1. The Mobiles for Education Alliance: ICT4E Evidence of Impact
Anthony Bloome
Senior Education Technology Specialist, USAID
UNESCO Learning Week
Paris, February 22, 2014

2. Fellow Presenters
Panelists: Liv Nordhaug, Senior Advisor, Dept. of Global Health, Education, and Research, Norwegian Agency for International Development (Norad) Emily Todd, Education Advisor, DFID Marie Metz-Geller, Advisor Sector Programme Education, GIZ Rebecca Leege, Director, All Children Reading Grand Challenge, World Vision Workshop facilitator: Molly Hageboeck, Technical Director, MSI

3. Current Steering Committee Members
Add Norad

4. mEducation Alliance Mission and Goals
Committed to reducing barriers to access appropriate, scalable, and low-cost mobile technologies, broadly defined, to help improve learning outcomes in formal and non-formal education across all levels.
Goals:
Reduce duplicative efforts
Share knowledge
Promote partnerships and coordination
Improve research and evaluation
Share full mission statement: The Alliance is committed to reducing barriers to access appropriate, scalable, and low-cost mobile technologies to help improve learning outcomes in formal and non-formal education across all levels, especially in low-resource and developing country contexts. In this regard, the Alliance is committed to an ethical and holistic approach to understanding the impacts, accessibility and inclusivity of mobile technologies in education.
Share goals

5. What are his Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAG)?
This young person has dreams, aspirations, and goals – just like we do. He might have some really big ideas – what we affectionately call Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs). How can we leverage the smart and effective power of technologies in education to help him and his classmates around the world achieve their BHAGs.
EDC

6. What’s in your BHAG?
Working in the international development and education communities, we and our counterparts have our own BHAGs. It may be connected to basic education – literacy and numeracy, youth and workforce development, promoting access to education in remote communities, or supporting 21st century skills. What’s in your BHAG? Many of us work in rural and poor settings with low-resources such as that shown in the classroom in this picture. We’re here at today’s mLearning event because we likely think that the transformative opportunities provided by utilization of technologies in education can help us achieve these goals.

7. Reading is a 21st century skill!7

8. Investments in Technologies for Education?
Exciting but…
Learning from our failures?
Impact on learning outcomes?
Cost-effective?
Sustainable?
Replicable?
However, while we’re excited by ICT4Es and every day is providing further examples of the potential use of technologies to assist our efforts, we know that our enthusiasm in this arena should be tempered by the scarcity of evidence to date about effective investments in technologies which are cost-effective, sustainable, and replicable. There is also very little evidence to date and after many decades of investment in ICT4Es, about the impact on learning outcomes.

9. Moving the Evidence Agenda Forward
One of our BHAGs
Moving the Evidence Agenda Forward
Increased evidence
and experience
Better use of technology to improve education outcomes
The ICT-enabled evaluation fund will serve as an umbrella for funding activities, such as rigorous impact evaluations, that:
Provide Evidence on whether and how technology can be applied to projects to achieve better education outcomes,
Leverage Expertise and insight from across the education ecosystem to guide reformers in their implementation of ICT-enabled education projects, and
Test, Replicate, or Help Bring to Scale successful approaches to applying ICT to all aspects of education.
The cornerstone of the partnership is a series of impact evaluations to investigate and provide evidence on whether and how ICT contributes to improved education outcomes.
To lay the foundation for the evaluations, it is necessary to first identify gaps in evidence and develop a set of indicators to measure the outcomes of ICT-enabled interventions. Important questions to be addressed by the evaluations also need to be defined jointly with stakeholders.
Attract significant funding for ICT4E evaluation
Identify innovative technology
Help decision-makers focus resources
Stimulate demand for most effective solutions
Inform project implementation

10. Our Agenda 10:00 Welcome and Introduction 10:05
Time
Module
10:00
Welcome and Introduction
10:05
Evidence Gaps and the Evaluation Continuum
10:15
Small Group Participation – Would An Impact Evaluation be Desirable?
10:45
Part 1: The ICT4E Landscape Findings & Q&A 
State of the Evidence: The HEART Educational Technology Topic Guide (DFID)
Landscape Review: Mobile Education for Numeracy (GIZ)
11:15
BREAK
11:45
Part 2: The ICT4E Landscape Findings & Q&A
Landscape Review: Mobiles for Reading (World Vision)
Landscape Review: Mobiles for Youth Workforce Development (USAID)
12:15
Small Group Participation – Would An Impact Evaluation Be Feasible?
12:45
Plenary: Moving the Field Forward with Evidence – A Broad-Based Challenge (Norad-facilitated)

11. For more information, please contact Anthony Bloome, Senior Education Technology Specialist, USAID,