Perspectives on Innovation

Earlier this month, The Economist announced a winner in the 21st Century Cyber Schools Challenge.  There were many strong submissions, and the team decided that the two runners up also deserved recognition for their outstanding solutions.  We will be posting solution summaries from the Challenge winner, Andrew Deonarine, as well as the two runners up in this Challenge, Tristram Hewitt and Daniel Rasmus.  Congratulations Andrew, Tristram and Daniel.

Below is a summary of the winning solution from Andrew Deonarine.  To see a larger version of the image, right click and select “view image”

In locations such as South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, children, teens, and adults do not have access to education. Many are illiterate, and cannot make use of books and other learning material. While some technologies, such as inexpensive laptops and tablets have been proposed to address the educational needs of this population, the devices are too expensive, require some degree of literacy, and are difficult to implement in resource poor areas. However, cellular phones have significant penetration in the world’s poorest countries, since they provide a means to make a living. In essence, they comprise a global, untapped computer network.

In this solution, I have presented a cellular phone based technology called EduCell that develops and distributes educational material using a method called PhoneCasting. PhoneCasting allows someone to write their own educational program using their phone and distribute it to other devices. EduCell consists of a piece of software that that runs small multi-lingual “scripts”, easily developed by local teachers in developing countries. Scripts are then assembled with multimedia to create interactive modules that teach reading, writing, arithmetic, etc. Modules can then distributed (PhoneCasted) to millions of other phones via an Internet server, or pre-loaded, at no cost. The benefits of the PhoneCasting technology are significant: a software programmer or knowledge of English is not required to produce content, which democratizes software development. This would, for the first time, make basic literacy and educational material accessible to hundreds of millions of cellular phone users, and their children, around the world.

–Dr. Andrew Deonarine

Earlier this month, The Economist announced a winner in the 21st Century Cyber Schools Challenge.  There were many strong submissions, and the team decided that the two runners up also deserved recognition for their outstanding solutions.  We will be posting solution summaries from the Challenge winner, Andrew Deonarine, as well as the two runners up in this Challenge, Tristram Hewitt and Daniel Rasmus.  Congratulations Andrew, Tristram and Daniel.

Below is Tristram’s summary of his solution:

Imagine a school house in a Nicaraguan village. One hundred students, each with nothing but a laptop, independently engage in their lessons. A precocious twelve year-old collaborates with an Ecuadorian peer on a biology project about rural water contamination over the cyber school learning platform. To her right, an eleven year-old, who tended the family’s coffee plot for the past year, plays a computer game to practice basic addition.

In this cyber school, semi-automated teaching systems power an individualized education. Students learn basic concepts, broken into independent lesson modules, through a mix of multi-media programming, games, interactive assignments, and live teacher contact. Structured peer interactions build creative and critical thinking skills. The teacher’s primary task, then, is not to “stand and deliver” but to facilitate student movement through pre-designed lessons. On the ground level, social workers supervise the school house; encouraging students, engaging parents, and creating the socio-emotional foundation required for academic success.

Grade levels do not exist. Rather, students advance through a course sequence outlined in the primary and secondary school curricula, each of which has a distinct purpose. While primary school teaches the minimum skills and knowledge required for participation in economic and civic life, secondary school prepares students for a vocation or university.

Combined, these elements form a scalable school model. Automated teaching technologies keep costs low by enabling high student-to-teacher ratios. Centrally managed courses improve quality. Local support systems ensure widespread access. Children in the developing world enjoy a newfound opportunity to realize their potential.

Earlier this month, The Economist announced a winner in the 21st Century Cyber Schools Challenge.  There were many strong submissions, and the team decided that the two runners up also deserved recognition for their outstanding solutions.  We will be posting solution summaries from the Challenge winner, Andrew Deonarine, as well as the two runners up in this Challenge, Tristram Hewitt and Daniel Rasmus.  Congratulations Andrew, Tristram and Daniel.

Below is Daniel’s summary of his solution:

I approached the Challenge for a 21-st Century cyber school as a design challenge, and thus technology as a component of the solution, not the entire solution. I focuses first and foremost, on establishing learning as a value. Learning must be introduced to students where they are, not where others wish them to be. Learning must be made contextual. Technology cannot exist without policies and practices that offer safety and health, family reinforcement, including parenting practice, and community involvement.

When it comes to technology, we must avoid repeating the failed practices of the West that often introduce technology for the sake of technology. In my design technology introduction must match readiness, and be appropriate and contextual to individual learning objectives. Technology must augment the delivery of instruction, not replace it. I believe it is imperative that the learning environment itself be part of the solution, with open source at the core, so that learners can help improve the software as they use it for learning.

Personalized learning delivered through content services will be central to next generation learning systems, regardless of where they are deployed. This approach to content strips away artificial containers and allows instructors to mix and match content, with the aid of business intelligence-like tools that align components to learning styles. In this way, the educator can concentrate on outcomes while software helps configure individualized instruction to help learner achieve the desired outcomes. This also implies a deep historical understanding of the learner, and his or her learning style.

The future of education will be global, mobile and individualized. This solution seeks to integrate those elements into a comprehensive design—one that refrains from being too optimistic about technology’s ability to transform learning. Any workable solution must start with parents, communities and governments, least those who invest in transformation find their money spent on expensive learning baubles, while those who we seek to reach subsist in squalor and oppression. A 21st Century cyber school is but a part of a bridge to the future, and it will do little good without a complete structure to support it.

Andrew Deonarine is the winner of the first Economist-InnoCentive Challenge, 21st Century Cyber Schools. On September 15, Andrew was interviewed on stage by The Economist’s Digital Editor Tom Standage, where he described his winning solution, the “EduCell,”  at The Economist’s Ideas Economy: Human Potential Conference in New York City.

I am a third year resident in the Public Health and Preventative Medicine (Community Medicine) residency program at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and a junior fellow of St. John’s College. I’ve always had an interest in biology, medicine, and computer science. I completed a BSc. Hons. in Biochemistry and Chemistry at the University of Western Ontario, as well as an MSc. in biochemistry. After, I pursued my interest in medicine and completed my MD at the University of Toronto. During that time, I had a chance to do research with Dr. Sarah Teichmann in bioinformatics at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, University of Cambridge. After completing my MD, I started my residency training at UBC. I also completed a Masters of Health Science at UBC as part of my residency. For my major research paper, I spent a few months working with Dr. Mark Musen at Stanford University on biomedical ontologies. This year I will be enrolled in the Clinician Investigator Program at UBC, and will complete a PhD in bioinformatics with Dr. Teichmann at the University of Cambridge, where I will be a member of Girton College. I will then return to UBC complete my residency training in Public Health.

Often I’m asked about how my studies in bioinformatics, public health, medicine, epidemiology, and biochemistry and chemistry fit together. I believe that one needs a holistic approach to solving developmental problems. Often, NGOs will pursue a “silo issue” rather than taking an integrated approach to development. In other words, they might look at economic development but not education, health but not economic development, the environment but not health, etc. Some of my other interests pertain to the creation of conceptual models for development and education in resource-poor areas. In order to address international health issues, one should have a strong understanding of technology (informatics), public health, epidemiology, education, and basic science, in addition to understanding local cultures and politics. Hence my academic course.

I became interested in education by cellular phone after listening to speakers from South Africa discuss the educational hurdles being faced there after Apartheid. As well, I’ve read Gandhi’s teachings on education and the importance of “universal media” in teaching. Many social, health, and economic problems in developing countries could be addressed if the populations were literate, and had a basic education. I developed a system called “Phonecasting” which distributes interactive educational lessons by inexpensive cellular phones, using software called “EduCell.” “EduCell” fulfills the test of being a “universal medium” as described by Gandhi, and could be an important, open-source teaching platform for the 21st century. The goal of “EduCell” is to plug the “education gap” that many children face in developing countries.

When I saw this education challenge issued by The Economist magazine and InnoCentive, I was excited. This was something I’ve been working on for years, and the Challenge fit my ideas perfectly. It has provided me with a chance to get my ideas out to the world and start to translate them from conceptual documents, emulator code, and schematics into real working pilots. I hope to start an NGO and employ students part-time to develop this idea over the coming months, and eventually to have this technology deployed across the world. I believe that basic literacy is a pre-requisite to solving many of the world’s problems, and Phonecasting is the way to help the world become literate.

In the effort to build a culture of innovation, it is InnoCentive’s role to provide its Solver community with the opportunities they need to take full advantage of their potential. This means presenting you with as many challenges as we can, even if we don’t have a financial stake in them. That’s why earlier this year we started aggregating external challenges.

When you click on the External Challenges tab you will see a list of the almost one hundred challenges we’ve processed so far. These challenges have been pulled from all over the web, by organizations ranging from Starbucks to NASA, and are updated regularly. If an opportunity presents itself, you can find out about it here.

The types of challenges range from colossal projects like the NASA Centennial Challenges, to student technical paper competitions and awareness projects geared towards children (which are a great way to get kids involved in open innovation!). These challenges welcome participants from almost any background.

Open innovation is about finding creative solutions to problems, and the world is teeming with problems. We’re going to make it as easy as we can to connect you with those problems. Good solutions need to be found for these challenges, and you’re the best community to do it.