Digital StudyHall (discussion)
October 18, 2006
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- In India there is generally a weak (or non-existent) oversight on what a researcher can
  do in education.  This is in stark contrast to the situation in China.  In fact, DSH was
  started in India and not China by happenstance -- the availability of a good local partner
  and the lax restrictions on what could be attempted.

- Obstacles to scaling (e.g., up to 100,000 schools):
  -- administrative:
     --- finding enough people at schools who would own the project and move it forward
         without having one central (outside) authority (e.g., Randy Wang) vet every single move
     --- without oversight, India may be a very hard place to scale this project (since there's
         no central authority that can be convinced to enact a change).  Viral adoption is hard 
         without effective forms of communication: word of mouth, etc.
         In contrast, China has a strong central authority that, if convinced, can scale rapidly.
         Most developing countries likely are closer to the "India category" than to the "China
         category" (e.g., Africa).
  -- technical

- Information going back from schools to the central place does not happen.
  Some uses of technology has been scaled back: use of TVs in place of computers in the classroom.
  This was in response to the actual needs and realistic restrictions on the ground.  One issue
  is that scaling back to the minimum needed equipment may constrain what can be accomplished in
  the future -- including rolling in more effective technological means of instruction (e.g., on
  computers) in the future.

- Statistics show that to meet the current teaching mandate in India, there would have to be
  2,000,000 new teachers.  On top of that, there is need for good teaching (not any teaching).

- Evidence suggests that teachers don't learn as well from reading on paper than they do from
  watching video materials.  Producing videos has gotten better over the years (though it is
  still in need of simplification) and may scale better as a strategy in comparison to getting
  teachers out of the classroom to a teacher training seminar (which would require a huge
  infrastructure).

- To evaluate learning outcomes (and impact) from the project, one can measure:
  -- percentage of kids who stay in school
  -- knowledge of the material (e.g., English)
  -- improved prospects for the future -- college, jobs, etc.
  The DSH project is still in the development stage, not quite at the point of evaluating it
  thoroughly.

- In Africa, pushing this idea may be even harder.
  -- The language situation is very different there: preference of tribal languages to the imposed
     outside languages, huge language split (e.g., Nigeria).
     In the North, Arabic is spoken widely, in the east it's mostly Swahili, whereas West Africa
     has French as the main language in some areas.
  -- Another hard issue for Africa is the percentage of educated people in some of those countries,
     that is a required element for bootstrapping a project like DSH.
  -- Further, there is an ethic of social service in India that may be non-existent in other
     places.  This, in particular, is a core element of Indian culture.

- One of the success requirements of DSH is to motivate teachers to do a good job teaching
  (including to hold classes regularly, which is not always the case).  In villages, teachers
  are normally the highest paid personnel, so it's not an economic issue for them.  Furthermore,
  they have security of employment by the state.