The Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (Ideas) today unveiled a policy paper showing how the Ministry of Education squandered billions by failing to consider the needs of schools and insisting on a "one-size-fits-all" approach.

The ministry spent a whopping sum in equipping schools with 4G connections, Chromebooks and the world’s only cloud-based virtual learning environment that connected 10,000 schools including parents, students and teachers under one network.

However, the auditor-general’s report found that less than five percent of teachers made daily use of the ICT facilities provided to them.

The policy paper indicated that the low level of ICT usage in Malaysian classrooms is due to unreliable network connectivity, lack of teacher training and a lack of decision making in ICT policies and infrastructure implemented in schools by their management.

Titled 'ICT in Classroom Learning – Exploring the Discrepancies Between Ideal Conditions and Current Malaysian Policy', the paper was authored by Jenny Gryzelius.

It acknowledged that whilst the MOE has a holistic approach and emphasised the importance of teachers, due to implementation shortcomings all good intentions are wasted.

Implementation lessons learned from the Smart School Initiatives have been ignored when pushing forward the 1BestariNet programme.

"The highly centralised approach taken by the MOE is a blanket, one-size-fits-all policy that does not work.

"The writer recommends that a decentralised approach – as taken by the New Zealand Ministry of Education – would serve the MOE well.

"In New Zealand each school leader is empowered, through guidelines provided by the government, to conduct a needs assessment for their respective schools to understand how best to integrate ICT into their schools," read the Ideas media statement.

Education policy the victim, again

Ideas said the paper also looked at the pivotal role ICT played in classrooms to create more engaging lessons and have students learn at their own individual pace.

"Additionally, two interviews with a teacher in a semi-urban school and an ICT teacher trainer showed that a lack of stable connectivity and teacher training in the appropriate use of ICT for lessons were the two key reasons for low ICT usage in classrooms," it added.

Commenting on the release of the paper, Ideas chief operations officer Tricia Yeoh (left) said like many other policies, the ICT in the education policy has fallen victim to the government’s numbers game.

"All government schools have been fitted with 4G connections, Chromelabs, and in some cases telecommunications towers, but it seems like priority is not being given to adequate connectivity and whether or not teachers are actually using the equipment.

"It is worrying that we have such low ICT usage in classrooms. As this week is Unesco’s mobile learning week, it seems the right time to ask the ministry why," she added