How Can Technology Support Education in War – WarAware Education Platform for Syria

The well-known Syria crisis has made it very challenging for thousands of Syrian children to have access to education. In this paper, we propose digital education platform to allow displaced Syrian kids as well as kids in the refugee camps in bordering countries, to have access to education. The proposed platform consists of four pillars: Hardware, Software, Curriculum, and Support services. We start by looking at the efforts performed in the field of education in war situations, and we extract from them the lessons learned and recommendations. We provide four main characteristics of war impacting kids’ education: (1) insecurity, (2) instability, (3) lack of resources, and (4) lack of adults’ supervision. We then use these four characteristics along with the extracted recommendations, as the grounds for drafting three design considerations for the implementation of a digital education platform. The three design considerations are supervised self-directed learning method, context-aware education, and kids-oriented design. Finally, we use these design considerations to provide design recommendations for the four pillars of the platform. We conclude our work by discussing the validity of the platform, its implementation feasibility, and challenges facing the implementation.