1.0 ABSTRACT

Early Childhood Education is considered to be one of the most important aspects of a country’s education process. Unlike other areas of education early childhood education needs an integrated approach from various parties including the Government, teachers, students, parents and health care services. However most countries especially developing countries, have so far failed to integrate those systems effectively resulting low quality and inefficient systems for early childhood education and development. Further locating the resources for children is not properly organized.

Therefore we are proposing an ICT infrastructure which could be implemented as a government portal that supports an efficient management of Early Childhood Education and Development within a country. This integrates all the parties relevant for the early childhood education and development (Government, teachers, nurseries, parents, doctors/health care officers etc.) enabling a cooperated actions among them. We have kept a strong eye towards the research and other recommendations of the international organizations like UNESCO regarding the same domain. We believe that by implementing this type of a networking model, governments can accelerate their drives towards the Millennium Development Goals. This type of an ICT infrastructure is also capable of enabling common masses to achieve high quality education for their children.

2.0 INTRODUCTION

Early childhood education is considered to be the most important stage of the human education process [12, 16]. Reason for this is that, it could have direct impacts on the secondary and tertiary education processes of a person and hence could effect to the overall literacy of the country.

Therefore, UNESCO has given top priority for Early Childhood Education in their agenda for “Education for All” [15, 3].

However, most of the countries are still struggling to provide a satisfactory Early Childhood Education for the children within their territories [20]. Especially developing countries are faced with several problems with related to development of Early Childhood Education [6]. Among these, three prominent issues could be identified. They can be mentioned as, lack of resources, inability of parents to spend time on their children and poor health conditions of the children [18, 1, 4]. Therefore an integrated approach is important in achieving the success in early childhood education process [7, 2, 19]. The objective of the proposed solution is to develop an IT infrastructure which could facilitate the attainment of above mentioned requirements.

The proposed system is called ISECED (Integrated Services for Early Childhood Education & Development) a web application that integrates all the parties related to Early Childhood Education, including the nurseries, day care centers, teachers, students, parents, doctors, local authorities and Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs). So, the main functionalities provided by the system can be specified as follows.

1. Integrate all parties important for early childhood education through a single system and enable communication among them.2. Let parents to actively get involved in child’s development process.3. Give Government the opportunity to monitor and guide all nurseries, day care centers, teachers and children with the help of a single system.4. Provide training, syllabuses and e-learning materials for teachers.

ISECED – an ICT infrastructure for Early Childhood Education and Development

Ruvindee Rupasinghe, Anuruddha Ranatunga, Sanjaya Ratnayake, Amila SajayahanFavulty of Information technology, University of Moratuwa

ruvindee@yahoo.com

5. Support to allocate scarce resources efficiently.6. Develop a comprehensive information system, which could support government to develop policies and plans for early childhood education.

A pilot project was carried out with two nurseries to evaluate the system. The project was a success and got positive responses from the teachers, parents as well as the health care officers.

3.0 EXISTING WORK

Several ICT initiatives exist in the domain of Early Childhood Education [11]. These projects are ranging from the government information portals to ICT enabled class room education. Two such examples are discussed below.

3.1 ICT infrastructure project in New Zealand

An ICT infrastructure has been developed in New Zealand for supporting the Early Childhood education. This concentrates mainly on using the ICT as a supporter for the in class learning. Here, various related issues like IT applications, Ergonomics, Cyber Safety and network designs have been addressed [10]. However, this project does not try to utilize ICT beyond the class room environment and address other important issues faced by the Early Childhood Education.

3.2 “TEChPLACEs” Project

Technology in Early Childhood-Planning and Learning about Community Environments (TEChPLACEs) was funded in 1997 by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Technology.This involves the development of a web site for linking local schools. Pre schools and kindergartens were also involved with the project. Basic objective of the project was to enhance the learning experience of the children [8].

3.3 US government portal for Early Childhood Education

US government portal for Early Childhood Education provides useful information for multiple parties engaged in Early Childhood Education. Here, the information for parents, service providers, researchers, agencies and policy makers are available [9]. Resources available for the parents include various guiding materials covering different aspects of Early Childhood Education. Service providers are also provided with various guiding materials. Data sets, statistics and funding details are available for the researchers. However, the functionality of the portal is eventually limited as only an information provider.

When we look at the existing work, it is clear that in most of the situations ICT has been used for either supporting the in class education or as a mere information provider. These kinds of systems might be sufficient for developed countries. But, for developing countries there are certain other issues that can be effectively addressed by incorporating ICT [11]. Especially, enhancing the parent participation in child’s education process, keeping a better awareness on the child’s health condition, coordinating resources for the needed and integrating all the stakeholders in a particular child’s education process can be addressed by creative introduction of Information Technology. The contribution of this project comes here.

4.0 USAGE OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY IN EMPOWERING EARLY CHILDHOOD RELATED ACTIVITIES

ISECED integrates all the related parties to the early childhood education and development. Therefore it Empowers parents on the progress of child’s education process in an effective manner. Further ISECED provides a common interface for parents and teachers to interact and share their knowledge with the experts in education field as well as the health sector. Through these processes it is able to utilize the available resources in an efficient manner. The main features of ISECED are as follows.

4.1 Empowering parents

In Sri Lanka most of the parents are engaged in various kinds of jobs. Especially the parents in urban cities are busy with their work schedules [14]. Therefore they do not have enough time to attend children matters in an efficient manner. ISECED portal breaks those barrios for parents by implementing a way to empower communication among parents and other relevant parties.

4.2 Standardizing nurseries

Currently the nurseries are maintaining their own syllabuses which may be ineffective in most of the time [5]. Therefore ISECED brings up a way to provide daily learning materials for nurseries to follow. Therefore all the nurseries will be following the same guidance in teaching the children.

4.3 Maintaining education related health records of children

The education and health has an unbreakable relationship between each other [13]. Therefore

maintaining education related health records is important for improving the child’s long term mental and physical health [17]. Therefore the local midwives are provided with a PDA application in order to store the health data of the children in her village. She may collect data electronically through the devices provided and later will upload the data to the portal.

4.4 Manage resource distribution among relevant parties

There are many donors located locally as well as internationally having lesser information on the resource requirements of the developing countries like Sri Lanka. Therefore the portal provides a way for donors to come to know the resource requirements of the nurseries in the region. Further the system implements a one to one donor concept by letting individual donors to select individual nurseries or children and contribute their education. This will encourage small donors to take part in the child’s education process.

Fig1: The high level architecture of ISECED

5.0 DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION

The high level architecture of the system is depicted in the figure 5.1. All the parties related to early childhood education are connected through the web portal. The system has been implemented considering the computer literacy of the users of the system. Most of the users of the portal are people with little computer literacy. Therefore the interfaces provided are implemented in a way that users can easily understand and use the portal.

ISECED provides more facilities to the user to enhance the early child education. online meetings, daily progress reports of the child, SMS notification service for parents, special vista side bar gadget to support donor’s participation, maintain health data of child, maintain centralized database for all parties, analytical data tool for governments and researches, one to one donor coordination, multi language facility and virtual community services are some of them. Services are provided to the identified users through the log in.

The doctors, parents, local child care officers and nursery teachers can use the online meeting facility and video conference facility provided by the system. Daily progress reports can be viewed by parents and local child are officers. User can analyze those data in various ways using different visualizing methods in this system.

The SMS notification service which is implemented as an additional service is used to ensure child security as well as effective monitoring. ISECED gets support from different service providers. Apart from the basic services provided system provides special services for doctors, child care officers, parents and teachers. The portal maintains separate health records of each individual child and provides necessary guidance when a professional consultancy is needed.

The donor coordination module which implements the one to one donor concept provides individual resource person to take care of individual child. This would attract more small donors for serving the needy children. The

donors can easily identify and choose a child or families to donate using online maps and details provided through the journal. All the payment is going through secure payment gateways. Other than these services the system provides services for government and researches also. They can view those summarized data to analysis and decision making.

The portal is implemented in three tier architecture with User Interface, Business logic layer and Backend database. Backend layer implements all data access methods and data control procedures. The middle business layer supports all the classes and methods to access those data. The front end or the user interface display those data in a more user friendly manner.

6.0 EVALUATION

In order to test the system ISECED was introduced to two nurseries. The results obtained were quite good. The parent’s respond was that it was much easier for them to use the system and they were able to manage their work properly. The nursery was happy as they could maintain a proper data management system for their nursery. Further the parent’s respond rate has been increased from 5% after implementing the system. We choose two nurseries form Kandy district, considering extreme ends. One is very urban and other is very rural.

Criteria parents teacher doctor child

Number of Users

24 5 1 6

Per user duration

1 hour 4 hrs 2 hrs 1 hrs

Total duration

24 20 2 6

Hit rate (per day)

App 4 App 3 App .5 App 1

Repeat visits

6 2 0 2

Table 1: Performance evaluation of the ISECED portal

We were able to collect data from urban nursery very successfully. We educate 59 parents, 6 teachers, one doctor and 60 children. 40%, 83%, 100% and 10% contribution was there respectively. These ratios are expecting to increase with the marketing and promotional activities. By introducing more educational games and one to one donor module child and rural parent involvement can be improve. Any user can use ISECED with very basic infrastructure requirements. A computer connected to internet is more than enough.

However, from the system administrator’s side there are costs such as server maintenance, back up and security cost and etc. Therefore a Web business model is essential for the ISECED. Therefore, we can allow parties such as nurseries, day care centers, Child care peripheral suppliers, Other classes (English, Swimming, Elocutions), Banks with child saving accounts, Primary schools (international colleges), Pediatricians and child psychologists, Leisure activities (children films, children parks), Nannies, NGOs, Government and etc to advertise on the ISECED. Additionally we can charge subscription fee from parents, nurseries, doctors, donors and government for the additional servicers. Moreover, registration fee and download fees are also possible.

7.0 CONCLUSION AND FURTHER WORK

The project is three year maturity and during the period it has gained many achievements. In 2007, ISECED won the Island wide championship of imagine cup competition, Sri Lankan, organized by the Microsoft Corporation. Also the ISECED project get qualify to the world wide finals of cup competition in Seoul, Korea in 2007. The project got a good impression from the participants of the world wild finals. The theme for the competition was “Technology enables better education for all”. ISECED exhibit two times in the “Dayata Kirula” the national exhibition in 2008 and 2009 consecutively. Also

the project participated the exhibition “Unlocking Young Minds” organized by Faculty of Information Technology, University of Moratuwa, 2009. The project’s feasibility was interviewed by Rupavahini Corporation, Sri Lanka, for the live television program “Sedhe Nimnaya”. In 2009 ISECED was selected as a feasible business solution in Graduate Entrepreneur Challenge, organized by British Council, Sri Lanka.

It has been identified Sri Lanka as a very suitable region for the ISECED true implement. Because, the society is well diversified and therefore, all the features can use in somewhere down the line. For example, the parents can be categorized as urban busy parents, non urban busy parents, non urban wealthy parents and non urban non wealthy parents.

Currently system has been implemented and tested locally within two nurseries. It has shown that a portal which integrates the related parties to early childhood education can improve the efficiency and quality of their education process. Due to the efficient handling of donor coordination the resource distribution could handle easily. As a future development we hope to introduce several standards for nurseries and implement the system island wide.

The localization capability brings a great opportunity to implement ISECED in other developing countries as well. Further a Social Networking module where users can interact very effectively will also be implemented. Also this includes a community forum as well.

9.0 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

All the faculty members and our colleagues deserve to be appreciated for contributing to the success of this project in various ways. Also the authors of the references we have used throughout this project are highly appreciated.

8.0 REFERENCES

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