Mobilizing CoPs to Improve EdTech Interventions through Collective Action

• In Event: Cultivating community & shifting practice: experiences from five communities of practice

Proposal

This community of EdTech innovators and enablers is working to create a movement towards evidence-based, technology-enabled teaching and learning in East Africa. Through gatherings, digital platforms and broadcast of information, the leaders of local EdTech ecosystems in Kenya, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia help to engage their communities and create opportunities to collaborate more effectively. In Kenya, the EdTech community mobilized diverse ecosystem actors – entrepreneurs, innovative practitioners, funders, researchers, government leaders, digital infrastructure providers, community leaders and more – to address local challenges through a set of Collective Action Goals. These 5 goals, grounded in the vision for ICT in Education provided by the Government of Kenya Ministry of Education, provided opportunities to align these stakeholders to work together to create change. The goals are: 1) Foundational Learning: Cultivate foundational literacy and numeracy for all learners, 2) Skills for the Future: Ensure learners have the skills they need to solve the problems of the future and thrive in a digital workforce and society, 3) Equity & Inclusion: Develop technology in education that is inclusive, accessible and responds to the different needs of learners, 4) Leaders of Learning: Strengthen the capacity of those closest to the learners – teachers, pedagogical leaders, parents and caregivers – to lead data-driven, inclusive digital learning, and 5) Enabling Environment: Develop sustainable digital infrastructure and evidence-driven policy to support resilient learning.

The members of the Skills for the Future (Goal 2) community of practice came together to validate the problem, to clarify the challenges leading to this problem, and then design a collaborative project to help address one of these challenges. The community of practice – made up of tech-enabled skilling tool developers, users and funders – identified that there was no standard definition of what a “good” edtech product looked like for tech-enabled skilling looked like, especially a definition that took into account the unique local context. To address this gap, community members worked together through a series of workshops and evidence generation processes to identify the best practices for developing edtech tools for skilling translated those into a framework, EdTech Imarisha, for quality standards of tech-enabled skilling in Kenya. Imarisha, the Swahili word for “strengthen”, allows edtech actors to elevate the use of EdTech to prepare young people to thrive. This collective action activity is one example of tangible outcomes produced by mobilizing communities of practice to solve ecosystemic challenges in EdTech in Kenya.

Author

• Jennifer Cotter Otieno, Education Design Unlimited