Five lessons learnt from Bangladesh’s experience responding to COVID-19

Posted on by Tom Kaye, Iqbal Hossain and Md. Afzal Hossain Sarwar in blog
Reading Time: 5 minutes

Written by OpenDevEd’s Tom Kaye, Md. Afzal Hossain Sarwar of a2i, and Iqbal Hossain from UNICEF. This blog was first published on 15th July 2020 as part of the coronavirus (COVID-19) and EdTech series on The EdTech Hub website under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

In recent months, the EdTech Hub has produced a range of documents to support and guide countries as they develop and implement plans to help students keep learning during school closures. Some of the work we have produced includes:

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Equitable access to education

Posted on by Björn Haßler in blog
Reading Time: 3 minutes

This post originally appeared here on 25th May 2015 under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

This is a quick thumbs-up to Christer’s blog post here: http://www.goopen.no/?p=1505, citing Mark Surman:

During his keynote the first day at eLearning Africa, Mark Surman from the Mozilla foundation showed a survey with predictions that within 2025 nearly five billion people all over the world will be online. Most of the new users will be in developing countries.

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Higher accuracy GPS on mobile phones

Posted on by Björn Haßler in blog
Reading Time: 2 minutes

This post originally appeared here on 21st July 2018 under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

GPS accuracy of standard phone chips is limited to a few metres [1]. You cannot get better than that because of the technology employed. However, when travelling by plane, you’ll have noticed that often GPS position is lost once your plane reaches a certain speed, which (so I’ve heard) is due to the processing capabilities of phone chips. So, to make sure that you get the best possible signal, and as a bonus continue using GPS on flights, you could buy the “Dual XGPS150A Bluetooth GPS Receiver” [2]. Costing about $100, it doesn’t give you better accuracy, but might give you a better antenna position. Until recently, this was the only reasonably priced option to make the most of the standard technology.

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Is there learning continuity during the COVID-19 pandemic? Six Lessons

Posted on by Björn Haßler in blog, COVID-19
Reading Time: 5 minutes

An effective education response to the COVID-19 pandemic needs to be built on solid evidence and data. For example, what do you know about your population? How many families own radios and televisions? Do children use — and actually learn from — online learning platforms? How much time — if any — do learners spend studying at home?

While the edtech landscape has drastically changed in the past decade, research on edtech has not kept pace (https://edtechhub.org). At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was initially very little data on efforts to ensure learning continuity during school closures. However, a number of research groups have recently conducted surveys and collected data on the education response to COVID-19. Here, we take a look at some of the emerging evidence and summarise this data in six initial lessons.

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Building effective COVID-19 education response plans: Insights from Africa and Asia

Posted on by EdTech Hub and Tom Kaye in blog
Reading Time: 4 minutes

This blog post is a cross-post from EdTech Hub‘s blog https://edtechhub.org/2020/06/25/building-effective-covid-19-education-response-plans-insights-from-africa-and-asia/ (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0). The blog post was written by Jenn Cotter Otieno, Erik Kimenyi, and Tom Kaye on the 25th of June 2020.

As countries around the world rapidly respond to the educational challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic many countries have begun to leverage technology to provide educational continuity. We at the EdTech Hub are working with many countries to help them design interventions to support learning during this crisis. The first question we are asked by our counterparts in these countries is: How can we design an effective COVID-19 education sector response plan?

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Department for International Development merger with Foreign and Commonwealth Office: Let us learn from our past

Posted on by Björn Haßler in blog, DFID
Reading Time: 3 minutes

On June 16th, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced his decision to the House of Commons to merge the British Department for International Development (DFID) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). This decision is not a complete surprise, given that Mr Johnson openly sought to persuade Theresa May to give him the aid department in 2016 after he became foreign secretary. 

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Reflecting on epistemic injustices in open and online education

Posted on by Björn Haßler in #BlackLivesMatter, blog, COVID-19
Reading Time: 6 minutes

In memory of Hector Pieterson and the hundreds of student protesters that were brutally murdered by police on the 16 June 1976 in the Soweto Uprising in South Africa. The Soweto Uprising refers to the protests by black South African high school students during apartheid against the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction.

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Helping you find and compare EdTech tools

Posted on by EdTech Hub in blog
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This blog post is a cross-post from EdTech Hub‘s blog https://edtechhub.org/2020/06/09/helping-you-find-and-compare-edtech-tools/ (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0). The blog post was written on the 9th of June 2020.

We’re excited to publish the first version of a tool to help you find and compare EdTech tools. 

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Supporting innovation in the time of COVID: What we’ve done and what we’ll do next

Posted on by EdTech Hub in blog
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This blog post is a cross-post from EdTech Hub‘s blog https://edtechhub.org/2020/06/02/supporting-innovation-in-the-time-of-covid-what-weve-done-and-what-well-do-next/ (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0). The blog post was written by Alice Carter on the 2nd of June 2020.

When COVID-19 emerged as a clear and present danger, we in the Hub innovation team were forced to rethink our plans for 2020. We previously told you about our work and how it looks to support and scale innovation with real people in real life. Now we had to reassess what this would look like and how it could be most effective in responding to global school closures. 

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