This document summarizes two educational technology initiatives in South Africa that provided tablets and digital content to students. The first initiative provided tablets to two higher education institutions with about 14,000 students total. It aimed to transition to more flexible, technology-enhanced learning. Key challenges included limited bandwidth, converting existing content to digital formats, and managing communication across stakeholders. The second initiative provided tablets to schools in a rural district, emphasizing alignment with education policy and gaining support through teacher training. Both projects provide lessons for implementing 1:1 educational technology initiatives on a large scale in South Africa.

2. Case Studies at National Level: 1:1
Educational Computing Initiatives in
South Africa
Steve Vosloo
Head of Mobile, Innovation Lab
Pearson South Africa
Presented at:
Global Symposium on ICT in Education
3-5 November 2014

3. Key approaches and lessons across two cases
CTI and MGI
- Higher Education
- Urban
- Nationwide
ICT4RED
- School
- Deep rural
- Single district

4. Tablet and Digital Content project
Implemented at CTI Education Group (CTI) and Midrand
Graduate Institute (MGI)
Key points:
Infrastructure constraints
Content digitisation
Communication
Unintended consequences

5. About the project
• CTI and MGI are two higher education institutions in SA,
wholly owned by Pearson
• 13 sites of delivery nationally (effectively 25 campuses)
• ±14 000 students

6. About the project
Long-term goal: to create a technology enhanced teaching and
learning experience through cultivating 21st century skills
and therefore ensuring academic excellence and
employability to all students
eVision of Teaching and learning with technology (TEL):
• progressively move from content-driven to outcomes-driven
• progressively move from “timetabled” to flexible structuring
of teaching and learning
• anytime, anywhere
• flexible learning spaces
• collaborative, communities of learning
• design of education interventions based on research

7. About the project
But, need to take “baby steps”
 build foundations
 get infrastructure in place
 don’t over engineer/design from day 1
 effectively replicate the 'analogue' experience of students
using text books for studies into a digital experience
… Then we build from here…

8. Infrastructure constraints
SA has limited bandwidth infrastructure, especially for high
peaks of traffic
Challenge: How to get ebooks onto tablets?
• Deliver titles on micro SD cards
• Over the air updates or from local servers on campuses
• Online registration but offline access

10. Infrastructure constraints
Challenge: How to manage ongoing bandwidth needs?
• Strong need to managing expectations about what the devices
can be used for
• Tablets were provided for accessing textbooks and learning
materials, but students and lecturers want to use it for so
much more  accessing YouTube, apps, social network sites,
etc.
• Manage access carefully
• Increase connectivity infrastructure

11. Content digitisation and lessons learned
Scope for 2014 deployment: 75 titles (ePub 2 and 3)
Scope in 2015 deployment: 159 titles (ePub 2, epub 3, PDF and
print)
Need to think digital first – most existing content did not start
from there
 Challenges in converting and retagging content originally
designed for fixed format (print/PDF) into a "reflowable" format
(ePub)
Need to redesign and reformat in some cases: editing, cutting
(so choosing vendor is crucial)

12. Content digitisation and lessons learned
Security and protection of Digital IP: Especially when acting
as the distributor of third party material (time taken in drawing
up contracts, the risk of distributors not releasing content,
timeline of the project implementation does not always
correspond to industry production trends)
Clearing digital rights: The additional time and cost required if
back list content was never originally cleared for digital
distribution

13. Content digitisation and lessons learned
• Quality control essential - The importance of allowing
adequate time to check converted content in the end-user's
application
• Expensive and time consuming (lots of ereaders)  Non-trivial
• All this takes time and requires very clear timelines
• Map the process to when the learner will receive content
• Deadlines / cut-off dates
• Preparation of PDF’s as Plan B fallback

15. Communication challenges
• Many stakeholders with different working cultures
• Disconnect between assumptions and reality
• Complexity of the implementation
• Easy for an “us” and “them” mentality to develop  one
implementation
A clear need to focus on communication across all groups to
support change management
Manage expectations, e.g. ePubs don’t have page numbers –
need to have a new way of referencing in class

16. Communication strategy
• Clarification of roles and responsibilities
• Formulate a strategy to inform all stakeholders regularly
using different formats
• Formulate a communication strategy for different phases of
the project
• Identify/assign a full time comms person to liaise directly
with all stakeholders to determine:
•Comms needs
•Preferences
•Existing and future comms channels needed
•Feedback loops
• Outcome: multi-channel Communication Plan

17. Communication “success”
• Improved stakeholder satisfaction
• Open and honest/transparent communication
• Knowledge about where to get answers
• Repeated/reinforced message through: using Neo/blogs;
Townhalls, Conference calls, face-to-face; email
• Enough time for people to engage
• Correct information

18. Unintended consequences
• We can now see campus efficiency, who is using and who is
not and capacity usage implications
• How to plan for more effectively managed environments
• Campuses are designed for 100% students, but actually we
only need for 70% capacity, so can allow for more
collaborative spaces, better learning spaces. Smaller and
more conducive to learning

19. ICT for Rural Education Development (ICT4RED)
project in the Cofimvaba schools district
Key points:
Alignment with policy
Achieving buy-in through teacher training
Tablet selection
Slides courtesy of
CSIR Meraka Institute

34. Go to http://ict4red.blogspot.com

36. Thank you
Steve Vosloo
Head of Mobile, Innovation Lab
Pearson South Africa
steve.vosloo@pearson.com
@stevevosloo