National Policy on ICT in School Education

Extracted from:

Kozma, R. (in press). Comparative analysis of policies for ICT in education. In J. Voogt and G. Knezek (Eds.) International handbook of information technology in primary and secondary education. Springer: New York.

Policy Recommendations

There are particular substantive recommendations that can help policymakers craft particularly effective educational ICT policies.

Policy alignment
National ICT policies will have the greatest impact if they are aligned with other strategic and operational policies. This alignment is of three sorts: strategicoperational alignment, horizontal alignment, and vertical alignment. Alignment between strategic and operational policies assures that ICT programs and projects are directly tied to the nation’s goals and rationale. For example, strategic policies that emphasize economic development should be matched by operational programs that use ICT to develop new workforce skills, not just purchase new equipment, and strategic policies that emphasize pedagogical reform should be aligned with ICT training that provides teachers with new pedagogical skills, not just new technology skills.

Horizontal alignment assures that ICT policies are consistent with other policies within the education system. For example, changes in ICT policies can both contribute to and benefit from corresponding changes in curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and teacher training, and it behoves ICT policymakers within the ministry of education to coordinate their policymaking efforts with those in other departments. More generally, policymaking efforts in the education ministry can benefit from coordination with those in the ministries of economic planning, telecommunications, labor, and rural development. Often policy coordination of this sort requires the guidance of the highest-level policymaker, the minister of education in the first instance and the prime minister in the latter. Some countries constitute cross-ministry councils to guide and coordinate related policies with shared goals.

Vertical alignment refers to the coordination of policies up and down structural layers. That is, national policies should guide and be coordinated with those at the state, provincial, or local level. This will assure that resources allocated at the national level are appropriately applied at the state and local levels to have the maximum impact on schools and classrooms.

Distributed policies
In some countries, educational policies may be the sole prerogative of the central government. In these countries, ICT policy may be formulated as a discrete policy statement within the ministry (department) of education, such as that in Singapore. In other countries, it may be integrated into the overall national education policy, such as that in Malaysia and Chile, or it may even be embedded in the national telecommunications policy, such as in Egypt where the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology leads the nation’s ICT-based Egypt Education Initiative, in collaboration with the Ministries of Education and Higher Education (Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Egypt, 2006). This sort of policy integration has the advantage of bringing more political weight and resources to bear on the effort. But to have maximum impact within the education system, the strategic and operational ICT policies need to be articulated in explicitly educational terms within the Education Ministry.

On the other hand, many countries have a federal political structure or a decentralized education system, where educational decision-making is vested in the states, provinces, or local districts or villages. In these situations, much of the discussion above applies to policymaking at the local levels. But the national ministry or department can still play an important role. One possibility in these cases is for national ICT policy to be strictly operational, providing resources that support the general use of ICT, but make them available for use by local agencies according to their own strategic policies. Alternatively, national strategic policy can be formulated as a vision that guides local efforts, or it can be articulated in general terms to advance important countrywide economic and social goals, while leaving the local agencies to craft operational policies that accomplish these goals.

Policy implementation
There are often huge gaps between policies and the changes in classroom practice that they are intended to affect (Cohen & Hill, 2001). Policies are articulated, but teachers are often not aware of the specifics of these policies or their goals. In turn, policies are implemented as programs, but often these programs are not effective in achieving change at the classroom level. A study by Cohen and Hill (2001) found that policies were most effectively implemented in classrooms where teachers had extended opportunities to learn policy-related materials. Rather than general reviews of policy statements or discussions of their implications, the most effective teacher-development experiences were concrete, content-specific, and instructionally useable practices directly connected to policy. Consequently, ICT policy implementation can best be assured when teacher professional development includes specific skills and tasks that incorporate ICT into their everyday classroom practices and explicitly connect these practices to ICT and broader education policies.

Private-public partnerships
The introduction and widespread use of ICT is an expensive proposition for any country. An important resource in this effort can be private-public partnerships. These partnerships can involve the Ministry of Education, along with universities, private NGOs, or private corporations. For example, the Ministry of Education in South Korea entered into an agreement with Intel to train a majority of the country’s 400,000 teachers, principals, and professors in coordination with its ICT master plan (Intel, 2005). The World Economic Forum and its sponsors support ICTbased education reform in Jordan, Egypt, India, and Palestine (http://www.weforum.org/en/initiatives/gei/index.htm). Related to this effort, both Intel and World Links Arab Region (an NGO) are training teachers in Jordan, as part of that country’s master plan. These partnerships can be particularly important in developing countries, where the demands for resources are significant and the available funds scarce. For example, the Telefonica OCT Chile supported the Enlaces program by donating telephone lines and unlimited Internet connections to schools, along with free email accounts for teachers and students (Hinostroza, et al., 2003).

Outcome-oriented policies, programs, and evaluations
The use of ICT in education constitutes a significant investment, and this requires a significant return in terms of learners served and the number of learners that become productive workers and citizens. Strategic policies should not only offer sweeping visions and specific goals for how technology can advance economic, social, and educational development, and operational policies should not only provide programs and resources, but they should also describe how these visions and resources will impact the educational system with measurable outcomes. Policies and programs should call for indicators and monitoring and evaluation plans by which these outcomes can be tracked (Wagner, et al., 2005). Both process and outcome measures should be used to monitor the progress of policies and programs, and provide information to policy makers that can be used to revise and refine policies and programs. The implementation of monitoring and evaluation components will increase the likelihood that national ICT education policies and programs will indeed be implemented and benefit students, teachers, schools, the economy, and society, in general.

Resources
Policymakers can benefit, not only from these recommendations, but from a large collection of resources that can aid them in policy formulation and implementation. Among these are works that list the current ICT policies of other countries, such as Cross-national information and communication technology policies and practices in education (Plomp, Anderson, Law, & Quale, 2003, in press) and the Meta-survey on the use of technologies in education in Asia and the Pacific (UNESCO, 2003). UNESCO also has a policymakers toolkit for ICT in education (http://www.infodev.org/en/Project.11.html). And the infoDev program at the World Bank has a variety of knowledge maps, guides, and handbooks (http://www.infodev.org/en/Topic.4d.html) that can be most helpful. With these resources, policymakers can begin to craft and refine policies that can help ICT deliver on its promises.

References

Cohen, D. & Hill, H. (2001). Learning policy: When state education reform works. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Hinostroza, J. E., Hepp, P., Cox, C., & Guzman, A. (2003). National policies and practices on ICT in education: Chile. In T. Plomp, R. Anderson, N. Law, & A. Quale (Eds.), Cross-national information and communication technology policies and practices in education (pp. 97-114). Greenwich, Connecticut: IPA.

Intel. (2005). 3 million teachers help students learn to develop 21st century skills. Retrieved on January 2, 2006, from http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20051116edu.htm.

Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Egypt. (2006). Egyptian Education Initiative. Retrieved December 30, 2006, from http://www.mcit.gov.eg/ICT_Learning_1.aspx.

Plomp, T. Anderson, R., Law, N., & Quale, A. (Eds.). (2003). Cross-national information and communication technology policies and practices in education. Greenwich, Connecticut: Information Age Publishing.

Plomp, T., Anderson, R., Law, N. & Quale, A. (Eds.). (in press). Cross-national ICT policies and practices in education (Rev. ed.). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

UNESCO. (2003). Meta-survey on the use of technologies in education in Asia and the Pacific. Paris: UNESCO.

Wagner, D., Day, R., James, T., Kozma, R., Miller, J., & Unnwin, T. (2005). Monitoring and evaluation of ICT in education projects: A handbook for developing countries. Washington, DC: infoDev, World Bank.