A Systematic Review of the ICTD Education and Learning Literature to Identify Scope, Impact, and Areas for Future Work
Aditya Johri · 2021
In the past couple of decades, the topic of ICT for development (ICTD) has received significant attention and across the globe, researchers, educators, and developers have engaged in projects to study, design, and apply technology to improve education and learning. The expectation that use of information and communication technologies (ICT) will improve education and learning, a critical social good, throughout the world have never been higher. Currently, there is no systematic review of existing literature to better understand what areas have been addressed, their impact, and what are the lessons learned for future work. This paper presents review of work on education and learning with ICT. We focus on the ICTD literature as it has a mature body of work and engages directly with the goal of doing good with technology. Through this review I illustrate the diversity of the work that has been undertaken on the topic and outline five areas of to guide future contributions: 1) appreciating the diversity of the domain; 2) taking a long-tern view of technology intervention; 3) understanding contexts and perspectives; 4) preparing for unintended consequences; and, 5) aiming for power parity between dominant stakeholders and intended beneficiaries. I also show that not all efforts have had a positive outcomes and many design and intervention efforts have been critiqued.