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This report is about Natalie Denmeade’s 2016 Study Tour to South and East Africa – This work was produced with funding from a NSW Premier Scholarship. It includes six case-studies of Gamification in Education. The recommendations are that TAFE NSW promote their excellent World Wide English resources to meet demands in East Africa, and that Australian Indigenous Education can benefit from the resources and approached used by African Entrepreneurs.
I have been back in Australia for a few weeks now and have been shuffling through recent events looking for themes and lessons learned. So far language, motivation and inequity are three recurring themes.
A main theme that has emerged is language: the choice of English as the language of instruction in schools is highly contentious. I was shocked at people I met who had a very poor grasp of English and had somehow passed secondary school. Children in Tanzania switch abruptly to English in standard 6 (Year 6). Even the teachers struggle in their level of spoken ad reading English! So for many students, exams can only be passed by guessing and rote learning so the goal is to endure this terrible few years and hope to get a piece of paper at the end which may be a ticket to a job. High school can be torturous for anyone – let alone if English is not your first language! East Africans have a strong desire to learn English as the global trade and business language so they are keen for better language tuition as early as possible. Many people I spoke to were very impressed by the NSW AMES World Wide English apps I showed them. The Internet and OER are playing a crucial role in these decisions about dominant languages.
A second theme that emerged was about motivation through fear and compliance. Through conversations with students and educators. I came away with a deeper appreciation of how gamification techniques can replace fear and physical punishments in schools, as being shown by students from the school of St Jude’s.
The final theme that is around inequity. When talking to people involved with education in Africa, one of the big questions that constantly arises is equity and the affordability of education, as discussed by Shai Reshef, President & Founder of University of the People, USA in his Keynote speech at the 2015 eLearning Conference. The success of the University of the People tuition-free model of online study is confronting to more traditional financial models. Even if education was affordable and distributed widely, without extra investment we are setting up educational expansion to fail. Tressie Mcmillan, a keynote speaker at the ICDE UNISA conference in South Africa noted:
The wider community must be linked to affirmative and deliberately making credentials matter for disadvantaged groups to broaden the labour market.
Educational technology alone can not solve complex social problems as educational expansion does not automatically produce more and better jobs. I am inspired by the work of Ubongo Studios Edu-tainment and the Afri-one team’s focus on social issues and humanities subjects.
In summary, although I see educational technology and gamification as very powerful tools which have the capability of offering better quality education to more people, the real question that remains is will these tools be exclusive to the wealthy and further the divide? That is not the future I imagine. The scalability of educational apps, OER, and courses are forcing radical changes to education in this generation. However, it will take a systemic effort to avoid further inequity and purposefully create mutually beneficial opportunities.