School Community Remote Education Readiness Assessment Framework

The continuity of education services during the Covid-19 pandemic has made clear that ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) is essential to achieve (even if partially) curricular goals with continuing isolation and confinement. Schools administrators need information on capability gaps regarding access, technology know-how, connectivity, and infrastructure, not just for each school but also for the community that it serves. Several models have been proposed to evaluate ICT impact on remote education, but none assess readiness and find gaps at specific schools and communities. This article describes School Community Remote Education Readiness Assessment Framework (SCRE-RAF), structured as a capability maturity model, geared to identify and measure capability gaps and derive improvement roadmaps for specific school communities. It defines four maturity levels (Emerging, Application, Integration, Transformation); eight Domain Areas (KDA), namely ICT skills, Instructional Design, Infrastructure, Connectivity, Teaching Processes, Innovation Policies, Administration and Resources, and Learner-Oriented Services; and 17 Key Process Indicators (KPI) with their capability levels. SCRE-RAF's structure and KPIs have been assessed though a survey to grade school teachers at a Chilean school network; all proposed KPI's had relevance agreement of 80% or higher from surveyed teachers, with highest agreement for ICT skills and the lowest for Student-Teacher Ratio. SCRE-RAF will now be deployed in a broader pilot to assess a small number of schools, and its results will be incorporated before deploying to larger school districts.