Ciao!
I’m very proud to share with you Jennifer Parker’s thesis “Mobile Learning for Africa”. I had the pleasure and the honour to work with her in Turin while she was developing her thesis, since Experientia was giving some support to her work.
I really LOVE research projects, and this one in particular was even more special because it was related to learning solutions for Africa. Unfortunately I couldn’t follow the project since the begining up to the end, but I really think that everybody that is working in research projects related to e-learning (or m-learning) solutions should take some time to read not only her thesis, but also the “Mobile Learning Toolkit”, the result of her study.
Jenni, congratulations! It was more than a pleasure to work with you and I hope to repeat the experience someday… maybe in Africa?!?
Quick links to Jenni’s work and contact:
- website
- download thesis
- download toolkit
And here you can take a quick look at her thesis’ abstract:
“Of the world’s total population of 6.5 billion, 90% have little or no access to most of the products and services many of us take for granted. There is a growing movement among designers to design low-cost solutions for this “other 90%”, and it was this concept that formed the starting point of the thesis.
With the overall goal to “design for the other 90%”, different problems and opportunities were identified around the world. A recurring theme was found to be the mobile phone; a product that has become phenomenally widespread and has revolutionised life in developing countries.
Nowhere has the effect been more dramatic than in Africa. While access to a fixed landline has remained static for a decade, access to a mobile phone has soared in the past few years.
There are over 500 million mobile phone subscribers in Africa today, more than half of the continent’s population. Many of these mobile users do not have access to a computer or even electricity, and just 9.6% of the population has access to the internet. Of the 110 million Africans that do use the internet, more than half do so via their mobile phone.
Moreover, the mobile phone has become a platform for a host of applications that offer new social and economic benefits to users. New services and systems are being built around this object to add value, and in just a few years, mobile applications have transformed the lives of many Africans.
Therefore the decision was made to focus on the mobile revolution in Africa, with the goal of developing a new service that makes use of mobile phones to create a better quality of life.
The result was a collaborative project with the United Nations, developed during a six-month internship with the International Training Centre of the International Labour Organization (ITC-ILO) in Turin, Italy. The project therefore took the direction of mobile learning (m-learning), an emerging field with great potential for contributing to social and economic development in Africa.
The ITC-ILO is a vocational training institute that offers training on how the ILO’s values can be put into practice in a real world context. It is a leading global provider of training for the world of work, with 14,000 participants from 192 countries taking part in courses offered both at the Turin campus and on the field each year.
The ITC-ILO is looking to offer more distance learning opportunities for participants in developing regions, and therefore the macro brief of the internship was to explore the potential for utilising mobile phones to achieve this goal.
Within this brief an applied project was conducted in collaboration with the ILO in Geneva. The ILO is currently launching a worldwide training programme called my.coop (Managing Your Cooperative), which aims to teach contemporary principles of managing agricultural cooperatives to people in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The goal of this applied project was to identify mobile learning opportunities within the delivery of this training programme in the African context.
The result is a mobile learning toolkit that contains an overview of mobile learning, 15 mobile learning methods and a selection of tools that can be used to facilitate these methods. Each method includes a general step-by-step guide plus a customisation to the my.coop training programme.
The mobile learning toolkit is an open source resource that can be used in the delivery of all kinds of training in any developing context. It has been designed to be as inclusive as possible, with most of the methods requiring only low end devices (basic mobile phones with voice calling and SMS capability). In this way the toolkit can be used to deliver interactive distance learning experiences to participants even at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP).”