Ministry of Innovation / Business of Technology

Giving Kindles to Ghanaian kids may be an OLPC alternative

A new study of Worldreading's 18-month pilot project in Ghana shows that …

So you've heard of the $100 laptop. (Ok, it's actually about $180—you know, the OLPC XO.) But what about that other $100 device, the Amazon Kindle? (Yes, the sub-$100 versions have ads, but still.)

Some educators hope that Kindles and similar e-readers, given their low price and streamlined design, could be the new learning tool in developing countries. A Seattle-based non-profit, Worldreader, has been attempting to bring Kindles to sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2010, the group has expanded its offerings to around 1,000 students in schools across Kenya, Uganda, and Ghana.

On Thursday, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), one of the group's sponsors, published a new report (PDF) outlining the 18-month pilot project examining over 300 students in Ghana between 2010 and 2011. The study was conducted by ILC Africa, a local Accra-based evaluation group, and it looked at groups of students who did not have e-readers (NE), those who did (E), and those who had Kindles along with "Out-of-Classroom Exploration" (E+OCE).

Given One Laptop Per Child's decidedly spotty record of showing actual, meaningful, sustainable, educational change amongst its worldwide deployments of about two million machines, the potential use of e-readers on a wide scale is intriguing given their low-cost, portability, use of existing mobile data networks, and design to be used in direct sunlight.

With respect to education, though, it's important to note that 243 Kindles, or 40.5 percent of the 600 examined across the study, broke over the course of the 18 months, while two were lost. Clearly, not much education from e-readers can happen if it's busted.

David Risher, a Worldreading co-founder, told Ars on Friday that it's not easy to square a 374-student study with 600 Kindles that were used. He explained that some students broke more Kindles than others, which works out to an average of 1.6 Kindles per student. However, Risher, himself a former Amazon employee, also said that the breakage rate in Ghana has subsequently fallen to 18 percent due to better case design, and improved training for students and teachers.

So, was the pilot educationally and pedagogically successful? It's a mixed bag. According to the study, teachers reported that the e-reader helped "contribute to class discussions," and that they could cover more material more quickly. However, "making sure all of their young students were on the right page in an e-book could be time consuming," and that "At all grade levels, a very common complaint was that students spent too much time using the e-readers for entertainment purposes such as listening to music."

Further, the study goes on: "High rates of breakages and permanent freezing forced students to share devices. Similarly, electrical charging issues led to temporary sharing."

But what about test scores, or any other sort of quantitative metric of the Kindles' effects? That's where it's even more murky. The study found "consistent improvement" in primary school students who were given e-readers (E, E+OCE), but "the evaluation team was unable to attribute growth at the junior and senior levels to the e-reader because the control groups also grew at the same rate."

In other words, no one can be sure what exactly is going on. Like the OLPC program, it's something that people generally feel good about, but no one has quite figured a way to know if it's working or not. However, the one advantage that the Kindle program does have, is that it costs around the same price as the existing textbook system in Ghana.

"At only $8.93-$11.40 more per student over a 4 year period than the traditional paper book system, the e-reader provides significant benefits over the traditional paper book system," the report concludes.

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