Enumerating the Obstacles of Accelerating the Use of Digital Classroom: Lessons from Bangladesh

Abstract

The main obstacles to use digital classroom in secondary & higher secondary education is the lack of quality of the content, effective usage and timely modification. Government of Bangladesh (GOB) has provided digital content development training to root level teachers and developed content repositories for teachers to upload and share digital content. One such web platform is Shikkhok Batayon. Our scrutinies of that website show that the usage of the platform is not satisfactory. In this paper, we try to identify the barriers of this initiative and propose how to use those trained teachers in successful implementation of Digital Classroom in Bangladesh. To achieve the goal of proliferating digital classrooms, we believe there are three solutions. Firstly, encouraging teachers to build their own content. Secondly, engaging third party to build the content for the teachers. Thirdly, building a centralized digital repository for the teachers to share and use digital content among them. Use of ICT in education sector is one of the primary tasks to build Digital Bangladesh. To achieve this goal, Bangladesh Government (GOB) has taken a timely initiative by providing 20,000 Laptops & Projectors to 20,000 secondary & higher secondary schools countrywide. Though, the use of digital classroom in most of the school is absent. From our survey we have found that almost every teacher is assigned to different tasks from a school authority other than regular classes. Again private coaching, tuition & other personal work keep teachers occupied. In this case, preparing content for digital classroom & regular update on that content is not possible for teachers to deliver in class. At the same time, teachers are willing to use the digital classroom as it helps students to understand subject matter easily with quality content on relevant subjects. Therefore it is utterly important to pin point the necessary actions to spread the use of digital classroom all over the country. Hence the research question this paper tries to answer: What is the effective model to ensure regular use of digital classroom with quality content in secondary & higher secondary level education in Bangladesh? We conduct a survey among teachers of various institutions of capital Dhaka of Bangladesh to answer our principal research question. So far we have covered 5 schools and from our preliminary analysis, we have found that higher secondary teachers are more interested than secondary teachers in the concept of digital classroom. But, inadequate support of content development, lack of practice in lecture delivery style and lack of incentive in using digital content are the three main barriers behind the proliferation of digital classroom. For this research, we have used uniquely developed questionnaire to find the answer to our research question. We have also developed content for one subject of topics of class IX & XI. We have carefully chosen schools to run the test which are situated in different parts of Dhaka city. We see that teachers prefer having a third party content developer with whom they can interact in their school premises. In order to understand the perception of the teachers and the students, we conduct ethnographic study via observation and survey mechanism. The result of this study can be insightful for the policy makers in the developing world who are contemplating in enhancing quality of education via ICT and connecting the next billion.