Sponsored by EDEN (European Distance and e-Learning Network)
iClass as the Foundation for an Educational Leap in Developing Educational Systems
The session will propose (and evaluate) a new paradigm aimed at using technology enhanced learning (TEL) to advance education in fast developing education systems side by side with more conventional processes, and suggest the tools needed to realize it. Such a policy is based on:
- A leap over the centuries-old stages of development that characterize education systems in developed countries. This leap will consist of using a sophisticated, intellectually rich, adaptive and personalizable system of distance learning to reach any student in the country.
- The use of low cost mobile terminals and cellular or satellite communication (when no communication lines are available) that will allow it technologically.
- The reliance on a sophisticated platform that supports and scaffolds learning by individuals or small groups of students, even when no face-to-face teachers are available on a regular basis. iClass is an example of such a platform which can be adapted to almost all educational contexts and LMSs.
This leap is proposed since the regular linear development is both too expensive to follow successfully, and educationally it prevents the quick adaptation of developing educational systems to the 21st century. It seems unnecessary to follow the anachronistic book-based, and organizationally and didactically rigid, standardized and expensive structures of the educational systems in the developed world just in order to abandon them once established in favor of the radical adaptation to the world of digital, organizationally and didactically flexible and personalized world of today and the future.
Examining such a policy and various modes for integrating it with more conventional policies gives developing education systems the chance to leverage what has been considered as a drawback – the absence of strong conventional educational systems – and turn it to an advantage.
| 
