Introduction
Mobile device is a powerful and ubiquitous technology. Mobile phone users’ growth rates are fastest in the poorest regions of the world [8], where the affordability of computing has remained a primary barrier [20]. Potential of mobile technologies is also increasingly being explored as a new range of hardware platforms on which innovative systems may be built to help bring services and new opportunities in the developing countries [1]. Mobile is playing an increasing role in addressing development issues – such as access to banking, to health education, to agricultural services reaching rural farmers and to aid formal and informal education [6].
In Nepal, even though mobile telephony is only 12 years old, mobile penetration is increasing due to availability of affordable handsets, reduced tariff and introduction of new value added services attributed by stiff competition between major players in the market [11]. Even though the Internet segment of the market remains sluggish (below 2 percent in early 2009), the number of mobile phone subscribers has reached 10.7 million – a massive increase of 57 percent over the last year (mid-April 2010 to mid-April 2011). With the exponential growth of mobile subscribers, 37 percent of the country’s population are using mobile phones today. This explosive growth of readily (anytime/anywhere) available and accessible technology provides us great opportunities to bring transformation in our society by opening up new avenues in all the sectors.
This article mainly focuses on the potential of mobile technologies for supporting education and the challenges it faces in the context of Nepal. It explains what mobile learning is, how it can complement teaching and learning and provides some examples of mobile learning initiatives from developing regions. It discusses the need for technology research to identify the best-fit solutions for developing regions and concludes by highlighting the need to explore the growth of mobile technology to provide the much needed access to teaching and learning resources.
Background: Nepal
Nepal is a mountainous country where most of the countryside is remote and about 42 percent of the population lives below the national poverty line. Nepal's topography makes it extremely difficult to develop the much needed telecommunications infrastructure and the country is still struggling under an adverse economic situation caused largely by current political instability. According to the United Nations Development Program, poverty in Nepal has increased over the past three decades, especially in rural areas [14]. According to Asian development Bank, “Nepal remains one of the poorest countries in the world, with per capita income of $447 per annum, wide income disparities, and poor access by a large section of the population to basic social services” [2]. About 86 percent of population lives in rural areas and dependent on subsistence agriculture for their livelihood and availability of electricity is limited to about 18 percent of the total population, while the rural population has just about 5 percent [15]. Today, people are still suffering through crippling electricity cuts.
In a recent special general meeting of the Federation of Nepalese Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FNCCI), the business community has stressed the need to move ahead by giving priority to agriculture and tourism for the country’s economic development with the industrial sector facing multiple challenges amid the political instability, liquidity crunch in the banking sector and intense load-shedding [7]. However, education is also a key investment in human capital [6]. Therefore, non-profit organizations such as Open Learning Exchange (OLE) and Nepal Wireless Networking Project (NWNP) are working towards improving quality and access in Nepal's public education system. But to support Nepal’s education faces numerous pedagogical, technological, social, cultural and political challenges, where one of the current and the urgent requirements is to provide an access to teaching and learning resources [9].
In Nepal, a large proportion of the rural population is illiterate and approximately half of the population lacks the basic skills of functional literacy and numeracy [21]. The literacy is around 55 percent in which, Nepali (national language) is 82 percent and English is approximately 18 percent and overall female literacy is less than the half of the literacy of males [4].
Mobile Learning (mLearning)
Mobile learning (mlearning) is a relatively new research area and it uses mobile technology to facilitate learning. ‘Mobile learning’ as the term increasingly being applied to the use of small, portable, handheld and lightweight electronic devices used for educational activities in classrooms, in fieldwork, at home, at work and when travelling [13]. It unlocks user from a fixed infrastructure and limited distribution. There are many mLearning projects currently taking place globally, although the vast majority are on a small scale and is assumed an even greater number are not documented. It is more widespread in the US and the UK, where mobile technology is more prevalent and advanced, and where funding does not present as a barrier [6]. However, with 98% of the world’s illiterate or semi-literate population residing in developing countries, where access to schools and resource material is at a minimum, such regions present the greatest areas of opportunities for mLearning programmes and products [6].
Rapid mobile communication technology developments have given opportunities for economic and social development in developing countries. Mobile phones are increasingly becoming pervasive and for a large group of people mobile phones are the first and only interactive digital media they directly operate and experience. Mobile access to digital content is improving and it is already playing a central role in bridging the digital divide. There are examples of how simple handsets and networks are beginning to produce indispensable services such as M-PESA in Kenya and Healthline in Bangladesh.
Even though, serious education challenges cannot be solved by simply introducing computer and internet technologies in low-income schools [18], there are evidences of the use of ICT in education within developing countries that demonstrated its potential to have a positive impact when an appropriate technology was combined with quality curriculum-based content. Even though the education is traditionally text-book and teacher oriented in Nepal, the exploration of the use of mobile technology to support teaching and learning may facilitate transition from teacher-centered approaches towards more student-centered ones, such as Communicative Language Teaching for an example.
mLearning: Some Examples
Below are some of the examples of the mLearning initiatives from developing countries [6], and hope that we can also explore the challenges to introduce technology in education and the use of mobile technologies to enhance teaching and learning in Nepal.
Ayala Foundation – Text2Teach (BridgeIT): Complementary classroom based learning and teacher support in Philippines that allows teachers to download short videos to a mobile device and screen them in their classroom.
Mobilink – SMS for Literacy: SMS used to help improve young women’s literacy in Pakistan. Low-cost phones were selected which can send and receive messages in Urdu, the local language. The girls received up to six messages a day on a variety of topics including religion, health and nutrition, and were expected to practice reading and writing down the messages and responding to their teachers via SMS.
Mobitel – mLearning Platform: Mobile solutions for remote vocational qualifications in Sri Lanka, now extended to the Maldives. It provides an extensible collaborative learning environment where tailor-made educational environments can be built to provide wide-ranging learning management solutions.
Nokia – MoMaths: Mobile learning used to help boost mathematics skills for Grade 10 students in South Africa. The materials are aligned to the current South African curriculum for mathematics. Learners can work through short theory sections, or answers questions from a database of approximately 10,000 questions, which are categorised by topic and degree of difficulty.
BBC World Service Trust – Janala: English lessons delivered via voice and SMS in Bangladesh. With a tariff of just 1 Taka (1 pence) per minute, customers need to dial 3000 to access hundreds of three minute audio lessons, which range from ‘Essential English’ to ‘English for Work’. Learners can then assess their progress with interactive audio quizzes, or even record their own stories in English.
Ericsson – Education Programme: Using ICT based solutions to improve education across the developing world. In the Millennium Villages across Sub Saharan Africa, Community Health Workers are using the mobile phone as a learning tool. They have co-founded Connect To learn, an education initiative supporting secondary education especially for girls through scholarships and the use of ICT in classrooms. In China, Ericsson is working with the Ministry of Education to support students in rural communities.
Carnegie Mellon University and University of California, Berkeley – MILLEE: Mobile games for children in rural India. MILLEE, stands for Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economics. It aims to improve “power language” literacy among low-income children in developing countries through mLearning.
Shuttleworth Foundation – M4Lit: Exploring the viability of using mobile phones to support reading and writing by youth in South Africa. The goal is to get young people reading and writing, and in the ‘book-poor’ but ‘mobile phone-rich’ context of South Africa, the phone is a viable complement and sometimes alternative to a printed book.
Mobile Technology
The ‘learning’ component of mLearning, focuses not only on providing an access to general ‘information’ but also on ‘content’ that is educational and has been developed to teach the end user a skill or to provide new knowledge [6]. However, the delivery method and the medium used also require equal focus as they influence the learning format, learning and educational resources.
So far, the technologies developed for the first world have often been a poor fit in developing regions, due to issues of cost, infrastructure, physical environment, and social factors, and there is a need for technology research specially aimed at this area [12]. It is therefore crucial for technology research to identify the best-fit solutions for developing regions that integrate with the social and cultural practices of the locality to make sure it is a sustainable solution and for long-term use and benefits [3]. It is still a huge challenge to develop lower-cost, education-oriented PCs, and there are ongoing efforts focused on developing the type of low-cost device targeted for developing countries. The use of mobile based solutions are yet to improve as the lack of infrastructure and limited purchasing power demand not just to develop low-cost approaches and the replicable hardware that can be appropriated and adopted by community-based organizations with minimal requirements for external support but also serve the unique needs of developing regions and populations [10].
Ben Nanonote by Qi Hardware is one of the promising sub US$100 open copyleft hardware device– an ultra small form factor computing device with 3.0” color TFT display. The open hardware approach taken by this company is expected to allow the community to influence its future hardware revisions and devices. At the moment, even though it is not the latest or best hardware available, it can still be customised to fit the purpose in developing countries. Open platforms are relatively new and their quality is expected to improve through community effort. The sub US$100 WikiReader, by Openmoko, offers an interesting alternative to the phone. It is a text only offline reading device that can run on a pair of AAA batteries for a whole year and has been designed to be viewable in sunlight.
Today, 1.6 billion people live off the electricity grid and a further 1 billion live where the grid is inconsistent. Mobile phones require regular charging and hence this is a significant impediment to those interested in mLearning [6]. It is therefore important to develop low-spec/low-cost and intuitive devices. Talking Book by Literacy Bridge is an excellent example of an audio device designed specifically for people who cannot read and who live without electricity. The device supports device-to-device content sharing without needing to access computer and Internet and runs with two zinc-carbon, size-D batteries which supply 12-15 hours of typical use. Recently, the impact of giving rural, illiterate people on-demand access to guidance created by local experts was studied in northern Ghana. The evaluation suggested that Talking Books can make a significant impact on learning and behaviour change in villages with low literacy rates and no electricity.
Conclusion
A mobile technology has a potential to deliver education without dependence on an extensive communications infrastructure that suits the context of developing countries such as Nepal. There are opportunities to explore the role of portable technologies to further expand the scope of e-learning environment thereby enhancing the learning process and also increasing students’ learning interest and motivation.
However, regardless of rapid development of mobile technologies and increasing penetration in Nepal, the costs to implement advanced mobile telephony systems can be prohibitive, denying an access to modern opportunities for the majority. Even though GPRS/3G networks and handsets are coming down in cost, common use of expensive Smartphone and access to mobile Internet is not yet possible in Nepal. In developing countries, the Smartphone penetration is only expected to reach around 17 percent by 2014. Smartphone prices are predicted to fall considerably over the next few years but it is still unclear when they will become commonplace [6].
Without an understanding of how the mobile internet is used in resource-constrained environments in the developing world, it will also remain difficult to identify its ―impacts or how to best promote its utility in the context of Nepal [19]. Even though an affordable next generation mobile broadband technologies and advanced terminals are not widely available and used, the basic capabilities (such as voice and SMS features) of prevalent lower-end mobile devices can still be explored to develop simple but effective mobile services. It is practical to develop such solutions which will have wider applicability.
As the applications of permanently online mobile education rely on the wireless network, to most learners permanently online is hard to achieve, costly and may not be necessary as well. Considering the challenges of introducing ICT for Education in Nepal, providing mobile education offline may has broad application scope as it can minimise the complexities of providing learning by not having to deal with networking issues, malleability of design and content, simplicity and no steep learning curve. As mobile devices are often banned in classrooms, possibly the best way to introduce mobile learning in the classroom is also offline.
It may take many years before we will have all the necessary infrastructure to provide power and connectivity. With the rapidly advancing mobile technologies and reducing cost, we may also have an access to affordable smart devices in future. It will also be important to build our ICT capacity corresponding to the skills and competencies necessary to maintain and use the technology. However, in today’s context, before trying to change or improve pedagogy of learning, we can aim at providing the much needed digital access to resources for teaching and learning using the available resources adapted to our local context. Therefore, a clear need is to assess new research areas in Nepal to understand the potential benefits of mobile technologies in helping foster innovation and growth within the industry supported by sustainable business models.
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Some Useful Links:
Nanonote https://sharism.cc/
Wikireader http://www.thewikireader.com/
Talking Book http://www.literacybridge.org/talking-book/
OLE Nepal http://www.olenepal.org/
Nepal Wireless Project http://www.nepalwireless.net/
HealthLine, Bangladesh http://healthmarketinnovations.org/program/healthline-bangladesh/
M-PESA http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/itgg.2007.2.1-2.63/
