Education

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The Global Refugee Forum and the case for education

Joseph Nhan-O’Reilly

By Joseph Nhan-O’Reilly.

 

In 2016, at the height of the European refugee crisis, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants. The declaration was hailed as the foundation of a new approach by the international community to large movements of refugees and migrants, as well as to protracted refugee situations.

The adoption of the declaration launched a two-year process that delivered the Global Compact on Refugees. It provides a blueprint for governments, international organizations, and other stakeholders to ensure that host communities get the support they need and that refugees can lead productive lives.

“The Global Refugee Forum provides a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to set a plan to close the refugee education gap, delivering quality education to the world’s 9 million refugee children and improving the quality of education of their host community peers.”

The next step is for concrete pledges at the first-ever Global Refugee Forum — hosted by UNHCR this December in Geneva — to support the compact’s implementation.

The forum’s results will be a critical test of the international community’s commitment to the new ways of working envisaged by global compact. Failure to back the practical hospitality and policy commitments of the countries hosting large refugee populations will call into question the credibility of the compact’s promises and put wider humanitarian reform efforts at risk.

The excellent work of host countries, together with growing support for education in crises, means there is a real opportunity to ensure every refugee child has the chance to go to school. The compact promises to minimize the time refugee children spend out of education, with a target of no longer than three months after arrival in the country in which they have sought protection.

The case for education for refugees is clear: it’s the chief concern for refugee children and their parents. Speaking in Berlin on the urgent need to expand access to schooling for refugees, U.N. refugee chief Filippo Grandi said, “I have worked for refugees for 35 years and there is one constant message I hear from them — they want education, even before food.”

Refugees know that education provides the building blocks needed to recover, to create new lives in their host countries, and to gain vital knowledge and skills to take back to their country of origin, should they have the opportunity to return.

But the majority of refugee children face the double jeopardy of losing both their homes and their right to go to school.

Eighty-five percent of the world’s refugees live in developing countries, which face big challenges in delivering education to their own populations. Unsurprisingly when refugees do have access to school, the education they receive is often low quality.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The Global Refugee Forum provides a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to set a plan to close the refugee education gap, delivering quality education to the world’s 9 million refugee children and improving the quality of education of their host community peers in the process.

How we can secure the future of school-aged refugees

This time last year we launched our call for a global refugee education action plan. It showed that we could deliver quality universal pre-primary, primary, and secondary education to the world’s refugees with just $11.9 billion in international assistance over five years.

While this looks like a lot of money, it is in fact a little more than two days of global military spending, which currently stands at $4.8 billion per day. For $1 million per day, we could secure the future of 7.5 million school-aged refugees.

“We must start by asking refugee hosting countries what they need and working out how we can get it to them.”

To do this, we need to clearly set out what refugee hosting countries need and secure pledges and contributions against those needs.

Without an agreed statement of needs, the Global Refugee Forum runs the risk of soliciting pledges of support, however worthy, which do not address the most critical needs on the ground.

In order to reduce the risk of existing funding being re-pledged, we must also establish the baseline of available financing and support, ensuring that new pledges are genuinely additional.

A global plan, based on need, would act as an advocacy tool, crowding in government, philanthropic, corporate, and civil society support. It would assist in developing and coordinating a global response that can be adequately monitored and hold stakeholders accountable for delivering.

In short, if the Global Refugee Forum is to achieve its goal, we need to ensure that new, tangible pledges are made in support of the education-related commitments in the global compact and that these align with agreed priority needs.

Education Cannot Wait’s replenishment in September is the perfect staging post, where donors will have the opportunity to support ECW’s innovative multi-year education plans, the majority of which will be in refugee hosting countries. These plans are the perfect instrument for agreeing what’s needed, providing catalytic funding, and then aligning financing.

Source of the article: https://www.devex.com/news/opinion-the-global-refugee-forum-and-the-case-for-education-95144

 

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China’s Education Authority Calls for More Electives, Choice

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Asia/ China/ 24.06.2019/ By: Ni Dandan/ Fuente: www.sixthtone.com.

 

China wants more high schools to offer the elective courses known as “zouban” — literally “roaming classes” — in order to better meet students’ diverse developmental needs and interests, an official with the country’s top education authority said at a press conference Thursday.

The conference came a day after the State Council — China’s Cabinet — issued sweeping new guidelines on secondary education reform. According to a spokesperson for the Ministry of Education, the document is the first of its kind to be released since the start of the 21st century.

“Taking into account talent cultivation rules, university department admissions requirements, and students’ interests and strengths, as well as the specific conditions at each school, zouban systems should be implemented in an orderly fashion,” Lü Yugang, director of the Ministry of Education’s Department of Basic Education, said at the conference.

Local school districts around China have experimented with zouban electives to increase student choice for decades, but the system has become more widespread in recent years as provinces and municipalities continue to add elective sections to their college entrance examinations. The new guidelines represent the first time the central government has explicitly endorsed zouban and encouraged local authorities to implement the model.

In his remarks at the conference, Jia Wei, deputy director of Shanghai’s Municipal Education Commission, framed the move as a change from the current exam-oriented model of education to a more comprehensive approach. “The goal of high school studies will no longer be simply getting into a university, but also figuring out students’ interests in life and targets for their future career,” he said.

Currently, zouban implementation is carried out at the local level, meaning the systems in place and degree of choice they offer can vary. Shanghai schools require students to choose three elective zouban from a list of six potential options, with each subject corresponding to an elective section on the municipality’s college entrance exam.

In addition to advancing the zouban system, the new reform guidelines also call on schools to explore more “interactive, inspirational, and experiential teaching methods,” and state that teaching management should be optimized and student workloads eased by reducing the frequency of exams and banning schools from forcing students to take extracurricular classes.

Cao Bingsheng, a teacher at Nantong Normal College in eastern China, says he’s pessimistic as to whether the new guidelines will have the desired effect, especially if schools continue to be graded primarily on test scores.

“It’s highly difficult to ban extra classes as long as university admissions rates are still used to evaluate the performance of (secondary) education authorities,” Cao told Sixth Tone.

Education officials also used Thursday’s press conference to announce that work on new high school textbooks is almost complete. In late 2017, the Ministry of Education issued guidelines for revising the country’s textbooks, which included adding more content related to socialist core values and both traditional Chinese and “revolutionary” culture.

Source of the notice: https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1004162/chinas-education-authority-calls-for-more-electives%2C-choice#

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Mozambique: Education Barriers for Children with Albinism

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Africa/ Mozambique/ 24.06.2019/ Fuente: www.hrw.org.

 

Children with albinism face insecurity and significant obstacles to accessing quality education in the Tete province of Mozambique, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

The report, «From Cradle to Grave”: Discrimination and Barriers to Education for Persons with Albinism in Tete Province, Mozambique is in the form of a special web feature with video and photos. Human Rights Watch found children living with albinism in the central Mozambican province of Tete to be widely discriminated against, stigmatized, and often rejected at school, in the community, and, at times, by their own families. They struggle to overcome barriers such as insecurity, bullying, and lack of reasonable adjustments in the classroom, which violates their right to education. Although the Mozambique government has taken important steps to better protect the rights of children with albinism, it needs to do more to ensure equal access to education.

“Children with albinism have the same right as everyone else to a quality education with reasonable support to facilitate their learning,” said Shantha Rau Barriga, disability rights director at Human Rights Watch. “Yet many children with albinism in Tete are relegated to the margins of the education system, and of society as a whole.”

Human Rights Watch interviewed over 60 people between July 2018 and May 2019 in Tete province and in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo. Interviewees included 42 children and young adults with albinism and their relatives; albinism and disability rights activists; community leaders; teachers and school principals; and representatives of international organizations. Human Rights Watch also met with government officials in May and reviewed relevant national and international legislation and policies.

Albinism is a relatively rare condition caused by a lack of melanin or pigmentation in the skin, hair, and eyes. People with albinism usually have a paler, whiter appearance than their relatives. While albinism affects one out of about every 17,000 to 20,000 people in Europe and North America, it is more widespread in Sub-Saharan Africa, with reports indicating that it affects one in 1,000 people in southern Africa, where Mozambique is located.

Although not everyone with albinism has a disability, the melanin deficit can result in low vision and an increased vulnerability to the sun’s ultra-violet rays. People with albinism living in Sub-Saharan Africa are about 1,000 times more likely to develop skin cancer than the general population.

In 2012, Mozambique ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which guarantees the right to inclusive, quality education. This entails ensuring that children with and without disabilities learn together in mainstream classes in an inclusive environment, with reasonable accommodations.

Fear of Violence

In late 2014, there was a surge of attacks on people with albinism in Mozambique, including kidnapping and trafficking. At the peak in 2015, the UN independent expert on the enjoyment of human rights by persons with albinism received reports from nongovernmental groups of over 100 attacks that year alone. A belief in witchcraft is one of the root causes of attacks, the independent expert said, with assailants believing that body parts from people with albinism can produce wealth and good luck.

Although the reports of attacks and abductions have receded, the families of children with albinism still live in fear, some keeping their children out of school. The most recent report of an attack was the abduction of an 11-year-old girl in May in Murrupula district in Nampula Province. She was later found dead with her limbs cut off.

Joao, a 19-year-old from the Angónia district, told Human Rights Watch that around 2015, he stopped going to school for fear of being kidnapped during the long walk from home. He said people would sometimes follow him. Others would call him “money” and “business,” referring to his valuable body parts. Joao’s family went to the police after assailants allegedly tried to recruit his friend to help abduct him.

“My dream was to become a teacher,” he said. “It’s good work. I still have the dream but I can’t go to school.” Today, Joao works in the fields with his father, planting beans and corn. The work is hard and painful, because the sun hurts his skin.

The Mozambique government should increase efforts to dispel deadly myths about albinism, including through workshops and at outdoor cinemas in the local language, particularly in rural and isolated communities – such as those across Tete – that may not have access to television and radio due to a lack of electricity.

 

Barriers at School

Children with albinism face numerous obstacles at school, including bullying by students and sometimes teachers, little to no reasonable accommodation for their low vision, and requirements to participate in physical education classes outside without proper protection from the sun.

Human Rights Watch found that in schools in Tete province, students with albinism who also have low vision lack access to appropriate learning materials, such as large-print textbooks, extra time for exams, or seating arrangements next to the blackboard.

Fatima, 20, said she dropped out of school in Grade 5 after insensitive teachers bullied her.

When she would try to sit in the front of the class to see the blackboard better, one teacher would yell, “You albino, you stay where you are,” she said. Her father complained to the school, but it only made things worse. “When the teacher would say those things to me, it allowed the students to do the same. There were no consequences for any of them,” Fatima said.

The government should ensure that all teachers in the public education system are sensitive to the needs of children with albinism and trained to adequately provide for their needs. Schools should have resources to meet their needs, including textbooks and exams with larger fonts, and assistive devices to read the blackboard, Human Rights Watch said.

Government Response

In recent years, the Mozambique government has taken important steps to protect people with albinism, including adopting a comprehensive Action Plan in 2015 to deal with violence against people with albinism. The plan includes measures to promote education and awareness of albinism among families and communities. However, human rights advocates in Maputo said that although they participated in drafting the plan, the government has left them out of implementation, reducing its effectiveness. They also remain concerned that the plan lacks a specific budget, which seriously impairs effective implementation.

At the Global Disability Summit in 2018 in Britain, Mozambique pledged to create inclusive education policies and plans, including carrying out a national strategy for inclusive education. The most recent draft strategy for inclusive education was silent on children with albinism, but the Education Ministry has promised to revise it to include language on albinism.

As a priority, Mozambique’s government should also carry out the recommendations outlined in the Regional Action Plan on Albinism in Africa, the first continental strategy to address violations against people with albinism. The plan, endorsed by the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights in 2017, contains a series of immediate to long-term measures focused on protection, prevention, accountability, and non-discrimination.

“By taking steps to make sure that children with albinism can get a meaningful education while continuing to investigate and prosecute those responsible for attacks, the Mozambique government has an opportunity to further show its commitment to ensuring safety, inclusion, and dignity for people with albinism,”  Barriga said.

Source of the notice: https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/06/13/mozambique-education-barriers-children-albinism

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For effective regulation of the country’s education system

Anurag Behar

By: Anurag Behar.

 

Scepticism of India’s draft National Education Policy should be suspended until it is implemented

This is the second column in the series, Glimpses Of The Draft National Education Policy (NEP). The draft NEP has received widespread responses, ranging from thoughtful endorsement and insightful critique to good-faith criticism. Some of this is in the public domain, but a lot more seems to be happening in group consultations, feedback to the human resource development ministry, etc. The final policy will be richer for all this. I am extracting some of the salient features of the NEP, with the intent to address some of the issues raised in these responses, but specific knowledge of the responses is not necessary to read through these points.

The NEP is a clear and strong endorsement of the public education system. It envisions high-quality, equitable and universal education—in and through the public education system. This is as applicable to higher education as to school education (age 3-22 roughly). Public-spirited, not-for-profit private institutions will certainly have a role in the Indian education system. However, it is the obligation of the state to provide high-quality education, and all efforts shall be aligned with this goal.

Government spending on public education must rise from current 10% of national public expenditure to 20% in 10 years. These numbers are rough estimates that indicate the direction and scale of the change required. The NEP is what the name says. It is education policy and cannot substitute the government’s fiscal policy and financial strategy. The NEP highlights the financial needs of education and does not dwell on where the money will come from, which is the business of the state.

The Right to Education Act (RTE), 2009, remains a key bulwark of school education—especially in the context of the strong reaffirmation of the state’s obligation and centrality of public education. If anything, its importance becomes deeper and broader, since the extension of the RTE from age 3 to 18, from the current 6 to 14, is envisioned as a key to enabling early-childhood-education and secondary education. The NEP explicitly endorses the continuation of Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation and the No Detention Policy in schools, taking a stand against the recent (past two years) legislative and other actions that dilute or eliminate these educationally important steps. It also directs action on the stopping of misuses and malpractices, including of 12(1)(c), for example, seeking exemption from the RTE by claiming “minority status», inflating student numbers, misrepresenting the socio-economic background of students, etc. It also calls for improvement of the RTE based on a comprehensive review of the experience of its implementation in the past decade, particularly on the matter of being responsive to local infrastructure needs without compromising safety, security and a wholesome learning environment.

“India» and “Indian» are integrated in many parts of the NEP. Some of these matters are: Indian languages, Indian literature, Indian art, Indian music, Indian knowledge systems, Indian history and context, etc. How could it be otherwise? After all, this is an education policy for India. Especially when it doesn’t do all this at the cost of ignoring the “global/modern». I can appreciate the apprehensions of some: “Is there more to this?» If the NEP text is read with an open mind, it becomes clear that there is nothing more to it than an important and valid commitment to know, understand and value our own society. The NEP takes a clear stand for a scientific temper, critical thinking and associated capacities, and for our constitutional values.

The NEP has the vision to transform the regulation and governance of the education system. Three of the key underpinning principles for this transformation are: transparent public disclosure, maximal empowerment and autonomy for institutions, and separation of roles and powers of regulation, operations, standard-setting, etc. While these principles are common to higher and school education, their manifestations are different. School education would be regulated by a newly created quasi-judicial “State School Regulatory Authority», based on a robust accreditation system, and the states’ Directorate of School Education (or Public Instruction) will only be responsible for running and improving the public schooling system. An illustrative implication of this is, Block Education Officers will have no regulatory powers; they will be responsible only for running and improving public schools. This “accreditation system» is based on, and thus empowering of, local institutions such as peer schools, school management committees and panchayats.

I have had the privilege of a ringside view of the evolution of the NEP. That gives me confidence that the draft will be enriched and revised by the constructive responses to it. Some of those responses will be the topic of the third piece in this series. I have also seen negative reactions to it. Many of these are born of a deep scepticism that committees can do their work unhindered and uninfluenced. Clearly, the final test of any policy is in its implementation, but it is important to suspend such judgement and disbelief. The NEP offers ample energy for that optimism.

Source of the article: https://www.livemint.com/

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Black education decline

Walter E. Williams
By: Walter Williams.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio says that the city’s specialized high schools have a diversity problem. He’s joined by New York City Schools Chancellor Richard A. Carranza, educators, students and community leaders who want to fix the diversity problem. I bet you can easily guess what they will do to «improve» the racial mix of students (aka diversity). If you guessed they would propose eliminating the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test as the sole criterion for admissions, go to the head of the class. The Specialized High Schools Admissions Test is an examination that is administered to New York City’s eighth- and ninth-grade students. By state law, it is used to determine admission to all but one of the city’s nine specialized high schools.

It’s taken as axiomatic that the relatively few blacks admitted to these high-powered schools is somehow tied to racial discrimination. In a June 2, 2018, «Chalkbeat» article (https://tinyurl.com/y64delc3), de Blasio writes: «The problem is clear. Eight of our most renowned high schools – including Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School – rely on a single, high-stakes exam. The Specialized High School Admissions Test isn’t just flawed – it’s a roadblock to justice, progress and academic excellence.»

Let’s look at a bit of history to raise some questions about the mayor’s diversity hypothesis. Dr. Thomas Sowell provides some interesting statistics about Stuyvesant High School in his book «Wealth, Poverty and Politics.» He reports that, «In 1938, the proportion of blacks attending Stuyvesant High School, a specialized school, was almost as high as the proportion of blacks in the population of New York City.» Since then, it has spiraled downward. In 1979, blacks were 12.9% of students at Stuyvesant, falling to 4.8% in 1995. By 2012, The New York Times reported that blacks were 1.2% of the student body.

What explains the decline? None of the usual explanations for racial disparities make sense. In other words, would one want to argue that there was less racial discrimination in 1938? Or, argue that in 1938 the «legacy of slavery» had not taken effect whereby now it is in full bloom? Genetic or environmental arguments cannot explain why blacks of an earlier generation were able to meet the demanding mental test standards to get into an elite high school. Socioeconomic conditions for blacks have improved dramatically since 1938. The only other plausible reason for the decline in academic achievement is that there has been a change in black culture. It doesn’t take much to reach this conclusion. Simply look at school behavior today versus yesteryear.

An Education Week article reported that in the 2015-16 school year, «5.8% of the nation’s 3.8 million teachers were physically attacked by a student.» The Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics show that in the 2011-12 academic year, there were a record 209,800 primary- and secondary-school teachers who reported being physically attacked by a student. Nationally, an average of 1,175 teachers and staff were physically attacked, including being knocked out, each day of that school year.

In the city of Baltimore, each school day in 2010, an average of four teachers and staff were assaulted. A National Center for Education Statistics study found that 18% of the nation’s schools accounted for 75% of the reported incidents of violence and 6.6% accounted for half of all reported incidents. These are schools with predominantly black student populations. It’s not only assaults on teachers but cursing and disorderly conduct that are the standard fare in so many predominantly black schools.

Here are questions that might be asked of de Blasio and others who want to «fix the diversity problem» at New York’s specialized schools: What has the triumph of egalitarian and diversity principles done for the rest of New York’s school system? Are their academic achievement scores better than students at New York’s specialized schools? The most important question for black parents: What has been allowed to happen to cripple black academic excellence?

Source of the article: https://www.theitem.com/stories/black-education-decline,329045

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Japan to boost education support for non-native children

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Asia/ Japan/ 18.06.2019/ Fuente: asia.nikkei.com.

Easier-to-read entrance tests among proposals for more inclusive schools

Japan will provide more support for educating children of foreign nationals from early childhood through high school, including by increasing Japanese-language classes, under a plan released Monday.

The education ministry’s proposals follow changes in April to immigration law that allow certain foreign workers to bring family with them to Japan. Schools had already been facing a rise in students learning Japanese as a second language, prompting criticism that efforts on this front were lagging.

Monday’s plan, which calls for working «to ensure that all children of foreign nationals have educational opportunities,» seeks to provide seamless support to learners from preschoolers to job-seeking international students.

It proposes multi-language guides to ensure parents have information on how to enroll students at kindergartens and elementary schools.

Public schools are to receive more teachers for Japanese as a second language as well as aides who speak the languages of foreign students. Some schools currently have no such staff. Regions with a shortage of human resources will use translation and distance-learning systems.

Public high schools will be asked to give special considerations for Japanese-language learners when taking admissions tests, such as making it easier to read kanji characters and allowing the children to bring dictionaries into the exam rooms.

The ministry proposes creating an evening middle school program in every prefecture and major city for those who could not receive compulsory education in their home countries.

The initiative also will help international students in higher education find jobs in Japan, proposing the certification of collaboration programs between universities and businesses.

The plan covers Japanese-language learners of all ages.A 14-language online curriculum for self-study will be developed for residents of areas that lack easy access to Japanese-language classes.

Source of the notice: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Japan-immigration/Japan-to-boost-education-support-for-non-native-children2

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Technological innovations have improved quality of education

Louis Fourie

By: Louis Fourie.

 

History has proven that education is one of the most powerful tools to drive positive social, economical and technological change, and, therefore, create a more prosperous future for a country.

In South Africa many approaches to enhance the educational experience and quality have been tried in the past, but none of them were dramatically successful in improving the results of students, giving them greater access to post-school studies or enhance their employability.

There is a constant drive for educational policy change at national level, yet the attempts generally seem to be perennially futile. We have tried the appointment of more teachers, pedagogical methodologies that did not work elsewhere, and instructional designs that are outdated in the Fourth Industrial Era.

Perhaps the answer (partly) lies in technology. In our endeavours to increase the access and quality of education in South Africa, the Internet of Educational Things (IoET) may provide the much needed support. Historically, technological innovations and enhancements have improved the quality of and access to education all over the world.

In particular the Internet has had a profound impact on teaching and learning. Due to the many free online resources such as Massive Open Online Courses from leading institutions such as Harvard and MIT it is possible to take a class at home.

High school learners can access the rich sources of the Khan Academy and digital encyclopedias. Almost any skill or theory can be learned via YouTube and TED.

It is possible to find an online tutor for a child in any subject for a reasonable amount and children can even (illicitly) outsource their mathematics homework and other assignments to an unknown person on the Web.

But the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) has not left education untouched. The Internet of Things (IoT), one of the building blocks of the 4IR, is an important innovation to create smart learning environments in schools and universities.

The IoT can improve the education system and can also add value to the face-to-face teaching environment and to structured learning.

The IoT makes it possible for schools to implement an unparalleled number of systems and methods that could enhance the abilities of students. It also revolutionises classroom dynamics, from primary school to university education.

The IoT, with its inherent connection of numerous devices and people to the Internet, will significantly transform our learning processes, as is evident from recent research that confirmed the educational potential at lower grade levels of the IoET devices.

Dr Jim Ang and his team from Kent University in the UK investigated how IoET technology could be effectively designed and used to support education in primary schools in rural Northern Thailand.

They developed a bespoke IoET platform called “Observation Learning System” (Obsy) that made the learning process more “real, local and fun”.

The toy-like Obsy device was based on the inexpensive Raspberry Pi mini computer and had several ports to which the learners could connect environmental sensors to measure ambient light and temperature. The recorded data was then transferred wirelessly to the tablets of the children. The Obsy was specifically designed to look like a toy to rouse the curiosity of the children and to minimise any possible technology anxiety or distrust.

At the back-end the system consisted of an IoET platform, which processed the context of learning activities, how the experiments have been carried out, as well as the results, allowing for improvements.

The children had to undertake three science-based learning activities with the aim of improving their understanding of certain science processes while simultaneously learning to work in teams.

They had to study the growth of mould in different conditions; learn about the factors that influence the growth of mushrooms; and determine how much light can pass through different objects by taking photos or videos, monitoring temperature changes, and measuring the amount of light with the Obsy device.

All the information that was wirelessly transmitted to their tablets, visualised in the form of graphs to assist the learners in making comparisons of the results and also in understanding how different conditions can lead to different results.

The device not only encouraged observation, but also invited students to share their results with the rest of their classmates.

From the research in Thailand, the researchers were able to demonstrate that the children using the IoET device had a significant higher learning engagement and obtained better scores than a control class that undertook the same experiments without the use of the Obsy device.

The current growth in the IoT has the potential to cause a move towards a new class of ubiquitous learning applications that rely on inexpensive sensors, edge devices, IoT middleware, and web-based protocols like HTTP to enable innovative ubiquitous and personalised learning designs in language and social sciences learning, science and technology learning, and domain independent learning.

Through the confluence of physical objects with the digital world, IoT allows the development of new hybrid systems. One solution is the powerful combination between Virtual Reality (VR) and IoT that was researched by Mohamed Fahim and others in Morocco.

IoT makes physical objects part of the virtual and digital environment, while VR makes digital environments seem realistic. Due to the increase in learners and shortage of physical resources in Morocco, the researchers resorted to VR and the IoT to create a credible virtual learning space where the learners could perform practical activities like in the real world – in this case the measurement of ultrasonic velocity in the air.

Thirty students were randomly divided into an experimental and a control group. A post-test revealed that the experimental group using the learning system based on IoT and VR were significantly better than the control group who only had a theoretical course.

Fourteen learners in the experimental group averaged 93.3percent, while the control group averaged between 46.7 and 53.3percent in the test.

The study indeed indicated that IoT and VR could widen the possibility for innovations in the teaching and learning, especially by creating a virtual environment where the learner is an active participant that can “learn by doing”, through the interaction with the 3D virtual objects.

An educational environment based on VR and IoT can further solve the problem of the equipment/product insufficiency often experienced by institutions. Such an environment can provide learners with a rich, interactive learning experience where they can perform tasks safely; participate in learning situations that require repetition; and participate in learning situations that are too expensive to implement in the real world.

It is evident that IoET technology in the classroom can bring major educational benefits. It can significantly improve learning outcomes and participation and allows learners to grasp more complex concepts.

Given the high percentage of children and students with smart phones in South Africa, the smart phones with their various sensors could easily be integrated into the learning activities of schools.

Learners live in a world where digital devices constitute a vital part of their daily lives.

It is time that the educational system harnesses this proficiency of students in the use of modern tools in order to stimulate their appetite for learning and their understanding of complex concepts.

Educational institutions can benefit greatly by using IoT in their regular educational activities. Perhaps the biggest problem is not the readiness of the students, but the readiness of the teachers.

Source of the article: https://www.iol.co.za/business-report/opinion/opinion-technological-innovations-have-improved-quality-of-education-26220202

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