Eliminating Worldwide Illiteracy with Electronic Tablets but Without School Teachers?
This blog will take a one-week early summer break and come back in June on a new, three-day, Monday-Wednesday-Friday summer schedule. Look for a new post on Monday, June 3.
Diane Ravitch made the announcement yesterday morning on her blog: A U.S. philanthropy has awarded $10 million in prize money to two companies—Kitkit School and Onebillion—for developing and testing out in Tanzania an electronic tablet program for teacherless education. “You knew this was coming, didn’t you?” writes Ravitch.
First it was Bridge International Academies, the for-profit, international private school venture underwritten by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and other philanthropists and operating in Kenya, Liberia, Uganda and India. At Bridge Academies, students must pay tuition, teachers in the schools must continually recruit new students, and teachers must present scripted curricula delivered to them electronically from a central site. Critics have pointed out that by employing less educated teachers who merely present scripted lessons, colonialist efforts like this one are undermining the development of a strong profession of well qualified school teachers in the locations of such experiments.
This week the news is not about scripted curricula delivered to teachers in the Global South. This week’s XPRIZE is for newly developed, programmed tablets to do the job of the teachers.
Philanthropy News Digest describes the challenge XPRIZE presented to several tech developers when it asked them to come up with teacherless teaching: “Launched in 2014 with support from the Merkin Family, Dick & Betsy DeVos Family, and Tony Robbins foundations, Elon Musk, and other funders, the Global Learning XPRIZE challenged innovators to develop scalable solutions that enable children to teach themselves basic reading, writing, and math skills within fifteen months. Each of the five finalists received $1 million to field test their CONTINUE READING: Eliminating Worldwide Illiteracy with Electronic Tablets but Without School Teachers? | janresseger
