A vision for delivering localized literacy and numeracy education: RoboTutor and Eneza

Adaptive learning technologies have been shown to be effective and efficient for many school children around the world by providing experiences that are personalized to the individual student (e.g., Anderson & Koedinger, 2002). While investigations of non-adaptive interventions have already shown that there is great promise for educational technology in sub-Saharan Africa (Conn, 2017). to date adaptive systems are failing to touch or benefit learners in sub-Saharan Africa. This is concerning: the global proportion of school-age learners in this region is one third of today’s planet, rising to half in the next generation, and there is a great need for high-quality education solutions that can scale. In this talk, I describe the adaptive system we have built to investigate opportunities for learning literacy and numeracy for primary school children in East Africa, called RoboTutor. RoboTutor uses state of the art technologies such as speech recognition and knowledge tracing in order to best support young learners. It also builds on decades of learning science research including work on culturally-relevant education. I report on the early stage studies we have conducted in two sites in Tanzania to examine the context of use and initial positive outcomes of the system. In this talk, I will also introduce a second intervention my group is currently designing to deliver a literacy curriculum by feature phone in the Cote d'Ivoire. Together, such systems present a new direction for supporting educational equity in Africa.

Lunch provided for those that RSVP.

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