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In our earlier SPIDER supported project,”Bangladesh Virtual Classroom”, we have developed an interactive TV and sms ”classroom” setting for ICT-enabled distance tuition. This idea was first tested at BRAC University in a live classroom situation, then recorded in Örebro (Sweden) for a distance setting using TV, and finally tested at Bangladesh Open University (BOU) with positive results. BOU is, despite the name, not a university but an organization that delivers basic education all over the country. BOU was originally not a partner in the project, but today there is great interest at BOU in developing the idea to a standard pedagogical method used over the set of courses. This means scale becomes a problem. BOU recruits a large number of students, around 800 000, and further development work, primarily pertaining to production methods, is needed.

Bangladesh is a poor country to which SIDA (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency) provides considerable aid, education being one of the most important areas. Education is most badly lacking in rural areas and among the poorer parts of the population, including women. This project focuses on using electronic means to provide education to such areas. BOU is charged with the task of delivering education to rural areas, and has an extensive network of 1300 tutorial centres for its 19 programs throughout Bangladesh to provide readily accessible contact points. However, teaching methods are traditional and do not reflect current interactive and student-centred ways of working. The project hence focuses on using ICT as a means for poverty alleviation and human resource development. It does so by close cooperation between Swedish and Bangladeshi universities, by adopting technologies and curricula to the preconditions in Bangladesh, which include a low bandwidth electronic infrastructure. The curricula developed will serve as a leverage to use of ICT in Bangladesh education and hence increase demand and help serve as a driver for further development of national telecommunication infrastructure projects. The project results will also serve as an example for aid organizations, such as SIDA, of how to arrange low-cost distance tuition requiring only minimal ICT infrastructure, an example that could provide valuable experiences transferable to other developing countries.

Project description

The project proposed will use mobile technology’s Short Messaging Service along with perceived live telecast to create an ‘almost’ ideal classroom situation for distance learning using the Question based Participation (QBP) technique. The method has been tested and found viable in our earlier project. The ideal face-to-face classroom situation is when each student follows the thread of the lecture and can answer the interactive questions posed by the lecturer/trainer/teacher. Implementing this ideal in a distance education context using existing contemporary methods such as the Internet is expensive and impractical for a developing country like Bangladesh. The technological requirements such as Internet access and computing resources required for both the student and the provider are difficult to meet, especially in the context of rural Bangladesh where the need for distance education is the most. In Bangladesh, the cost of Internet bandwidth is high and there is no internal infrastructure using which such solutions as countrywide video conferencing can be implemented.

Another solution that does not depend on the Internet and has been tried in different contexts is distance learning, through national television. While this increases outreach, the telecast is only one way, and there is no participation or interaction between the students and the teacher. There is also no way of knowing whether anybody at all is watching a particular recorded presentation. It would be ideal if students could participate and interact with a perceived “live” lecture (as opposed to a pre-recorded telecast) just as in a face-to-face classroom.

The project combines live telecast and SMS technology to deliver the content and get student responses. In Bangladesh, while using mobiles is still considered relatively costly, the coverage of the mobile telephones is now countrywide. Increased competition among the mobile phone service providers is also decreasing the costs and use is increasing rapidly. Our concept utilizes existing technological infrastructure in Bangladesh to promote learning via distance tuition. This means there is no immediate need for Internet and expensive bandwidth to establish interactive distance tuition. It should be noted, however, that the teaching methods and curricula developed are to the most part usable also as the ICT infrastructure improves. A prototype for the interactive distance education scenario has already been built and tested using BRAC university students in a simulated laboratory setting and as in live classroom settings. It has also been field tested at Bangladesh Open University (BOU) as part of our previous SPIDER project. We now propose to proceed to large-scale implementation. To do this there is need for considerable method development at BOU; pedagogical method, methods (including feedback and evaluation) for smooth production of interactive courses, and methods for economic delivery throughout the country.