Contextualizing ICT Based Vocational Education for Rural Communities: Addressing Ethnographic Issues and Assessing Design Principles

Abstract

Recently, combining Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) with Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) for a low literate population is gaining interest, as this can lead to more effective socio-economic development. This strategy can more easily provide employment and bring community wide change because of the improved quality and relevance of education materialQuery. Although TVET providers are present throughout India that uses some ICT, challenges remain for prospective students including illiteracy, language, resource limits and gender boundaries. Providing TVET that is accessible to low-literate people in rural village communities requires a shift in the design of ICT so that it is universally useable, even for communities like tribal India that has a largely oral culture. In this article, we detail the design and development of an ICT driven TVET model for a mostly illiterate audience in rural India and measure its efficacy. Through our ethnographic and usability study with 60 low-literate oral and novice village users, we present the issues faced and the solutions we incorporated into our new model. The results show that users performed better in the vocational course units with the solutions incorporated.