By adaptive - August 3rd, 2015
Mobile devices are changing communication in ever greater ways. And as Siegfried Mortkowitz reports, smart devices may soon help illiterate adults read texts and more.
As mobility continues to break new ground, creating new business models, transforming traditional ecosystems and, in the process, changing the way we live, it has slowly moved into spaces not usually associated with revenue streams and marketable solutions.
Now, an innovative collaboration between the non-profit educational organization XPRIZE and the Barbara Bush Foundation is looking to bring a mobile solution to the stubborn and surprisingly pervasive problem of adult illiteracy. The two non-profits recently launched a global contest to find the most effective app to help low-literacy adults improve their reading and writing skills.
“There are more than 36 million adults in the United States at 3rd grade or lower reading levels,” says Jennifer Bravo, senior manager of the Adult Literacy XPRIZE. “Only about 2 million of those are served by place-based literacy programs in schools, community centers and libraries.”
A total of $7 million has been earmarked for the contest, with $4 million to be awarded to the team with the solution that proves most effective in promoting adult literacy over a 12-month field test. The two teams that show the best performance in each of the two target demographic groups, native English speakers and non-native English speakers, will receive $500,000 each, and another $1 million will be split among the teams that advance to the Cities Competition, in which the five best solutions are deployed in several cities across the country. There is also a $1 million prize for the city that achieves the largest percentage of downloads of any of the apps for its low-literacy population.
The competition was only recently launched, so it is still unclear how many app developers will have provided solutions by the time it closes in December. Most of them will register towards the end of the six-month registration period, Bravo says. A similar competition, the Global Learning XPRIZE, for a learning app for tablets to be used by children in East Africa, attracted nearly 200 teams.
Bravo says that adults face three serious barriers to improving their literacy, barriers that mobile apps are perfectly suited to overcome. “The first is access,” she explains. “Adults have difficulty accessing these services because they may not have enough time, because they work, and because of the cost.”
A mobile app offers the flexibility for the learner to adapt the program to his or her schedule and to use them wherever they may be, on a bus traveling to work, in a restaurant, on a beach.
Scalability is another roadblock, since place-based programs require teachers. “They are hard to scale,” Bravo says. “Mobile solutions overcome the scalability problem.”
Finally, there is the issue of persistence, that is, how long the adults stick with the program. According to Bravo, in existing programs, one third of adults drop out before the end. “Skill learning takes time,” she says. “The solution needs to be sticky, maybe even fun.”
Children, she notes, are a “captive audience” by the very fact of them attending schools, but adults often drop out of schools and literacy programs. “We lose them. Finding them using devices they’re comfortable with points to a future of mobile jobs-skills training.”
The way past the stickiness issue may include rewards for achieving a certain score or gamification, Bravo says. “We’re leaving this up to the teams. We’ve left the competition broadly defined.”
Terry Heick, director of the progressive learning organization TeachThought, which promotes literacy through diverse approaches, including digital solutions, applauds the XPRIZE concept and believes that mobile apps can be valuable tools in promoting literacy.
“Mobile devices present ways for people to access information wherever they are and are often packaged in a way that is appealing and a matter of habit,” he says. “This app would be designed to strengthen the user’s phonemic awareness, improve word recognition and then string words together to produce thoughts and then read texts. This is a matter of perseverance and motivation. The project is a cool idea. Let’s see how it plays out.”
But mobile devices also present a danger to the users, the distraction of undemanding texts. “There are distractions on mobile phones that are very powerful,” he explains. “And people develop habits of reading these texts. It’s the difference between a piece of chewing gum and an avocado. Most people are going to choose the chewing gum. The question is not only does the solution improve their ability and tendency to read, but also what kind of texts do they read as a result?”
There is yet one more obstacle that adults must confront in trying to become literate, the stigma attached to adult illiteracy. Using a mobile app allows the user “to do it privately and to focus on themselves,” Bravo says.
In addition, the app developers will be required to build in a social network so that users can communicate with each other as they learn. “A support system is very important for literacy,” says Bravo.
Heick agrees. “Part of the beauty of the ability of APIs and apps to interface is they can connect people. In this case, it could provide moral support and also destigmatize challenges in literacy without joining Facebook. If the app could establish that, it could create a pathway for adult learning.”
XPRIZE is also looking for teams that are good at design and are able to offer a smooth interface for the users. In addition, the app will likely be device-agnostic and suitable for both IOS and Android platforms.
Bravo says the project is “a kind of experiment” that has additional goals beyond the launching of an effective app, such as the gathering of data on app use and creating a market for this kind of solution.
“We’re very interested in usage data from the field tests,” Bravo explains. “How often learners use the app every day, what time of day.” This data will be made available so that designers of educational and skills apps can use it.
This will be of great interest to TeachThought’s Heick, he says. “I’d like to see a broad study to see what the developers came up with and how users responded.”
“We want to pioneer ed-tech solutions for adults,” Bravo says. “We’re trying to create a market for this.”
She says that the winning app will be available to individuals as app downloads and will no doubt also be purchased by educational organizations interested in literacy support.
Heick sees marketing the solution as an important goal. “There is a lack of visibility for these solutions and there are not a ton of great ones out there,” he says. “If this project can create visibility, because of the involvement of the Barbara Bush Foundation, and a market that attracts adults, it could be very useful.”
But Bravo and Heick agree that digital solutions to literacy are not enough, and that place-based programs remain important stages for the promotion of reading and writing.
Heick feels very strongly about the importance of the human aspect of learning. “Place-based education usually happens where you live and work, where your friends live,” he says. “These are the most primal ecosystems we participate in. Many authorities now believe that digital spaces are becoming primary spaces, but I disagree. The user uses the app to digitally dive into a space, but the user, as a person, precedes both. You live in a physical space. A place. I worry that the long-term consequences of digital space effectively replacing local physical communities would be a net loss for culture.”
Bravo agrees, emphasizing the importance of personal contact in education. “We have a vision in which we have more integrated place-based and face-to-face learning with an overlay of digital technology,” she explains, and describes that relationship as “a partnership between human interaction and technology.”
She views the adult literacy project as a strongly forward-looking undertaking and part of a vision at XPRIZE that foresees “a world in which learning is democratic and available to everyone. Not everyone should have to invest $100,000 a year to get a degree.”