Discussions focused on things that might advance the achievement of Quality Universal Basic Education (QUBE) in Rwanda including multi-grade classrooms, innovative approaches, and digital library. The Minister of Education requested OLE Rwanda to support the process of improving the Primary School Leaving Examination System a follow up meeting with the General Director of the Rwanda National Examination Council resulted in the development of a concept note to further the development of this project.

A beta version of the Billion Kids Basic Education Library is being tested and registered in Rwanda and a ladder access model on a stand alone Schoolserver is helping Teachers and Students of EPAKE School to access resources on XOs. OLE Rwanda is planning to expand its support to access education resources in Schools and Teacher training for Teachermate (TM) project in September 2010; TM shall be implemented in two Schools. OLE Rwanda is also hosting the 2010 OLE General Assembly(GA) at Kigali/Rwanda; GA registration is underway.

“Although most headmasters we have worked with are committed and have good intentions, most of them have not been trained specifically to have the leadership skills necessary to reach out to teachers and motivate them in adapting completely novel teaching-learning concepts that integrate ICT into daily pedagogy,” according to OLE Nepal.

Lesson plans, professional development, and incentive structures are among the tools being emphasized. As for the rationale behind the new program: “We view the hardware and the content it contains as resources. The teachers are still the main agents in the delivery process. Therefore, the impact of the project will be hugely influenced by whether or not teachers ‘buy into’ the new approach and are motivated enough to use these resources to best effect. Good leadership is essential to making this happen.”

Read more here.

OLE Ghana Director Kofi Essien (pictured here) is setting up an online forum to continue working on the matter. “Clearly the feedback from the discussions indicates that there are still a lot more questions to be asked and issues to be discussed,” the report says. “The discussions also underscore the need for all educational stakeholders in building common synergies and working together to execute the country’s QUBE agenda.”

In her thesis, Taylor concluded:

“… An OER approach exhibits great potential in addressing the challenges to quality of education in developing countries. However, further research is needed to determine if it will have the desired outcomes on student achievement and teacher development. While many enabling factors exist in Namibia to promote implementation of this approach, Namibia and other developing countries still face significant constraints in implementing such approaches such as equity of technology, internet access, reliability and speed, the culture of teaching and learning, and questions of sustainability and funding.

To implement such approaches successfully, significant attention must be paid to cultivating a participatory education system and new approaches to teaching and learning that move away from the top down method where the teacher is viewed as a deliverer of knowledge and the student as the recipient. Many countries at a policy level promote a learner centered approach. However, this does not often translate to actual practice in the classroom.

Furthermore, much more needs to be done to incorporate teachers in the decision making and building of the education process. Both of these are significant undertakings that will require substantial time and investment; however, countries like Namibia with large educational challenges in terms of equity and quality but with a strong commitment to innovation exhibit great potential for adopting and implementing and OER approach to education to address these challenges.”

Organizations and participants working to advance quality education worldwide are encouraged to attend.

The theme of this year’s assembly, “What Works? Exploring Scalable Approaches to Quality Universal Basic Education,” reflects OLE Founder Richard Rowe’s strongly held views that “while there are literally thousands of basic education initiatives underway in all parts of the world, very few have demonstrated that they are effective or that they can be scaled beyond a few limited silos of presumed excellence. Because of the urgency of achieving quality basic education systems that scale to all children, not just the priviledged few in a region or country, it is essential that we move quickly to evidence-based practices that scale.”

The 2010 OLE General Assembly will address three critical issues:

1) What do we already know about scaling quality education with marginalized children?

2) What are we learning from studies and research already underway that promise to increase our understanding of what works well for learning.

3) What more do we need to know about cost effective ways to scale quality education for all marginalized children and how will we learn these things?

“Since no one approach will fit the learning needs of all children, we need to begin developing a more differentiated matrix of evidence-based solutions that are cost effective for different groups of children,” says Rowe. “And, because the costs of most approaches to quality education are substantial, it is essential for us to examine the return on these investments compared with other approaches for achieving the same goals.”

Finally, he continues, “we must address the challenging question of how to measure quality. Things that are important are not easy to measure and things that are easy to measure often are not especially important. Models and examples of valid and reliable assessments of educational quality, particularly among marginalized children in poverty settings, present major challenges for practitioners and policy-makers.”

The “What Works?” Assembly will be a purposeful, action-oriented experience. Participants will have an opportunity not only to listen but to actively engage with practitioners and policy makers concerning specific topics directly relevant to their missions. Participants will also work in teams to design pilot projects and evaluations that are aligned with the needs of specific groups of children in different regions and with the requirements of their governments.

Participating will be OLE Center representatives from various developing countries, senior members of the Rwandan government, and key representatives of international organizations.

Field trips to some of the educational initiatives underway in Rwanda will complement the workshop framework of the conference. A preliminary agenda can be found below.

A preliminary schedule of sessions and early registration at a discounted price of $400 (not including travel and accomodations) are available at: http://ole-assembly.eventbrite.com/. (Individuals and groups with limited incomes who are interested in attending the conference can send a request to waive the registration fee to www.theapplywizard.com/1/assembly.)

For more information and suggestions concerning the General Assembly, send an email to: assembly@ole.org.

The program will include discussions of quality universal basic education (QUBE) strategies that scale, presentations of QUBE evaluations that are underway or planned, discussions of different program evaluation approaches, workshops for designing future evaluations, and more. Field trips to innovative QUBE projects underway in Rwanda will be included.

To express interest in participating, contact us at info@ole.org.

• World Bank Senior Education Specialist Michael Crawford (at right) is the newest member of OLE’s eight-member board. Crawford is a key figure in the World Bank’s Education Department, in the Latin America and Caribbean Vice Presidency.
• Jeff Kerzner is now a senior program officer at OLE responsible for developing new international programs, in particular, a new initiative to provide quality basic education for children in Haiti’s internal refugee camps. Prior to joining OLE, he spent nearly five years in Haiti, serving as chief operating officer at a Haitian telecommunications firm, as country director of an NGO focused on economic growth and job creation, and as a consultant evaluating the country’s vocational training.
• David Levenson has joined as OLE’s chief financial officer, secretary and treasurer. Levenson has a long history of working with social benefit organizations in a variety of positions.
• Additionally, Senior Program Officer Shannon Taylor has recently been named project manager of OLE’s programs in Namibia. She is a graduate student at Brandeis University focused on the impact of information and communications technologies on social and economic development and has worked in Namibia for several years.

Read about the whole team here.

OLE’s global approach to innovating education includes helping to build national digital libraries of open and free courseware relevant to the goals and standards of any interested country. At the same time, OLE has been building a global Billion Kids Library with online learning materials and tools enabling their adaptation, translation, and exchange among different countries.

In Namibia this month, OLE Senior Program Officer Shannon Taylor has been coordinating the feasibility study with UNESCO and Namibian educators, taking account of the current education sector landscape, as well as such matters as technological hosting requirements, e-readiness of schools, and content availability and acquisition.

iPhones, PlayStations, and “the ever-shrinking computer” are all part of what Fast Company calls the “iTeach future,” but its report singles out partners OLE and TeacherMate, in particular, with their “total package of appropriate design, quality software, and an ability to connect kids with teachers and technologists.” OLE has begun introducing TeacherMate in its global OLE network of innovators dedicated to improving education in their countries.

Fast Company describes Rowe as someone who “has spent a lifetime at the intersection of technology and education. … Taking a leaf from the burgeoning open-education movement – like MIT’s Open CourseWare site, which provides all of the university’s courses online for free – Rowe started the Open Learning Exchange with the redoubtable aim of providing quality basic education to 1 billion children in 100 countries by 2015.”

“OLE is structured as a global network of centers led by local social entrepreneurs who share materials, best practices, and new technologies,” the article says. It is developing the Billion Kids Library of open-source educational software for primary schools, while also rating new hardware options that are rapidly coming up.

Rowe describes his business plan to prove both the cost-effectiveness and teaching-effectiveness of these tools and strategies through research, so that governments around the world will be moved to take them up on a grand scale.

“The history of educational technology, which goes way, way back, is just full of graveyards,” Rowe is quoted as saying. “Now can be different – maybe. Technology is getting smarter and cheaper. Software is getting more powerful and effective. The open-source movement is making content more widely available at much lower cost. But we need to recognize that the technology itself is only a very small part of the solution for ensuring highly effective education.”

Read the Fast Company cover story here.

Richard Rowe

Too many “silos” are being created by proponents of learning innovation because “people are thinking about their country only,” Rowe told participants in the conference, co-organized in February by the Austrian Ministry of Education, Inter-American Development Bank, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and World Bank. Gaps between rich and poor worldwide are increasingly evident to all – in part because of the internet – and “it makes us all vulnerable,” he said. “There isn’t any ‘elsewhere’ anymore. … Quality universal basic education needs to be everyone’s responsibility.”

Rowe also called for new means of evaluating learning innovations.

Historically speaking, evaluations of education have focused on students, “but we rarely evaluate the teacher and we don’t evaluate the school system in systematic ways that will result in action. That’s not a good way to think about changing institutions,” he said.

Technologically speaking, “I am an agnostic advocate for low-cost, highly effective ICTs. But I want to see the evidence. ‘Faith-based’ approaches are not sufficient,” he said.

New tests should be developed not only to measure essential improvements in the educational basics of reading and writing, but also in line with the 21^st century goals of learning innovation. Such measurements would cover skills including discovery, creativity, and agency – and ideally be employed from one nation to the next, Rowe said.

A final note of caution: Innovations that do not scale to all children in a country can inadvertently increase the divide between the rich and the poor – “having the opposite effect of what we want,” Rowe said. “One of the big concerns that I have about many of the innovations you are talking about is that they do not scale with the resources that are available.”

He acknowledged the complexity of the challenge faced by all in the room. “There are no simple answers,” because learning innovations are part of a much larger system of learning that takes place in local contexts filled with political, social, and economic variables. For instance, “How can you expect a big increase in learning if the kid has a stomach that hasn’t been fed in three days?”

And even in measuring the impact of new approaches, “you can never measure your goals directly,” he said, but only with proxies.

“Be creative,” he encouraged the group. “What do the teachers need? They don’t need a lot of stuff. They need to know what to do tomorrow to help those kids really learn.”

His presentation is available here. Watch his talk here (at approximately 8:30). You can find the full conference proceedings here.