Japan's slow digital revolution (Part 1)
The first in a four-part investigation into a new initiative in Japan that could turn the tables on previous one-device-per-child failures.
Something big is crashing through downtown Tokyo.
In 2024 Japan will begin to roll out digital textbooks for all students and all schools. English will be first, followed by Mathematics in 2025. Dates are to be confirmed for other subjects.
This might not sound particularly revolutionary at first pass. If, like me , you tend to think of Japan as a country at the cutting edge of technology, you might even be faintly surprised this isn’t already the case. This is the country that brought us digital pets, from Tamagotchi to Pokémon Go, Akira’s dystopian Neo Toyko and the cyberpunk of Ghost in the Shell, elaborate musical toilets and robot restaurants. But digital textbooks… What is this, 2006?
When schools first shut and the world went into lockdown, digital evangelists predicted that this would prove a hinge point for education transformation. Two years later, there’s a wide recognition that in-person education is important and that norms around behaviour need to be re-established.
Japan is the only country I’m aware of that has used the emergency of the pandemic to accelerate transformation of its education system. Having kept technology largely out of the classroom, Japan is preparing for digital to become a key classroom tool.
The initiative mirrors a number of high-profile failed digital initiatives from around the world, but this one may well be successful. To understand why, we’re going to need to understand more about the context of modern Japan, the way Japanese teachers teach, and how the digital content is designed to be used.
Because this is a big story, I’m doing things a bit differently. Rather than one extremely long article, I’m publishing this as four linked articles. If you’re a subscriber, you’ll get these direct to your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday for the next two weeks.
The shape of things to come
In this article, I’ll outline the background of what what’s happening and outline the history of some similar digital initiatives.
In the second article, I’ll look at the broader context of Japan’s political, social, economic, technological, legal and environmental conditions.
In the third article, I’ll show you how the digital textbooks are intended to be used in the classroom. From a user experience and learning design perspective, we’ll take a look inside Japanese classrooms and how the digital is designed to work with teachers.
And in the fourth article, I’ll reflect on what we can learn from this and apply elsewhere.
The GIGA school initiative
The Global and Innovation Gateway for All initiative is a real mouthful and most commonly referred to as: GIGA schools. Forgive the snark so early on, but I’ll bet that acronym came before the full-length title. Giga: from the Greek for giant; a prefix indicating a billion; most commonly associated with gigabytes; sounds a bit cool; less alarming than the next factor up. (Tera, which comes from the Greek for monster. Surely appropriate for a country cinematically pestered by kaiju? The campaign to rebrand as TERA schools starts here…)
The GIGA schools initiative was conceived towards the end of Shinzo Abe’s second administration. In 2019, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) announced a four-year policy to equip each student with a digital device and to radically improve the digital infrastructure within schools.
As if to prove that this development was overdue, Japanese schools were closed by the pandemic in late February 2020.
Kazuaki Iwabuchi writes about the way school closures unfolded:
On April 7, at the very beginning of the school year, a state of emergency was declared in 7 prefectures (out of 47 in total) covering mostly urban cities (including Tokyo). While schools continued to be closed in those prefectures, the state of emergency was extended across the nation on April 16, and thus most schools went into a temporary closure. The school closure, despite being temporary, led to a huge disparity in student learning between schools. For example, some public schools had been implementing online education since before the pandemic, and some private schools were able to set up online education immediately after the temporary closure. These schools were able to deliver online classes on the premise of one device per student. On the other hand, most of the public elementary and junior high schools, without online education in place, had to distribute learning materials by sending in hard copies to students at home, resulting in a noticeable gap between public and private schools. Nevertheless, some exceptional cases existed, wherein public schools had allocated one device to each student a few years ago and had lent Wifi routers to improve the network environments even in the student homes. These cases include Saga Prefecture and Shibuya Ward in Tokyo. While these were exceptions, since there are 249 elementary and junior high schools in Saga (Board of Education, Sage Prefecture, 2017), and 34 in Shibuya (Shibuya City, n.d.), these cases highlight that a substantial number of public schools had been ready for online education.
On May 4, the state of emergency was extended until the end of the month, and most schools remained closed. Shortly afterwards, on May 14, the state of emergency was lifted in 39 prefectures, followed by the Greater Tokyo Area on May 25. Schools began to resume in June, but in major cities, many schools took measures to shorten in-class hours to reduce contact between students. In addition, there were many schools that divided classes into two groups and introduced staggered hours for attendance. Meanwhile, in less impacted regions, schools returned to normal with a regular attendance of students. In July and August, most schools shortened their summer break and held alternative classes to make up for the delay in the curriculum due to the temporary closure. Fortunately, by the beginning of the second semester in September, most schools were able to catch up and return to normal, successfully reaching the end of the semester in December.
The GIGA schools programme was accelerated in response to the pandemic at a cost of ¥461bn (c$3.366bn/£2.845bn). For comparison, this is roughly double the amount of money the UK government committed to education recovery in 2021 (and that, in turn, was barely 10% of what Sir Kevan Collins, the government’s Covid Catch-up Tsar at the time said was needed).
So, you’ve got a massive fistful of Yen, how do you spend it?
¥297.3bn went on PC terminals
¥1.1bn went towards assistive devices for children with visual, auditory and physical disabilities
¥136.7bn was spent on installing LAN and power supply cabinets in schools
¥10.5bn was earmarked for ICT engineers to support schools
¥14.7bn went towards emergency provision of mobile routers for households without WiFi during the pandemic
¥0.6bn of further emergency funding was spent on installing cameras and microphones in schools to support distance learning
¥0.1bn was spent on research to introduce a platform for learning and assessment for remote learning during school closures
If you want an indication of the pace of digital rollout, the graph below shows how Japan went from 1.2% of students having a digital device in March 2019 to 96.5% having one in March 2020.
One weird trick
Let’s step away from Japan a moment, because perhaps your Spidey-sense is tingling… One device per child – does that sound familiar? Rewind to 2005 and to the high-profile One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative launched and supported by tech evangelists punch-drunk on the pre-Great Recession boom times.
The [low-priced laptops at the heart of the OLPC programme], were originally meant to cost $100 each, though that price soon rose to near $200. They were originally meant to be hand cranked (like the famous clockwork radio), but in practice needed electricity, and so high costs in infrastructure for both electricity and connectivity. They were meant to be available for all, so MIT said (at first) they could only be bought in million unit lots. Software was open source but in a sense proprietary as other software couldn’t easily be used on them. Internet access was available but obviously limited by connectivity.
And they were meant to be about self-learning. Underpinning OLPC, as its proponents often said, was a view that schools weren’t working and weren’t even really necessary: that if you gave children laptops, they would teach themselves to do all kinds of things, leapfrog the adult world, become vectors of change for older generations and for whole societies. Teachers in this model were unnecessary, and OLPC did not provide a teacher interface or backup. The children got their laptops, were expected to learn with them, fix them when they went wrong, and change the world with them.
Inside the digital society: lessons from little laptops; LSE
The idea of technology replacing teachers wholesale sounds outlandish in the post-lockdown world, but this was an initiative built on the incredibly shaky foundations laid by Sugata Mitra and the Hole in the Wall project.
(Mitra’s Hole in the Wall Project saw a kiosk with a computer and internet access installed in a slum in Delhi in 1999. The argument was that children presented with opportunity would self-organise their learning, even if they hadn’t been taught English, the medium of much content on the Internet. An additional 23 kiosks were placed in rural India, and in 2004 the experiment was repeated in Cambodia. Mitra was given awards for his research and inspired the novel that went on to become Slumdog Millionaire. There’s a good critical analysis of Mitra’s landmark project here.)
A OLPC project in Peru published its findings in 2012. There had been a massive increase in access to computers, but despite this access there had been no demonstrable increased learning for the subjects targeted. There were, however, some limited benefits in terms of cognitive skills. As the World Bank’s Michael Trucano reflected:
Long term, sustained positive change (in the education sector, if not more broadly), whether as a result of an explicit reform process or slower, evolutionary changes in behavior, typically does not happen as the result of a single discrete intervention. Dump hardware in schools, hope for magic to happen – this is for me the “classic worst practice in ICT use in education”. I am not saying that this is an accurate characterization of what has happened in Peru (I have no first hand knowledge of the project there), but this is something that one sees seen repeated time and time again, in countries rich and poor, “advanced” and “developing”. Around the world, expecting the introduction of ICTs alone – no matter whether the shiny devices are lined up in rooms in computer rooms added on to schools or (to borrow a particularly colorful metaphor) dropped from helicopters into remote communities – to help bring about transformative, cost effective improvements in student learning while at the same time continuing with a business as usual approach to other aspects of the educational experience usually proves to be, well, a less than optimal way of going about things. In the specific case of OLPC in Peru, the IDB's suggestion “to combine the provision of laptops with a pedagogical model targeted toward increased achievement by students” sounds like an eminently reasonable recommendation, and one which presumably is relevant to educational technology initiatives of various sorts in other places as well. That said, given the history of educational technology programs showing little substantive impact in place after place, one can perhaps question whether it goes far enough. Given the outsized ambition that characterizes massive investments in ICTs in education in country after country around the world, it may seem foolish to question whether many of these sorts of programs are indeed being ambitious enough. But are they?
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Given the massive price tags associated with large scale educational technology initiatives, it is hard to believe we aren’t being ambitious enough. But given the checkered history of so many investments of this sort around the world, if we aren’t being truly bold, it might be worth asking: Should we be doing this sort of thing at all?
Look, I’m happy to dunk on tech-will-save-us evangelists. A huge amount of money has been wasted on dangerously naïve policies that assume that if children are presented with unfettered access to technology they will construct a meaningful curriculum by pursuing their own interests rather than doss around or follow their baser instincts. (And I’m using “dangerously naïve” here precisely because these are experiments that have been played out in disadvantaged communities as if education in the developing world is some kind of zero-sum game.)
But there’s reason to believe that Japan has learned at least some of the critical lessons from these failures.
Slow and steady wins the race
Japan is better known for the quality of its education system than its pace of change.
The country scores highly in international comparative tests. Despite peaking in 2012 and has showing declining scores in PISA since, Japan remains one of the top performers and a constant source of interest for international education researchers.
The education system in Japan has the turning circle of the Ever Given.
A new curriculum is introduced roughly every 10 years. Coincidentally, Japan planned its most recent curriculum reform in 2018, which started to be implemented in schools between 2020 and 2022. Despite the rapid procurement and rollout of digital during a period of crisis, MEXT is taking a typically cautious approach to routine use of the new devices.
A pilot is currently underway with reports about progress gradually filtering into the media. The reporting has highlighted some of the mixed results from MEXT’s surveys. There have been concerns from teachers that the increased engagement reported from using digital is distracting children from learning and that they’re remembering less from lessons. The relative merits of paper textbooks (better for writing) and digital textbooks (better for gathering information) have been discussed with no clear winner. And concerns about the impact of tablet use on children’s eyesight have been raised. In fact, there are a range of health concerns. Here’s some reporting from June 2022, following the publication of results from a survey of 65,000 elementary and middle school students conducted by MEXT:
According to the survey results, more than 20% of students in the lower grades of elementary school said they had eye, neck, shoulder fatigue or pain after using electronic textbooks or learning terminals, and more than 30% felt “eyes are very tired”. In addition, about 40% of middle school students said they felt fatigue and muscle pain after using it. In primary and secondary schools, 40% of students said that “using e-textbooks can easily make people sleepy during the day”.
But, counter-intuitive as it may seem, this kind of public conversation about the policy is likely to be critical to its success. If someone tries telling you that this one weird trick will transform your education system for the better, you would be right to be sceptical. A public pilot, acknowledging weaknesses as well as strengths, and shaping of policy based on evidence is key to gaining public trust.
Rather than dumping technology into classrooms and hoping teachers figure it out for themselves, there’s a significant amount of support available to familiarise stakeholders. MEXT has produced a significant amount of practical guidance for teachers to model how the digital textbooks could be used in the classroom.
And there’s the well-established Japanese practice of lesson study. Lots has been written about lesson study – if you’re unfamiliar with it, I’d recommend this short paper by Toshiakira Fujii. I won’t retread the same ground here other than to say it is a model for collaborative planning and development of lessons and reflection and refinement through observation. This provides a natural self-organising platform for training teachers in the use of the new technology and exploring different ways it can be used in the classroom.
Rather than “hope for magic to happen”, MEXT has potentially set up the conditions for success.
See you space cowboy…
There was a period when a lot of money was thrown at getting technology into schools, but with limited impact. If Japan’s GIGA schools initiative is successful, we should expect more money to be thrown at technology-in-schools programmes in the hope of replicating the success.
How can we prevent the mistakes of previous initiatives being made again?
While the most eye-catching part of the GIGA schools programme might be the devices themselves, the devices are only a small part of what may make this programme successful.
In Part 2 we’re going to look at the conditions that might lead to success and how the GIGA schools fit into modern Japan.