Nadia Wong didn’t plan on getting involved in Cambodia's edtech industry. She arrived in Phnom Penh three years ago to teach at the Royal University of Law and Economics, a change from her previous life as a corporate lawyer in Hong Kong. Wong was excited to work with young law students in Cambodia, and she planned to use blended learning strategies to enhance the classroom experience. But those plans changed once she landed in the classroom.
“My expectation was completely different than what was happening on the ground,” Wong said. A lack of internet access prevented her from integrating the video and interactive online components she had hoped to use. Even if she uploaded content to a class website, her students wouldn’t watch them because they didn’t have internet outside the classroom.
Cambodia's internet landscape suffers from high costs and poor connectivity speeds, according to the Asia-Pacific Networking Information Centre. That makes it challenging for teachers such as Wong to supplement their classes with interactive lectures and content.
But a year after she began teaching, a friend invited her to help out with the National Business Plan Competition. The three-month event provided lean startup training to some of Phnom Penh’s brightest students.
“During those 12 weeks, I saw how much my students learned when it was integrated,” Wong said. Since then, she’s been actively involved in Cambodia’s edtech scene. Wong is currently the executive director of the NBPC Incubator in Phnom Penh and she served as a mentor for the city’s 2016 Startup Weekend in January.
Wong said the ICT landscape in Cambodia is changing, but there’s a long way to go in terms of educational access.
“I’ve seen technology be embraced in Cambodia,” she said. “Almost every student has a Facebook account.”
Although costs for internet hookups are too high for many private residents and public schools, Wong said, her students frequently check Facebook from wired cafes. She shares videos to the social media platform and posts questions to spark discussions outside the classroom.
Wong also works as a business development director with System Experts, a business that helps schools implement open source solutions for their most critical functions. Even if a school is wired, many teachers manually record student enrollment information, grades and attendance records, according to Wong. She and others want to digitize those processes so that teachers can spend more of their time imparting wisdom than calculating grades.
“I feel that every organization, especially in Cambodia, should have access to open source software,” said Leap Sok, System Expert’s managing director. Sok has worked in the IT industry for 12 years, and he said that many organizations in both the public and private sectors want to adapt new technologies. However, they often view costly proprietary systems as their only options. Either they invest large portions of their budget in those programs or they go without. Sok believes open source solutions provide a better path.
“They can spend that money on teacher salaries, computer hardware, better curriculums,” Sok said.
System Experts is currently focused on open source student information management, which involves digitizing data on enrollment, grades, and attendance. Instead of handwriting the information or manually analyzing spreadsheets, teachers will be able to spot performance trends and student needs more easily.
Once the student information component has gained momentum, the company will expand its services to include learning management as well. This includes integrative techniques, such as video and online components.
Of course, internet access is even more of an obstacle in rural areas than it is in the cities. That’s why edemy, an edtech company, is using inexpensive tech set-ups to provide offline training to students in remote parts of Cambodia.
Kagnarith Chea was touring the country on a grant from the U.S. when he saw firsthand the educational challenges students face. Many of those he met complained about the lack of quality English language instruction, Chea recalled. Even those who could afford advanced training struggled to find teachers qualified to offer it.
“I started to brainstorm the idea of providing a leveling playing field for these kids in terms of English education,” Chea said. Using a Rapsberry Pi device that costs about $30 and a $12 router, edemy provides offline content to rural communities. Teachers can access instructional training videos in how to present the information. In areas where there are no teachers, students can watch videos, participate in interactive practices, and track their own improvements.
Providing quality information is especially important for high school students, Chea said.
“Senior high school is one of the biggest needs since it determines the economic window for students in terms of going further to university, applying for scholarship and applying for jobs,” he said. “Science subjects like math, physics, chemistry and biology are the most difficult ones for students if they [don’t] have access to qualified teachers. … We did a small pilot with four schools and 40% of the teachers are under qualified. To deal with lack of teachers, the schools have recruited teachers from primary schools and junior high schools.”
Not all teachers are on board with edtech measures, including streamlining through open source platforms.
“There’s huge resistance from teachers in Cambodia,” Wong said. “They say, ‘I don’t want to put everything out there because I’ll lose my job.’ That’s a huge barrier to tech [adoption].”
Sok believes that training and experience will help teachers realize that technology won’t threaten their jobs but will empower them to teach more effectively.
“Teachers are our main stakeholders,” he said. “We need them to make the ecosystem happen.”
Chea sees edtech as playing an integral part in Cambodia’s educational development.
“Edtech would be able to supplement the training and learning gap between rural and urban students,” he said. Increased mobile penetration will also facilitate self-learning.
The field will “also allow more capable students to … have more access to economic opportunities such as scholarship and university admission,” Chea said.
As Sok put it, young students “are the assets of the country’s development.”
