You can fit a short sentence into 140 characters and send it as an SMS, and the pupil can respond within the same constriction. This is many levels better(?) than chalk and talk because records are kept for analysis and assessment, and 1:1 tuition, programmed instruction and distance tuition are possible.

I use facebook to share and begin debates, it's an amazing tool, twitter, youtube, Itunes and flipboard are awesome to share materials, but there are tons of popular tools.

The best reason to use them are:

They are free

You don't need time to teach persons to use them

Everybody can have them

People use them for everything so is easy to find learning things.

The cons:

You must be very flexible to use them

Not everybody can see the value

Alma - these tools are great, but rely on latest device apps and relative high bandwidth!

Do you have a typical hardware budget and usage (Pay as you go?) budget in mind?

Do you have any way of gauging effectiveness?

What interaction mix are you thinking of peer-peer and tutor-pupil?

Some moble social networks such as BBM and WhatsUp are relativley free and other such as MXit costs very little. Most cell phones (even the cheapest) have a number of these interactive tools. In any case people are using them for social interaction purposes.

Although I have not gauged the effectiveness of using this, I know that people want to interact and support each other as they go through their learning experience. Students can use social network tools to motive each other (affective support) while tutors can stimulate discussion on a subject matter (cognitive support).

I've run virtual classrooms on 56kbs modem speed and it behaves remarkably well. No videos or application sharing. Just plain text/small images and audio.

Discussion forums and tweets work well too as others have mentioned, as well as apps like Socrative for classroom polling.

Ian Kennedy we do not have any significant budget (cost) in mind, but for use in developing countries we want to provide classroom software that adapts content delivery down to dial-up speeds. Effectiveness KPI are still under discussion - any suggestions? Ideal interaction mix would be a mix - based on bandwidth allowance.

Good day everyone, I'd go with Edward. A technical requirement seems to be the text(-only) dependency. With low bandwith there's no much room for multimedia (referring to the graphical user interface as well as to the media that can reliably be used for the teacher-pupil or pupil-pupil interactions to take place in this teaching/learning setting).

Though I as a lecturer think pupils or students can in general be burbedend to text intensive learning without overcharging them, this text dependency may give some limitations in terms of suitability: Effective (probably in this context here understood as satisfactory learning output creating) distance learning in (extreme) low bandwith areas may only be suitable for students who already have enough literacy skills as they otherwise wouldn't be able to follow instructions, to express themselves through the medium of text, or to read text materials provided to them for learning purposes. Additionaly, I think these students should also have quite good autodidactic skills, as - due to the text dependency - they would have to learn a lot by their own and also through almost only one sense (the eyes).

Bottomline: As I see it, distance learning in low bandwith areas and/or developing countries might - in order to be effective (!) - (1) be an additional learning offer besides classical (interpersonal) learning settings and (2) be suited only for those pupils or students who are already literate enough to be able to learn to some extent independently. So the effectivity of distance learning might very much depend on the target audience and their circumstances.

Silvester, I mostly agree - do you know of literature justification for text-only dependancy?

Stephen, a happy new year to you and the other followers of this blog.

I'm not really into researching these topics, but answered what seemed to make sense from my experience as a lecturer as well as in working in and with developing countries - and taking my technological basic knowledge into account.

Here are some quick finds that might lead to further references; you may already know them?

Usun, S. (2004): Factors Affecting the Application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Distance Education: http://tojde.anadolu.edu.tr/tojde13/articles/usun.html.

Falowo, R.O. (2007): Factors Impeding Implementation of Web-Based Distance Learning. AACE Journal, 15 (3), 315-338; http://www.editlib.org/p/21710.

Singh, U. (2008): Internet – A Technological Channel for better Distance Higher Education in India. International Journal of Instructional Technology & Distance Learning, 5 (7); http://www.itdl.org/Journal/jul_08/article06.htm.

I hope to see this thread activated during this Corona epidemic. Textbooks at home and instructions received over mail should not be discounted. In Sri Lanka, we estimate that about 50% of more households will not have smartphones/will have spotty access or will not be spare the family phone for school work.

Incentives to Telcos to widen access should continue in the meantime.

Sujata

Absolutely. The world is slightly different from when this post was placed back in 2013. I totally agree that educator have to use whatever methods work, but uni-directional learning (without social interaction and cohort interaction) is shown to lead to dropout (this point is still valid). I commonly old school phone students - particularly those overseas - and this is fine. Whatever works! But interaction is needed.

Stephen Gulliver