ICT, the Education Sector, and Open E-Learning: A Unique Opportunity for the Decade Ahead

As the World Bank approaches its fiftieth year of involvement in the education sector, its Sector Strategy for Education 2020 focuses on key challenges created in the past decade. With the successes in building up primary education systems, millions of matriculating students in many developing countries will now be seeking secondary and tertiary education. For most observers, this is a crisis: even if enough schools could magically be built in time, there would not be nearly enough trained teachers to staff them. For some observers, this is a crisis that can be coped with: information and communications technologies (ICT) have reached a stage where virtual schools and distance learning can be employed at scale to meet such challenges. Curiously, the Education Sector Strategy 2020 makes no mention of virtual schools or distance learning. In fact, it contains only a single, ambivalent reference to ICT for education. The curious silence belies the World Bank's vital leadership and active involvement over the years in identifying and funding model ICT uses in the education sector. However, this chapter is ultimately not about arguing over the extent to which ICT should be mentioned in the World Bank's Education Sector Strategy. Instead, the goal here is to draw attention to a specific opportunity that the World Bank has before it to shape and guide the many ICT-based virtual school projects that will be undertaken in the coming decade. The crucially important opportunity is one for which the World Bank is uniquely suited: to seed and grow an open e-learning movement based on open source, open educational resources, and open pedagogy for secondary and tertiary education in the developing world.