Enciclomedia (SEP)
Description
Federal program of the SEP (massive rollout in 2004) that digitized the free textbooks for 5th and 6th grade of primary school and linked them to multimedia resources projected on electronic whiteboards: about 125,000 classrooms equipped, total cost estimated at 23,498 million pesos. Original idea by Felipe Bracho Carpizo (1988). The secondary school version was canceled in 2007 (official letter 714/07), with settlements of ~1,870 million flagged by the ASF; the full program ended in 2010-2011. The Harvard/ILCE evaluation found that 6th grade students without the tool obtained better results (1.48 vs 1.23) than those who used it.
Lessons learned
Three documented lessons: (1) technological determinism: equipping classrooms without teacher training or a pedagogical model produces null or negative results (Harvard/ILCE evaluation: 1.23 vs 1.48 in favor of classrooms without the tool); (2) the leasing scheme and opaque contracts generated a cost of 23,498 MDP plus ~1,870 MDP in settlements flagged by the ASF; (3) discontinuity across six-year administrations kills edtech programs: each administration launches its own without evaluating the previous one (Enciclomedia was followed by Habilidades Digitales para Todos and Mi Compu.Mx).