Learning Is an SMS Away: Mobile Phones in Education

Remote teachers can request assistance by uploading text messages to Moodle (a virtual learning environment) through which faculty can track comments and provide support. Photo: AKDN

Penina Onyango, Head Teacher at Kawino Secondary School in Kisumu, Kenya, no longer awaits the arrival of Brown Onguko – her course facilitator at AKU’s Institute for Educational Development, East Africa (AKU-IED, EA) – from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to help resolve her teaching challenges. Instead, she has a much better bargain: she can communicate with Onguko when she actually needs his help, thanks to her mobile phone and text messaging, which costs her as little as Ksh10 (US$ 0.13) per message

Although the University is already using eLearning technology to enhance outcomes for students, it relies on the use of the internet, access to which is still limited, slow or expensive in many developing countries. In Africa, less than 5 per cent of people use the internet – in Kenya only 2.2 per cent of households have internet access and the figure drops to 0.6 per cent in Tanzania, compared to 72.1 per cent in Canada and 61.7 per cent in the US, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) 2009 report Measuring the Information Society.

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