LAC ICT/Education Policies and Plans Mashup

While ICT alone cannot solve all pressing problems and complex dimensions of the education systems, there seem to be a general perception that it could play a key role in transforming the education sector. However, for this transformation to happen, national governments need to take a stronger leadership role to develop effective policies and plans to mainstream appropriate ICTs into the teaching/learning process.

View LAC ICT/Education Policies and Plans in a full screen map

This holistic approach in the introduction of technology and innovation as a key driver of 21st century education, moving away from technology-centric models ("Computers-First"), has been acknowledged from numerous studies, including an upcoming publication from the IDB (Development Connections: Unveiling the Impact of New Information Technologies) that emphasizes the need of more investment in teacher training and adequate educational software. And as I pointed out on another post, factors such as total cost of ownership, sustainability models, monitoring and evaluation etc, shouldn't equally be overlooked. Countries cannot expect that learning (or other desired education outcomes) will improve overnight with simply greater access to computers.

So, I have put together a collection of national ICT in education policies and plans in the Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC), by mashing up the data compiled and publicly available in an open database with Google Maps through BatchGeo. This work is based on the GeSCI (Global e-schools and Communities Initiative) publication "ICTs in Education (ICT4E) Policies and Plans worldwide " by Roxana Bassi. The result is an outlook of the current policies and plans on ICT in Education in the region that would help us better understand how LAC countries are trying to use ICTs to enhance the relevancy and quality of education.

Datasource: download the full datasheet LAC ICT/Education Policies and Plans Outlook - licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. See "LAC ICT4E Policies and Plans" worksheet.

Interactive Map: view LAC ICT/Education Policies and Plans in a full screen map.

This inventory is by no means exhaustive; it’s a working in progress and subject to change and/or revision based on information received through comments, hearings etc. If you have any recommendations, or you would like to add/update some information in future version, please post your comments and/or send me an email.

As noted on this post, it is important to mention that "ICT use in education" policies take many forms; some places have formal, official, "National ICT/education policies"; in other places, the operative policy is to be found as a the "ICT" component of an education policy, or conversely in the "education" component of a national ICT (or its equivalent, e.g. ICT4D, IT, e-society, etc.) policy or some related field (like workforce development).

But we will dive deep into this data in the next posts, and I encourage you do the same!

Cross-posted to IDB's ICT for Development blog.