Bridging the Divide – Using Digital Tools/Platforms to Implement Data Driven Educational Programming

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

As digital technologies become more prevalent globally, the education sector is increasingly using digital tools and platforms to collect and analyse data aimed at improving, understanding and personalising learning and wellbeing support for children. Using these tools for research and practice also significantly contributes to developing local evidence that is critical for improving quality education programming.

How to measure the quality of education programming is a struggle for many actors working in education spaces, especially with huge workloads and limited resources. Humanitarian and development data can often be focused only on basic quantitative data which is unreliable, unusable and unethically collected. This not only leaves actors unaccountable to stakeholders and is inconsiderate of those who provided the information but it also lacks the ability to measure the impact of programming.

Humanitarian and development actors need to find a balance between leveraging technology to improve humanitarian outcomes and addressing the challenges it introduces, especially in terms of inclusivity, privacy, and reliability. There are, for example, arguments that poorly planned or unmonitored systems – particularly those used in storing data – can reduce data privacy and security and increase risks of data breaches. Technology can also be costly, which can contribute to the digital divide whereby some actors have access to high quality data and others do not.

On the other hand, digital tools, used in the correct way, can significantly simplify the data collection process during humanitarian emergencies, a time when efficiency is of utmost importance. These tools, and the data collected through them, can serve to enhance the quality, accuracy and cost-effectiveness of monitoring and evaluation processes, enabling organisations to measure their impact and make better-informed decisions, more accurately target their programming to the local context and more effectively allocate resources where they are most needed thus improving programme quality. Technology can also enhance the data analysis process, enabling automatic analysis and generating dashboards and other visualisations that can greatly contribute to more accurate and accessible reporting.

The measurement and use of data in education in emergencies is critical to understanding changing contexts and needs, as well as the impact of programming on student learning and wellbeing. Relevant and accurate data is vital in ensuring quality programming which meets the needs of the local communities, whilst also adhering to global and local minimum standards. The proposed panel will examine how the use of digital tools and platforms can bridge the digital divide to ensure the implementation of high-quality data driven educational programming aimed at improving children’s overall wellbeing and learning outcomes. The panel will examine how the use of digital platforms can enhance the quality of these tools, especially contextualisation and localisation, through collaborative efforts among the EiE stakeholders (funders, researchers, practitioners, local communities, and institutions, etc.). It will also discuss how detailed and ethical MEAL guidance on measuring education indicators can support organizations to better measure progress and impact, and more effectively implement their programmes, while remaining accountable to the affected populations. Lastly, the panel also explores a case study of how data on children’s learning and wellbeing, collected through the EGRA, EGMA and SERAIS tools and visualised through online platforms, can be used to better target programming to ensure that teaching and learning is effective, and student’s learning outcomes are central to project design and implementation.

Sub Unit

• Monitoring and Evaluation SIG

Chair

• Sonja H Anderson, INEE

Individual Presentations

• Quality Measurement of Key EiE Indicators for Improved Evidence-Based Programming - Laurel Jansury, People In Need

• The Use of Digital Data Collection to Improve Education Programming in Fragile Contexts - Paul Tonkei, Concern Worldwide; Amy Folan, Concern Worldwide