It seems the promise of laptops for Standard One pupils continues to give the Jubilee administration sleepless nights.
Sections
of the media recently reported that the government is now considering
distributing tablets instead, apparently as a way out of procurement
hurdles surrounding the earlier effort to purchase laptops for primary
schools.
It is not clear just how procuring a tablet
cures the earlier procurement challenges, since the vested interests
that might have sabotaged the earlier effort to buy laptops may simply
shift the battle to the tablet procurement process.
Battles
aside, we need to ask if there any pedagogical benefits that tablets
provide over laptops. In other words, which of the two devices presents
better learning outcomes, easier management and maintenance?
Many
sceptics would of course dismiss the question, arguing that the Sh17
billion budgeted for the project would be better spent on hiring more
teachers and expanding and equipping primary schools. They would,
therefore, not buy either device, preferring instead to channel the
funds towards other needy causes.
THE GREAT EQUALISER
The
proponents of the project, however, point out that the laptop project
is actually not about laptops, but instead about transforming and moving
the education sector to the next level and ensuring that our children
are better equipped to work in the 21st century knowledge economy.
They
argue that indeed the transformation is already happening, with close
to 70 per cent of all primary schools in the country already connected
to the national electric grid, thus transforming not just the particular
school but also its environs.
Small market centres
that dot the countryside have suddenly found themselves lighting and
powering up a 24-hour economy due to the presence of electrical power
supply, largely due to the project.
And more is yet to
come, they say. With electronic devices, textbooks are bound to be
replaced by digital content which can be re-used without exposure to the
usual wear and tear.
Teaching is expected to be
enhanced as most of the teaching instruction becomes standardised and
digitised. This means that a pupil in some remote village in Turkana
will have the same learning experience in, say Mathematics, as the one
enrolled in a expensive private school in Nairobi.
ADVANTAGE LAPTOP
Digital
assignments and homework will be auto-marked, making it easy for
teachers to not only provide instant feedback to students, but also
track academic progress for pupils across multiple years.
Indeed
one must concede that it is a beautiful future awaiting our educational
sector. However, the devil, as they say, is in the details, and in
going back to the question of whether a tablet is better than a laptop,
one needs to find the answer within the context of the above-promised
future.
Tablets tend to be of limited hardware and
software capacity and may struggle to deliver on the educational future
described above. If one is to host several interactive digital books and
other content on the device, a laptop would clearly have an advantage
and would be preferred.
For tablets to measure up to
the laptops’ capabilities, one must factor in the internet. A tablet
with internet capability may adopt a “cloud computing” approach that
allows content to sit remotely on the internet, while the pupils access
it locally.
This compensates for the weakness of a tablet, but introduces another cost item — who will pay for the internet access of over 20,000 primary schools across the country?
This compensates for the weakness of a tablet, but introduces another cost item — who will pay for the internet access of over 20,000 primary schools across the country?
LONG-TERM INTERNET COSTS
Additionally,
tablets tend to rely more on battery rather than electrical power,
potentially defeating the main objective of putting primary schools on
the national power grid.
In other words, the projected
power consumption from primary schools may be 50 per cent lower than
expected - potentially disrupting the financial projections of Kenya
Power who are currently investing heavily in expanding the grid.
The
only advantage tablets seem to have is that they are cheaper than
laptops. But the question is whether we are going into this project
because it is cheap or because we want to transform education in Kenya.
Furthermore,
the long-run costs of the per-requisite internet service will
eventually override the lower purchase price of tablets.
Clearly
the “Standard One Laptop” pledge seems to be moving from one challenge
to another. But one needs to be careful to ensure that the pledge is not
moving from the frying pan right into the fire.
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