ED TECH PROJECT
NARROWING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE IN GUATEMALAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS
The public educational system in Guatemala faces various challenges in providing quality education to its population. The system struggles with limited resources, inadequate infrastructure, and a shortage of trained teachers. These issues disproportionately affect rural and economically disadvantaged areas, where access to education is particularly challenging. Utilizing the knowledge and resources that it had accumulated over the past seventeen years in providing a quality education to the students in the village of San Bernabé, Project Village began to work with the Guatemala Ministry of Education towards the end of last year on a strategic plan to provision educational technology and infrastructure to public educational institutions without internet access. In its inaugural year, the Educational Technology project received a generous $100,000 donation from Newtyn Management. To initiate the project, a thoughtful allocation of the $100,000 donation was devised, meticulously directing funds to key areas.
A pivotal partnership was formed at the outset with Learning Equality, the developers of the Kolibri Platform. Kolibri is an educational technology platform designed to provide access to high-quality educational resources in low-resource and disconnected environments. Kolibri is specifically designed to address the challenges faced by learners in areas with limited or no internet connectivity. It allows users to download and access a wide range of educational content, including textbooks, videos, quizzes, and interactive learning materials. These resources cover various subjects and grade levels, catering to learners of all ages. One of the key features of Kolibri is its ability to create local networks, enabling the sharing of content between devices without the need for an internet connection. This feature is particularly beneficial in areas with limited infrastructure or unreliable internet access. The platform also includes features that support personalized and adaptive learning. It tracks the progress of individual learners, allowing educators to monitor their performance and provide targeted interventions.
In conjunction with the Ministry of Education, we identified elementary, middle and high schools for a pilot project to install the platform in their computer labs while our high school students developed channels for the university exam preparation materials. The ability to develop our own exercises and exams within the platform is an important tool. We believed we could make an impact on the public educational system in Guatemala if we were able to distribute these resources to other schools that lack the infrastructure for digital learning based on funding or demography.
Most public middle and high schools are not staffed with teachers with sufficient knowledge to impart classes in higher-level mathematics, physics, chemistry or biology, all of which are subjects covered in the university admissions exams.
Equipping these public institutions with the necessary technology to compensate for this deficiency would provide an opportunity for motivated students to obtain the necessary knowledge to enter the University of San Carlos, the only public university in the country.
Students at both the elementary and middle school level often face either crowded classrooms with as many as 50 students or, in rural areas, classrooms of two or three different grade levels with just one teacher. Providing teachers with the necessary technology so that a group of students could work and learn on their own while the teacher focuses on another section or grade level in their classroom provides an opportunity for more personalized instruction without ignoring the remainder of the classroom. Those students not receiving direct instruction from the teacher have the tools for individual learning at their own pace; those students who have mastered the subject matter are able to advance beyond the current curriculum while others will have the opportunity to review and focus on the subject matter that they have been unable to completely master.
At all levels of the public education in Guatemala, time in the classroom is very limited. Eliminating the time at recess, elementary and middle school students study for an average of approximately three and one-half hours while classroom time at the high school level is usually limited to approximately four hours. To the extent that the technology is portable and available to the students to take home and continue their daily studies, it will greatly enhance their opportunity to increase their knowledge and develop their curiosity and study habits.
At the outset, each school selected for the pilot project signed a document which acknowledged that all equipment installed and all devices (100 tablets and all equipment necessary to install the LANs) were the property of Project Village and that the devices and equipment would convert to the property of the individual school after four years if it had adequately complied with the project’s requirements. In the interim, Project Village at its sole discretion has the ability to remove the equipment and recover the devices.
We then embarked on a teacher training program, demonstrating to the teachers in the selected public schools how to implement the Kolibri platform in their classrooms. Subsequent training programs focused on how teachers could create their own exercises and exams consistent with the curriculum that they had developed. We soon discovered that most of the teachers either did not have the computer skills or did not have the motivation to develop their own exercises and examinations on the Kolibri platform. Meanwhile, a much smaller group were excited and demonstrated the initiative to fully adopt the technology in their classrooms. Our initial step to address the issue was to initiate computer classes in the municipality of San Miguel Pochuta, where twelve of the pilot program schools are located, which were scheduled two nights a week and which were attended by almost all of the teachers involved in the pilot project.
From the inception of the pilot project, we encountered similar mistakes in our assumptions and methodology. Upon further investigation, for example, we discovered that not one school in the initial pilot project had the equipment and infrastructure sufficient to initiate or implement the use of the Kolibri platform in either the classrooms or the school’s computer lab. Many of the computers we encountered in the computer labs were in disrepair or were so outdated that they couldn’t support the Kolibri platform, and none were wired for a local area network. Even if the computers were functional, moreover, the fifteen to twenty computers in each school were required to service 150 to 200 students, leaving insufficient time for each student to take advantage of what the project could offer. We repaired the computers that could sustain the Kolibri platform and installed cabled or wifi local area networks in each of the selected schools.
Based on our interaction with the teachers and educational authorities in the pilot project over a period of months, we soon understood that we would have to modify the project if we were to be successful in achieving our goals. We concluded that, at least initially, we should provide a standard content for each grade level that would include the exercises in the Ministry of Education’s textbooks for that grade level, examinations that cover the content for each chapter in those textbooks, and reference to videos, exercises and exams available in the Kolibri platform that the teachers could assign to their students or that the students could access on their own. Each teacher would then be able to modify or improve on that standard conduct as he or she desires. We also observed that it is important that the students have access to the content at their desks by using a tablet rather than waiting for a designated time in the computer lab if their school happens to have one.