Smart school project in Iran: Potentials and barriers
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Smart school project in Iran: Potentials and barriers Farhad Seraji 1 & Hamed Abbasi Kasani 2 & Hojjat Abedi 3 & Mohammad Sajedifard 4 Received: 25 November 2019 / Accepted: 24 March 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The study was aimed at identifying the potentials of and barriers to the Smart School Project (SSP). Through the use of a mixed methods design, data were garnered from 746 school teachers, principals, and information technology experts, semi-structured interviews with 21 key informants and two researcher-designed questionnaires on the potentials of and barriers to SSP. The qualitative data were analyzed using three-stage coding and quantitative data were analyzed using exploratory factor analysis. The findings from the three data collection tools indicate 8 potentials and 9 barriers. SSP potentials include improving teachers’, principals’, and students’ knowledge, skills and attitudes toward using information and communication technology (ICT), access to quality e-content, increasing school facilities, potentials available in the social environment, developing curriculum beyond schools, student participation in the learning process, enhancing school and parent relationship, and social supports and enacted laws. Further, SSP development barriers are comprised of 9 themes including teachers’, principals’ and students’ lack of access to ICT and using it, vagueness in policies, missions, and goals of ICT integration into school curriculum, lack of support system and supervision, lack of specialized training for principals and teachers, barriers concerned with the nature of ICT, incompatibility of curriculum structure with ICT, structural and organizational barriers, cultural conditions and barriers, and lack of space and equipment. Keywords Smart school project . ICT . Barriers . Potentials . School curriculum
* Farhad Seraji [email protected] Hamed Abbasi Kasani [email protected] Hojjat Abedi [email protected] Mohammad Sajedifard [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Education and Information Technologies
1 Introduction The emergence of new horizons on a stage of international competition and the impact of new technologies in all aspects of humans’ life indicate that the requirements of today’s education are not the same as those of the past. The advancement of information and communication technology (ICT) and its consequent impacts have provided opportunities for the establishment of learner-centered, interactive, flexible, meaningful and facilitated learning environments (Zamani et al. 2016; Gülbahar 2007). Therefore, educational systems in information societies attempt to integrate the curriculum of public education courses with ICT and its capabilities in three main ways. The first is the provision of diverse educational resources and facilitation of the interaction between learners through the network and the technological capabilities that are employed as complementary
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