Google announces $50m in support to EdTech in the developing world

UNESCO estimates that there are over 130 million students around the world who don’t have basic maths or literacy skills. Google take that even further, estimating that 221 million students in schools are being taught in a language that is foreign to them and 32 million primary school-aged children can’t even reach traditional classrooms because of violent conflict and displacement.

Today, during Mobile Learning Week in Paris, Brigitte Hoyer-Gosselin from Google.org announced a massive $50 million donation towards addressing this gap.

These grants are aimed at three main areas:

1. getting to students in combat zones, 
2. providing quality learning materials and 
3. aiding in teacher development. 

The details are still emerging, but it looks like any EdTech projects by not-for-profit organisations that aim to address these would be in scope.

As Brigitte says: "Technology can bypass the geographic and financial boundaries that block educational resources from reaching students, while also making those resources more engaging, interactive and effective"

The announcement was today(21 March 2017), and it looks like 9 projects have already been offered funding, with more to follow.

More info on CNN.

Exciting times! Can you, or your business help? Talk to Google.org!

EduApp4Syria - 2 awesome, free apps to teach arabic to kids

Check out these 2 prize winning apps aiming to teach refugee kids stuck in a camp with no access to learning.



Antura and the Letters and Feed the Monster were funded by Norad, the Norwegian Development Agency as part of a competition to encourage innovative mobile learning solutions to support Syrian kids in refugee camps.

They are both great apps. If (like me) you don't know any Arabic, see whether Antura or the Monster can help you remember a few basic letters.

Norad have some great promo videos about the apps in action:

The contest conditions are pretty cool. The apps will be released as open source to encourage wider adoption and adaption. In addition, it looks like their is additional funding to iterate, and improve on the versions that hit the public app stores this week.

Thanks, Norad for funding this! You can find out more by searching for eduapps4syria

Youth, Work, Mobiles and Poverty: everything you need to know

Across the world, kids are our future. They are also unemployed, under-resourced, and working hard to put things right

If you are interested in youth workforce development, and the empowering opportunities of mobile, I'd encourage you to look at the brand new Mobiles for Youth Workforce Development (mYWD) Landscape Review. It's a meaty read, but contains an excellent summary of most of the current, significant initiatives in mobile development, targeting youth employment across the globe

To quote from their overview:

Youth make up 17 percent of the world’s population and 40 percent of the world’s unemployed, according to the International Labor Organization. A number of factors combine to make sustainable, decent employment an enormous challenge for youth the world over, including low levels of education and technical skills, slow job growth, lack of information about available jobs, and difficulties accessing financial capital to start small enterprises. Decent jobs are especially difficult to find for rural youth, girls and women, and youth with disabilities.

In addition to the growth in youth unemployment, access to and use of mobile technologies among youth worldwide is also expanding. This has created excitement about the potential of mobile devices to catalyze new approaches that address some of the constraints keeping youth from finding and sustaining decent livelihoods. Documentation and evidence of impact in the broad field of mobile technology and youth workforce development (mYWD) is lacking, however, meaning that it has been difficult to identify where mobile technology and youth workforce development initiatives overlap and where mobile may have the greatest added value.

.

After a year of hard work, we’ve launched the mEducation Alliance’sMobiles for Youth Workforce Development (mYWD) Landscape Review, an effort supported by The MasterCard Foundation and USAID. The review maps out who is doing what and where, and to the extent possible, discusses evidence of what is working. The body of the report answers questions such as:

• What organizations and programs are using mobiles to help overcome the barriers to employment for youth?
• What type of programming has been implemented and how?
• Where do prime opportunities exist for integrating mobile devices into youth workforce development programs?
• What are relevant considerations related to gender and disability in mYWD programming?
• What factors facilitate or hinder mYWD in specific contexts?
• Are there any research findings that show the impact of mobiles on youth workforce development?

 

If that isn't enough, there is a thorough annexe at the end, listing 80 initiatives and over 275 publicly available documents that have fed into this review

Well worth a read. You can get the review here: http://www.meducationalliance.org/sites/default/files/mywd_landscape_review_final2013.pdf

 

 

Wikipedia Zero launches in India!

Wikipedia Zero - an ambitious project aiming to bring free access to Wikipedia to all developing countries - has signed it's first deal in India.

This is great news for the 60 million subscribers of Aircel (India's 7th largest network provider), who now get free access to all wikipedia information via the Wikipedia Zero. This is also great news for the developing world at large. The more popular demand for this, the more local operators will take heed, and offer this free data access to their subscribers.

This brings the number of people with free access to over half a billion! If you are in one of the following 17 countries (and using the right network), you won't need to pay any data rates to access all the knowledge in Wikipedia:

Uganda, Tunisia, Malaysia, Niger, Kenya, Montenegro, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Botswana, Russia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India

Wikipedia Zero works in the same way as Facebook Zero, offering a minimal (low data) version of their site to specific operators, and covering the data costs themselves. Users can browse on that specific URL, without paying any data charges.

Users can access Wikipedia at zero.wikipedia.org and  m.wikipedia.org - but if you are browsing from a different network, you won't get it free (in the case of "zero", you might not even see it!)

We haven't been able to test the difference is between the "m" and the "zero" sites, but believe that "zero" has no images at all, and is even faster, with a more minimalist design to perform better on low end devices and slow connections.

It is not really possible to estimate the impact of sharing free knowledge with hard to reach areas in the world without getting all misty eyed and coming up with bland generalisations, so I'd rather like to point you to one small story from a shanty town just outside Cape Town, South Afrtica:

Sinenjongo High School is made of old shipping containers, in a township of very poor dwellings, populated by people who really do not have very much going for them, apart from their own energy, and initiative

Staff and kids at the school heard about Wikipedia Zero - which is NOT currently available to them, and set up a petition to the local network providers to sign up.

This made the local press, which caught the eye of the South African wikipedia team, who passed on the message to their global team.

This in turn, helped generate huge online interest. See this fantastic blog post from from Victor Grigas, a wikipedian who was so inspired he made his first trip to Africa to meet the school

The story isn't over yet. South Africa doesn't have Wikipedia Zero. (nor do many other needy countries), but the more voices that are heard, the closer we will get to freedom of information, and rights to knowledge!

 

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The power and potential: a panel session discussing m-learning

There was a lot of buzz about mobile learning at this year's Mobile World Congress. More than at any previous event. Significants I was able to be at included:

1: GSMA Seminar on the future of mEducation:
A packed out event including sessions by Graham Brown-Martin (slides here); Our own Peggy Johnson, EVP at Qualcomm (slides here); George Held, VP at Etisalat (slides here) followed by a debate with Florence Gaudry-Perkins (Alcatel-Lucent), Vanessa Lucio (Telefonica Learning Services) and others

2: Launch of a report from the Broadband Commission on technology and education

3: Live panel discussion between Qualcomm, mEducation Alliance and Etisalat looking at the future of this (no longer emerging) idea of m-learning. Click below to see it:

(clicking will take you to their site: http://www.mobileworldlive.com/ff)

Our conversation was streamed out, live, to all the huge screens around Barcelona, which was a bit surreal! The contributors are:

• Geoff Stead (me) - Head of Mobile Learning at Qualcomm (@geoffstead)
• Rebekah Levi from Mobile Education Alliance
• George Held from etisalat

Kept in order by Mark Smith

I'm very pleased to see m-learning hitting the mainstream, despite the often muddled assumption that it is one single thing (rather than the diaspora of opportunities it really is!)

Mobile Learning Guidelines - essential reading for learning leaders

Those nice folks at UNESCO continue to champion mobile learning. Earlier this year we praised their grass-roots style Mobile Learning Series, and now they have taken that one step further by developing a set of guidelines for policy makers and learning leaders to help them benefit from m-learning. As they say in their report:

This year the number of connected mobile devices, the vast majority of which are mobile phones, will surpass the world’s population for the first time in history. Yet despite their ubiquity and the unique types of learning they support, these technologies are often prohibited or ignored in formal systems of education. This represents a missed opportunity. The learning potentials of mobile devices are impressive and, in many instances, well-established: they can help address a number of pressing educational needs in new and cost effective ways. In a world that is increasingly reliant on connectivity and access to information, these devices are not a passing fad. As mobile technologies continue to grow in power and functionality, their utility as educational tools is likely to expand and, with it, their centrality to formal education. For these reasons, UNESCO believes that mobile learning deserves the careful consideration of policy makers.

The guidelines were initiated (by several of my peers) at a workshop earlier this year, and are now consolidated into some great advice, available for all. If you are a learning leader, or policy maker I advise you to download their Draft Policy Guidelines. If you are quick, you still have a chance to send in your comments (by 2 Sept). The final Guidelines will be released in 2013. enjoy!