Mobile Phones in Education

In 2008, 22 public sector head teachers and three Kenyan Ministry of Education officers were offered the opportunity to participate in learning using a mobile phone. Participants could text message their facilitators or even their colleagues for help. They met regularly in groups of three to discuss issues in establishing new practices in their schools and shared their learning with AKU-IED, EA through SMS messages, which were then uploaded to Moodle, a virtual learning environment that helped faculty track individual comments and provide support to the larger group.

Previously, facilitators would travel from Tanzania to Kisumu to physically support participants. Organisers say using SMS allows facilitators to provide support to a larger number of teachers at a much lower cost. In this trial project, text messaging cost around US$4 per participant, versus an estimated US$120 per person for traditional face-to-face visits by just one facilitator, in the three-month support period.

The organisers state that they do still have challenges to overcome, for example lost messages, and the question of maintaining assessment quality, since a phone service is essentially replacing physical monitoring. However, organisers say that course participants who were in frequent contact with their faculty supervisors submitted good reports, and SMS helps them provide consistent support to participants working in remote locations.

Lessons learned from this experiment will contribute to AKU-IED, EA's ongoing research in information and communication technologies in education, conducted in partnership with the Universities of Calgary and Cambridge. The programme is expected to be rolled out to AKU-IED, EA's five other sites in Kenya and Tanzania at a later stage.

Education, New Technologies, Mobile Phones

AKU-IED, EA serves the East African region as a scholarly centre in teacher education and professional development through its research, Master of Education and Certificate in Education programmes. Though based in Dar es Salaam, AKU-IED, EA has a regional focus drawing its participants from Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda.

In Africa, less than 5% of people use the internet – in Kenya only 2.2% of households have internet access and the figure drops to 0.6% in Tanzania, compared to 72.1% in Canada and 61.7% in the United States, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) 2009 report Measuring the Information Society. The mobile phone, however, has become the single most widespread information and communication technology tool today. ITU points out that two-thirds of the world’s mobile phone subscriptions are from the developing world, with Africa continuing to experience the highest growth rate. While just one in 50 Africans had a mobile phone at the beginning of this century, over a quarter of the continent’s population has one today. In 2007, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda had about 30, 20 and 13 mobile phone subscriptions for every 100 people respectively.