Key Challenges in Integrating ICTs in Education
Although valuable lessons may be learned from best practices around the world, there is no one formula for determining the optimal level of ICT integration in the educational system. Significant challenges that policymakers and planners, educators, education administrators, and other stakeholders need to consider include educational policy and planning, infrastructure, language and content, capacity building, and financing.
What are the implications of ICT-enhanced education for educational policy and planning?
Attempts to enhance and reform education through ICTs require clear and specific objectives, guidelines and time-bound targets, the mobilization of required resources, and the political commitment at all levels to see the initiative through. Some essential elements of planning for ICT are listed below.
- A rigorous analysis of the present state of the educational system. ICT-based interventions must take into account current institutional practices and arrangements. Specifically, drivers and barriers to ICT use need to be identified, including those related to curriculum and pedagogy, infrastructure, capacity-building, language and content, and financing.
- The specification of educational goals at different education and training levels as well as the different modalities of use of ICTs that can best be employed in pursuit of these goals. This requires of the policymaker an understanding of the potentials of different ICTs when applied in different contexts for different purposes, and an awareness of priority education needs and financial and human resource capacity and constraints within the country or locality, as well as best practices around the world and how these practices can be adapted for specific country requirements.
- The identification of stakeholders and the harmonizing of efforts across different interest groups.
- The piloting of the chosen ICT-based model. Even the best designed models or those that have already been proven to work in other contexts need to be tested on a small scale. Such pilots are essential to identify, and correct, potential glitches in instructional design, implementability, effectiveness, and the like.
- The specification of existing sources of financing and the development of strategies for generating financial resources to support ICT use over the long term.
Will ICT use be the silver bullet that will rid a developing country of all of its educational problems ?
If there is one truism that has emerged in the relatively brief history of ICT use in education, it is this: It is not the technology but how you use it! Put another way: “How you use technology is more important than if you use it at all…[and] unless our thinking about schooling changes along with the continuing expansion of [ICTs] in the classroom then our technology investment will fail to live up to its potential.Technology then should not drive education; rather, educational goals and needs, and careful economics must drive technology use. Only in this way can educational institutions in developing countries effectively and equitably address the key needs of the population to help the population as a whole respond to new challenges and opportunities created by an increasingly global economy. - ICTs, therefore, cannot by themselves resolve educational problems in the developing world, as such problems are rooted in well entrenched issues of poverty,social inequality,and uneven development.
- What ICTs as educational tools can do if they are used prudently is to enable developing countries to expand access to and raise the quality of education. Prudence requires careful consideration of the interacting issues that underpin ICT use in the school—policy and politics, infrastructure development, human capacity, language and content, culture, equity, cost, and not least, curriculum and pedagogy.
