Redefining the Future of Education in Africa
In the keynote for the first Future of Learning conference in South Africa, Frank Aswani from the African Leadership Academy noted that the average age of the population in the US is 41, in Europe it’s 44, and in Japan it’s 50.
In Africa it’s 19.
Workforce growth over the next ten years will be 120 million in Africa vs. 10 million in the US, or 2 million in the UK. We are busy developing solutions for a generation of youth that we do not yet know and do not understand. They could be Africa’s greatest asset, but potentially also its greatest liability if we do not design the future for this generation together with them.
The challenge for leaders in education today is how can we cultivate collaborative behaviour that drives innovation and meets the education needs of the continent? Bringing together the most dynamic and creative minds in education from across Sub-Saharan Africa, delegates shared best practices on how to develop and implement transformative, sustainable and innovative models for education.
Praekelt.org was asked to facilitate a spark session, and I spoke on our newly revamped m-learning platform, dig-it. Dig-it provides learners with a fun, interactive platform to support daily maths revision. The premise of the platform is that regular, consistent practice throughout the year is a more effective method of learning than cramming just prior to exams. Dig-it was designed to address the maths skills deficit in South Africa, as well as to tackle the negative perceptions around maths such as ‘girls can’t do maths’ and ‘maths is for geeks’.
The focus of my presentation was how we used a human-centred approach to create the platform. Little did I know how pertinent the topic was.
Organizations and people have a tendency to wait for a finished product before introducing it to the users it’s intended for, which goes against many of the values of human-centred design. When we approached the Department of Education regarding dig-it for instance, they were open to meeting us but they preferred to work together once we had a finished product. This is understandable considering how many projects and pilots are out there.
Dr Felicity Coughlan, a director of the Independent Institute of Education & AdvTech, spoke on how South African education is in an insular and defensive space. There’s a lack of willingness to learn from others, with a “if we didn’t invent it, we’re not going to try it attitude”. She added, “We are not coping and the last thing we want is help.”
This is the opposite to how service designers and product makers like to work. We prefer to have partners that we collaborate with throughout the process. By learning from others, working with stakeholders, and co-designing with the end user we believe we can design the most innovative solutions. The end users of dig-it are Grade 10, 11 and 12 learners at no and low-fee schools in South Africa. We knew meeting with a representative sample of these learners was critical to developing a product that users would adopt. We made sure to get to know learners in all corners of South Africa, from rural QwaQwa in the Free State, to Soweto and Mamelodi in Gauteng, and Philippi in the Western Cape.
Simon Kaguramamba of Action Starter referred to it as “moving beyond teaching only the 3R’s (Reading, Writing, Arithmetic) in school and focussing rather on the 4C’s (Collaborate, Create, Critical Thinking, Communication)”. Coughlan suggested that by working closely with principals, even the poorest of schools could be transformed into quality education providers. “Universities have always been under-prepared for young people. Not the other way around.”
For those who have to work with the products, getting involved late in the game isn’t ideal. Teachers shared their feelings of frustration when fully developed products intended for their use are delivered to their classrooms. They are expected to adopt these products without having been consulted during the design process.
Praekelt.org endorses and follows the Principles for Digital Development in all of its work. These principles include “Design with the User”, “Understand the Existing Ecosystem” and “Be Collaborative”. We were very careful to facilitate multiple user sessions throughout the dig-it design process, as well as during the pilot period.
We gained many critical insights from the learners during our visits including the fact that they are not familiar with the term ‘blog’, do not recognise the ‘burger menu’ as a clickable icon, and their primary method of finding websites is to search for them using google, rather than to type a url into their browser. These insights, although seemingly minor, had very real implications for the design of the site, as well as the effectiveness of the marketing materials used to drive users to the site. We also learned that despite the fact that 80% of our current users now have access to smartphones, almost 35% are still using Opera Mini as their primary web browser. This confirms the need to keep the site as data light as possible as data is still expensive and an issue for the target market.
By sharing these learnings, my hope is that a human-centred approach will be used far more widely in the education space going forward. By putting our minds together, educators, learners, government, technologists and entrepreneurs can co-design truly transformative, sustainable and innovative new models of education. Because disruption is what we really need if we want to reach the next generation. Not more of the same.
Written by Lauren Kotze, Service Designer at Praekelt.org
