Indicators to Measure the Impact of ICT Use in Education

The history of collecting meaningful data about the use of IT (ICT) in schools is relatively short. Microcomputers have been used in schools since 1979. The first survey carried out by the Department of Education and Science (DES) in the UK was in March 1990, the results being published as a Statistical Bulletin in June 1991.

Mr Aston’s report provided a historical summary of the conduct of impact studies of ICT on education in the United Kingdom and Western European countries. He touched on the measures and indicators that evolved, current practices being used, and were used in the recent years, as well as specific experiences faced by European nations in the conduct of these studies. He also presented “a more sophisticated model for describing the nature of ICT impact at a national level.” Paper No. 3 The Development and Use of Indicators to Measure the Impact of ICT Use in Education in the United Kingdom and other European Countries by Mr Mike Aston, Consultant, UNESCO IITE The history of measuring ICT impact There is no mention of communications other than a note to say that modems were in use in several secondary schools for access to the national viewdata system (Prestel) and mainframe computers. The number of CD-ROM drives was noted as being on average of one for every ten secondary schools.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, had proposed the World Wide Web project. In 1992, the World Wide Web became accessible to the public and in the spring of 1993, a group of graduate students at the University of Illinois computer laboratories, led by 21-year-old Marc Andreessen, created a “browser” program called Mosaic, and distributed it free. Netscape and then Microsoft followed with browsers that greatly simplified a computer user’s ability to search the Internet in search of information. By 1999 there were 150 million users on the Internet with over 800 million web pages accessible to anyone in the world with the necessary equipment and communications facility. By August 2001, the number of Internet users worldwide had risen to 513 million.

Full articles can be downloaded here: Indicators of ICT Use in Education