Beyond the Blackboards: Building a Micro-Edtech Economy through Teacher-Led Innovation in Low-Income Schools

Abstract

As the global Educational Technology (EdTech) industry grows by leveraging massive, top-down initiatives, one of its most important potentials of innovation is systematically ignored still: the grassroots imagination of low-income school teachers. With limited funds, these teachers generate contextually-responsive responses to the urgent pedagogical issues on the ground, efforts which are seldom appreciated, sponsored and expanded. This theoretical analysis refutes this negligence by placing teachers once again at center stage sustaining, they are micro-innovators, and their ability to know the locality and thus local needs well is the gate towards effective integration of EdTech. Using some illustrative contexts in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, the present paper demonstrates the need to create a so-called micro-EdTech economy, we outline how such best practices and teacher driven initiatives are systematically hobbled by lack of funds, scalability, and rewards within attendant institutions. In order to fill this gap, the paper articulates a framework of a micro-EdTech economy, a cohesive ecosystem that is intended to facilitate and grow teacher-driven solutions. The main idea of this framework is the digital platform that comprises an open-source repository and a microgrant hub connected by a network of NGOs, investors and local incubators. It has been programmed to ensure that grassroots innovation have been validated, financed and shared via healthy systems such as peer review and intellectual property protection. Most importantly, we argue that encouraging such a bottom-up culture is not only a step on the way to greater technology integration, but also an essential route to both increased educational equity, and sustainable capacity building. The paper proposes a novelty in the model of valuing those professionals most directly involved in the learning and transforming the paradigm of EdTech attention through imposition to empowerment.

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