What Is a Culture of Innovation and How Can We Build It?
Like many educators and organizational leaders around the globe, my organization is working hard to design and implement new approaches to education that we believe can be more effective for students than those we currently have in place. Through sheer force of will, many of these new ideas will have the chance to be tested […]
How For-Profit Businesses Will Reshape Education
Looking out to 2025, the following are likely: 1) For-profit education businesses will disrupt and drive change and innovation in the educational system at all levels. 2) At least part of the 2025 educational system will be in the hands of for-profit businesses. 3) Public systems will change and reform and they will still dominate. 4) Issues, challenges, contention, […]
Assessing Creativity in Education by Paul Collard
How do we put a teacher’s or a learner’s creativity to test? When assessing creativity, what should we measure? Paul Collard, CEO of Creativity, Culture and Education (CCE), explains how the ‘Creative Habits of Mind’ framework is helping assess creative learning and teaching. Mr. Collard will be speaking at the 2014 WISE Summit. How do you assess […]
Is Digital Literacy an Essential 21st-Century Skill?
Three ideas by Mark Surman, Executive Director, Mozilla Foundation, from the 2013 WISE Summit Last year, there were 2.4 billion users on the Internet all over the world. By 2025 this number is expected to reach 6 billion users with 1 trillion connected devices. Today the Web touches all aspects of our lives as we live in the […]
Exploring the Future for Education: Three Scenarios for 2025
What is “school” in the future? We gaze forward to 2025 and imagine Mariam, aged 10, in West Africa. Her school is a visor and a touch-response glove that let her enter virtual worlds to play and learn her way. For Aarav, age 15, in South Asia, school is a training center built by employers where […]
Empowering Refugees Through Education
There are more than 40 million refugees and internally displaced people around the world, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). A vast majority of these people are women and children. This special feature looks at how learning, in different forms, can offer stability and better lives for children, families and communities. Find […]
Making Education Attainable for All: Why Bangladesh Needs Low-cost, Private Schools
In 2012, over two hundred thousand students applied for admission to the prestigious Dhaka University. Only 6,000 can matriculate, putting Dhaka University’s acceptance rate at under 3%. One in 37 applicants was accepted (as a point of comparison—Harvard College admits about one in 17 applicants). In recent years, dozens of private universities have sprung up in Bangladesh, sensing the […]
Why Private investors, Governments, and Aid Agencies Should Rethink Their Strategies
I have been researching low-fee private schooling for over a decade. In fact, the term, ‘low-fee private schooling’ did not exist until I coined it. In 2001, when I began researching the sector, there were almost no published studies in the scholarly literature. People spoke of ‘budget schools’, ‘private schools for the poor’, or ‘teaching […]
Low-Fee Private Schools and International Aid
Introduction Over the last decade or more there has been a considerable increase in ‘low-fee’ or ‘low cost’ private schooling in many developing countries. Countries as diverse as India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Uganda, Ghana, Mongolia, China and Vietnam have all seen a dramatic growth in private schools aimed at some of the poorest families these countries. […]
The Impact of Low Cost Private Schools
In recent years there has been growing interest from donors in supporting low cost private schools in low income countries as part of global efforts to achieve progress on education. Indeed there is growing support from donors like the World Bank and DFID despite the lack of evidence that this is an effective use of […]