Facing the challenges of the One-Tablet-Per-Child policy in Thai primary school education

Abstract

The Ministry of Education in Thailand is currently distributing tablets to all first year primary (Prathom 1) school children across the country as part of the government’s “One Tablet Per Child” (OTPC) project to improve education. Early indications suggest that there are many unexplored issues in designing and implementing tablet activities for such a large and varied group of students and so far there is a lack of evaluation on the effectiveness of the tablet activities. In this article, the authors propose four challenges for the improving Thailand’s OTPC project, consisting of: developing contextualised content, ensuring usability, providing teacher support, and assessing learning outcomes. A case study on developing science activities for first year primary school children on the OTPC devices is the basis for presenting possible solutions to the four challenges. In presenting a solution to the challenge of providing teacher support, an architecture is described for collecting data from student interactions with the tablet in order to analysis the current progress of students while in a live classroom setting. From tests in three local Thai schools, the authors evaluate the case study from both student and teacher perspectives. In concluding the paper, a framework for guiding mobile learning innovation is utilised to review the qualities and shortcomings of the case study.