A one page description of the Education Technology Ecosystem in the Philippines.

The presentation summarizes a paper by Tim Slade and Luis Crouch on the measurement of learning inequality before and after a successful reading project. The paper concludes that at least for the case studied, the project improved not only the averages but also reduced the inequality. The paper was prepared under the auspices of a conference on "Learning at the Bottom of the Pyramid" organized by IIEP and Dan Wagner of U Penn. This is the presentation that was delivered at vCIES 2020.

This tool was created to support projects who are considering delivering educational content remotely. The decision tree supports multiple aspects of instructional design and accessibility to suggest specific authoring tools and delivery platforms.

The Malawi National Reading Program (NRP) is the country's flagship education program aimed at improving the reading skills of all Malawian learners in Standards 1 to 4. USAID supports the NRP by providing finance and technical assistance through several activities including MERIT: Malawi Early Grade Reading Improvement Activity (MERIT), Yesani Ophunzira (YESA), Strengthening Early Grade Reading in Malawi (SEGREM) and Reading for All Malawi (REFAM). MERIT focuses on teacher professional development and support, YESA on continuous assessment and remediation, REFAM on inclusive education, and SEGREM on materials development. Since 2016, the NRP has reached over 56,000 teachers and 4.6 million students in all public schools in Malawi. In addition, results from the 2018 Early Grade Reading Assessment shows that the NRP has had some success in improving reading skills of students in Chichewa and English, and especially for those students in the Standard 4. Implementing successfully at a national scale requires that all partners have had to coordinate and collaborate with each other, with the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MoEST) in the lead. This panel includes representatives from the MoEST and NRP implementation partners discussing their roles in supporting the NRP and sharing lessons around their approach, achievements, and challenges as they collaborate to get all children learning. The combined experiences of the different partners will be useful for other projects, organizations, and governments who are looking to make a wide-scale change in their education systems.

As the world faces higher and higher unemployment rates among its youth, there is increasing interest in evaluating whether schools are adequately preparing their youth to enter the workforce. Do early school leavers (those leaving by Grade 9) possess the “foundational” and “employability” skills needed to effectively enter the workforce? Assessment instruments for literacy and mathematics appropriate to the end of the primary cycle do exist. However these tend to be in depth, large scale, regional or national assessments and not the rapid assessments that EGRA/EGMA are. In addition, these tools only measure some foundational skills, such as reading and math. Previous investigation on employability skills identified three “clusters” of commonly cited skills in the international literature: cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal skills. These three clusters align favorably with the three domains specified by the Committee on Deeper Learning and 21st Century Skills, convened by the US-based National Research Council, as well as other prominent models. A subset of these skills could be assessed, in combination with foundational skills such as literacy and mathematics, in order to ascertain whether or not youth of secondary school age (i.e. around 15–18 years of age) are finishing their tenure in formal schooling with at least a modicum of “work readiness” skills. This report describes a framework for understanding and measuring employability skills.

This topic brief is based on information from interviews with officials and staff of the DepEd Information and Communications Technology Service, BLD, NEAP, and DOST-SEI; head of the education programs of private companies; and faculty members from three higher education institutions in the Philippines engaged in teacher professional development. Relevant policy documents were also reviewed. This brief was prepared by Monalisa T. Sasing, under a subcontract issued to FIT-ED, Philippines. It was edited by Sarah Pouezevara (RTI) prior to publication.

This topic brief is based on information from interviews with officials and staff of DepEd regional and division offices in the Cordillera Administrative Region and Baguio City, the Department of Information and Communications Technology, the Department of Science and Technology-Science Education Institute, the United Nations Development Programme Philippines office, two private telecommunications companies (Globe Telecommunications and Smart Communications), two private EdTech service providers, and two non-profit organizations working in EdTech. Relevant policy documents were also reviewed. This brief was prepared by Liezl F. Dunuan, under a subcontract issued to the Foundation for Information Technology in Education (FIT-Ed), Philippines. It was edited by Sarah Pouezevara (RTI) prior to publication.” (2 April 2020).

This policy brief is based on information from interviews with officials and staff of the ICTS Unit and the BLR of DepEd, participants in the OER teacher training workshops under the Digital Rise Program led by ICTS, and experts from two higher education institutions in the Philippines that are engaged in teacher training in using OER. In addition, relevant policy documents and projects reports were reviewed. This brief was prepared by Patricia B. Arinto, under a subcontract issued to the FIT-Ed, Philippines.

This report is an analysis of the education technology (EdTech) ecosystem in the Philippines. This report seeks to identify opportunities for EdTech alternatives to help the Philippines break away from the status quo in teaching and learning. It will contribute to ongoing policy review and curricular reforms intended to improve country-wide achievement in basic education. The information was gathered by a team of researchers from the Foundation for Information Technology Education and Development, Inc. (FIT-ED), and RTI over the course of four months in the second half of 2019. The study team interviewed over 50 key informants from government, civil society, and the private sector and visited schools, consulted relevant documents, and administered a large survey, all designed to answer the questions: what technology is being used in education, how is it being promoted and adopted, what are the effects, and how can good practices be scaled up? The result is the following ecosystem profile, based on the Scaling Equitable Education Technology (EdTech) Ecosystem Model published by Omidyar Network, now Imaginable Futures,1in 2019 (Omidyar Network, 2019a). Cite this report: Pouezevara, S. (2020). Philippines EdTech ecosystem profile. Prepared for USAID under the All Children Reading-Philippines Project, AID-OAA-TO-16-00017. Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI

Presentation for the 2019 ICERI conference (Seville, Spain.)