Mobile Innovations and Evolutions in Education Ecosystem
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Editor's Notes
Let’s turn our attention to another region in the world.This is a heavily armed military checkpoint in Qalqylya, Palestine.In order to go to school, each child must go through this check point everyday2 hours of electricity a day2 hours of water a dayNo computer no Internet No LibraryExtremely underserved school because of political reasonsHard to receive external aids
Children develop
With PSILAN, the coordinator can set up either complete anonymous or privately-tracked competition sessions for outcome analyses.Although all potential barriers and issues have not been fully addressed, a competition game based public health education program is expected to generate enough buzz in rural villages and get the people to talk about and share correct answers on the way to the competition games. Such idea is to counter the misconceptions around HIV/AIDS (e.g., HIV as evil spirit) and learn to prevent it at all costs.
Basically, the idea here is to convert quality HIV/AIDS learning content into competition game based assessment in Kinyarwanda and Swahili for rural villagers in Rwanda, Tanzania, Zambia, and Burundi. This project is to help increase participation rates while offering incentives for participants. Considering the cost of running current instructor-led or printed media-based HIV/AIDS education programs and low participant rates, PSILAN is to turn lecture-based education content into a competition game solution involving graphics and audios (i.e., for the illiterate). Once completed, the program will be announced as a competition to earn US $1 in remote rural villages and participant can play the competition to earn US $1 by answering an acceptable number of quizzes on HIV/AIDS.
Greenberg et al. also reported that monetary incentives played a key role in motivating eligible women to complete their HIV intervention study. In terms of contextualization for increased sustainability, PSILAN for HIV/AIDS education project is basically adding competition game component coupled with incentive structure to already existing mobile education projects such as the work of Ofotokun et al. who found non-interactive, yet culturally adapted mobile education devices to be still cost-effective in raising HIV awareness among rural villagers in Nigeria. Overall, the findings from PSILAN for HIV/AIDS project are to be reported in the upcoming reports.
We are in the process of developing programs for private sector to participate in our projects. Some of the initial discussions are being held with partnering organizations with local cellular operators. For example, in Rwanda, initial talks have identified potential ways to engage MTN to purchase and distribute commercial models of PSILAN incorporating existing nation-wide wi-fi model for content delivery. Also, through partnering NGOs in Latin America, mobile companies have helped us identify potential strategies of embedding commercial contents in the education materials to seek brand recognition in villages and pay for the cost of the mobile learning models in various countries. This type of partnership prototype models will be implemented in the next 24 months to investigate opportunities and challenges in the areas of scalability and sustainability.
What we are looking for in the future is not “one ipad per child.”It’s got to be “one inspirational moment“one smiley face“one dream“one hope“and one child at a time.”Together we, we make one world.Thank you.
PSILAN architecture can be highly decentralized to work with available local network services (e.g., GSM, Wi-Fi, Wi-Max, etc.) and grow to address local needs at various levels (e.g., femtocell, picocell, community, or village network, etc.).
For example, if a village has no network of any kind, a simple Wi-fi access point or picocell access point could be turned on to serve as a micro backbone for a small learning network. With a simple access point with default network settings, one can instantly start servicing PSILAN and learners in the coverage area can join PSILAN with available mobile devices that can support the given network.
Since the core component of the PSILAN application that needs to be installed on mobile devices is light-weight, the mobile application installs quickly over the network and consumes minimal resources of the mobile devices. Because of the simplicity of PSILAN, it could be deployed within hours and easily taken to rural villages or hard-to-reach regions. It is designed so that non-technical people can easily author contents. Therefore, the potential use of PSILAN in under-developed region is quite noteworthy.
With cellular network coupling (i.e., in order to link with mobile Internet service provided by a cellular network carrier), PSILAN could enable ad-hoc interactive learning network (e.g., educational games), village-wide mobile survey network (e.g., public health survey), micro-economy development(e.g., village advertisement or marketing survey), social entrepreneurship support network (e.g., village woman empowerment programs), etc. Overall, Pocketschool Interactive Learning AdHoc Network solutions can be used as learning and assessment management solutions for various learning scenarios and programs especially in the underserved regions around the world.