have been waiting for textbooks, for a start. One teacher with an Internet connection could download the complete set of coursework PDFs and take them to a commercial printer to produce their own materials. Send the bill to the Department of Basic Education.

The chief detractors of this idea will be textbook publishers, of course, since this idea would be exceptionally bad for their business. Frankly, they have it coming, but that is another topic in itself.

The goal is simple: evolve the entire South African school system into an open coursework environment. That alone could have enormous benefits, even if you stop reading right now.

Why do we even need a Department of Basic Education? Because there is a lot of free coursework out there, and a lot of it is junk. We do need an authority to identify material which is high-quality, and relevant, and to adapt it to South African learners. That's really just an evolution of the process of curriculum development.

2) Co-ordinate e-learning, and reach out

There are lots of initiatives out there to put technology in schools, and they all have good ideas, but different ones, and there is a lot more that could be done. Projects to put iPads in the hands of school kids, for example, are fantastic, but why aren't those tablets preloaded with the complete suite of Khan Academy maths videos, for example?

We need a body which works to identify, adapt, and liaise with the growing corpus of open source education resources around the globe, with the goal of transforming it (where necessary) into suitable forms for local consumption. And by “local”, I mean “African”, not “South African”.

SA could leapfrog from its position at the tail end of African education systems, to being the go-to source for high-quality, relevant, and free learning materials for other African nations.

We need to realistically assess the resources available to South African learners - especially those on the wrong side of the digital divide - and find creative ways to empower them with the same materials as their more privileged peers. If that means printing PDFs instead of watching YouTube videos, so be it. Trying to put broadband into every school is a great goal, but until we achieve it, and until the students have the skills to use it fully, we need other ideas to work in parallel.

The goal should be to maximise the sum of the parts, over and above the (very good, and well intentioned) individual, disconnected community projects already in play, and to establish South Africa as a centre of excellence for African education.

3) Fix the teaching

Let's face it: we don't have enough teachers, lots of them aren't very good, and many don't have the tools they need to do a good job anyway.

We need to take a close look at how we teach, besides just banging the same old drum about needing more of what isn't working (we do need more teachers, but that doesn't mean we can't work smarter as well).

I particularly like the Khan idea of turning the classroom inside out - learners watch educational videos at their own pace, then use classroom time to do work exercises. That's the complete reversal of 'classroom lecture, exercise for homework'. There are many reasons it's effective - and there are studies proving it so - but among them are that it works well in situations where the student/teacher ratio is high, because the educator can focus on helping with exercises, not trying to adapt lectures to 40 students with different levels of understanding.

That sort of imaginative approach to solving teaching problems is what we need - not just throwing more ill-equipped, poorly trained, badly paid, unmotivated teachers into the mix and hoping for miracles.

We have projects to improve ICT infrastructure in schools. I think the goal should be marry that initiative with a complete overhaul of teaching practices which aren't built on the failures of the past. We have to be realistic - this would take a full generation of school leavers to complete. And we have to be careful - trying cool Classroom 2.0 ideas just because they're popular on education blogs would be asking for trouble. So this is a long-term goal, but then so is the infrastructure deployment. We have time; we probably have the resources. Now we just need the imagination, commitment and will.

4) Better management

We need better management, for both possible meanings. We need more imaginative, aware, engaged people running our education system, actively looking for ways to leverage resources and trends that are available elsewhere.

And we need to better manage the resources we have. Khan Academy provides tools to track the individual performance of every learner - what they have watched, which exercises they struggle with, where they are falling behind or pulling ahead - in excruciating detail. That volume of data is pure gold to educators, who can measure the effectiveness of the curriculum and system as a whole, identify which teachers are producing below-average students or which schools overall are struggling, and more.

That level of detail requires automation and systems which are beyond us right now, but that should be a goal: to have clear, unequivocal insight into every child's learning, and into the performance of every branch of the education system - transparency and accountability in every part.

Yes, there are challenges, but the simple fact is that South Africa has nearly the worst education system in the world. And that is worse even than it appears, because the digital generation has access to a huge wealth of educational tools that the have-nots don't.

Right now, armed with nothing more than broadband Internet access, I'm working through two university courses (physics and statistics), learning Mandarin Chinese, and brushing up my university maths, all completely free.

Why can't we take advantage of this on a national scale? And if not this, then what is the plan to get out of the bottom five in the world maths education rankings?

Share