Access to literacy is critical to children's futures, but formal education may be insufficient for fostering early literacy, especially in low-resource contexts. Educational technologies used at home may be able to help, but it is unclear whether or how children (and families) will use such technologies at home in rural communities, particularly in low-literate families. In this paper, we investigate these questions with a voice-based literacy technology deployed with families in 8 rural communities in Côte d'Ivoire for 4 months. We use interviews and observations with 37 families to investigate motivations, methods, and barriers for rural families' engagement with a literacy technology accessible via feature phones. We contribute insights into how families view digital literacy as a learning goal, leverage networks of supporters, and over time, transition from explicit to implicit support for children's learning.

Low levels of childhood literacy in global contexts may be mitigated by educational technologies, however, these technologies often rely on parents of sufficient literacy to effectively support their children. Given low levels of adult literacy in many low-resource contexts, we investigate the nature of low-literate adult support for children's use of a literacy technology designed to foster early literacy precursors. We deployed an interactive voice response (IVR) system with 38 families in a rural village in Côte d'Ivoire using the IVR for 5 weeks in their homes. Using call log data and grounded theory analyses of IVR observations and interviews, we find evidence that families leverage complex support networks where family members support children's use of the IVR in different ways, via a collective network of intermediaries. These results suggest opportunities to scaffold low-literate family supporters for educational technologies.

Tablet-based educational technologies provide a supplement to traditional classroom-based early literacy education, especially in regions with limited schooling resources. Prior work has probed how children generally interact with and learn from these technologies, however, there is limited research on student engagement with applications that utilize valuable input techniques such as automatic handwriting and speech recognition. In our study, we designed and field-tested early literacy speech and handwriting recognition applications with the primary aim of maximizing student engagement. We designed the applications based on prior research insights and classroom observations from our target population and field-tested the applications with 283 children living in rural Tanzania. We found that observing a small set of classrooms can produce design insights that increase engagement on tablet-based learning systems on a much larger scale. We also demonstrate the importance of domain familiarity in students' choice to persist through activities while learning with technology.

Smartphone- and tablet-based learning systems are often posited as solutions for closing early literacy gaps between rural and urban regions in emerging economies. These systems are often developed based on experiences with students in urban contexts, limiting their success rates with children from rural areas who have had little to no prior exposure to technology. To explore how such technologies are used in different learning contexts, we deployed an early literacy learning application in school and home settings in a rural village in Tanzania. We use Rogoff's theory of instructional models to understand and describe the interaction between learners, adults, and peers. We found that in the presence of a school teacher, the instructional model was primarily "adult-run" where information was almost entirely disseminated by the teacher, while in home settings, the instructional model was similar to a "community-of-learners" model where children collaborate with other peers and adults to achieve their learning goals. We use these instructional models to surface six themes of support and scaffolding that were expressed differently across settings, and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of the instructional models observed in providing support across these themes.

Making MOOCs accessible to English Language Learners (ELLs) requires that students understand the language of instruction, and that instructional strategies address their unique learning challenges. Through the analysis of clickstream log data gathered from two MOOC courses deployed on Coursera, Introduction to Psychology and Statistical Thermodynamics, we show that ELL students exhibit distinct struggle behaviors in video portions without visual aids e.g., narrations without slides. Our findings challenge widely accepted multimedia design principles such as the split attention effect, provide insights into designing MOOC videos, and emphasize the need for adaptivity to increase MOOC access for ELLs.

Open access and low cost make Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) an attractive learning platform for students all over the world. However, the majority of MOOCs are deployed in English, which can pose an accessibility problem for students with English as a Second Language (ESL). In order to design appropriate interventions for ESL speakers, it is important to correctly identify these students using a method that is scalable to the high number of MOOC enrollees. Our findings suggest that a new metric, browser language preference, may be better than the commonly-used IP address for inferring whether or not a student is ESL.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have the potential to bridge education and literacy gaps by offering high quality, free courses to anyone with an Internet connection. MOOCs in their present state, however, may be relatively inaccessible to non-native English speakers, as a majority of MOOC content is in the English language. While a potential solution is to translate all MOOC content into all languages, it is not known whether this solution will satisfy the learning goals of all English as a Second Language (ESL) speakers. Through a series of interviews, we investigate ESL speakers' motivations for taking MOOCs and other online courses. Our findings show that ESL speakers have a variety of motivations for taking online courses that are not captured in current surveys, which implies that current one-size-fits-all approaches to increasing MOOC accessibility for learners with a first language other than English may not be effective. Rather, offering learners individualized tools based on their motivation and needs may be more effective.