Giving school children access to technology tools to aid learning has been a goal for politicians and administrators worldwide. The challenge is in choosing products and services that can help lift learning outcomes rather than serve as just a prop for cheesy photo ops. In the early 2000s, visionaries such as MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte thought they had all the answers with the One-Laptop-Per-Child initiative. Still, cost and product challenges sank the project. In the US, Google, Apple and Microsoft are locked in a three-way fight for digitising schools nationwide. Two of them, Google and Microsoft, are now in battle in Indonesia, where the pandemic sped up the use of tech in education. Driven by a young and enterprising education minister, Nadiem Makarim (the co-founder of superapp Gojek), the Indonesian government green-lit a billion-dollar project to digitise education in 2019. In 2021, Indonesia’s education ministry said it would spend US$243 million to purchase laptops and other gadgets. While Google has been an early beneficiary of Indonesia’s school digitization program, the use and adoption of its Chromebooks have been uneven. Anti-corruption crusaders are up in arms over the opacity of the decision -making. Microsoft, which commands a ~90% market share in operating systems with Windows in Indonesia (Google has a minute 0.22%), must think it has the short end of the stick. Can Makarim overcome these challenges and roll out a viable program for Indonesia’s schools and students? As tech behemoths battle over getting laptops into children’s hands, the question arises: are these companies and an ambitious minister losing sight of achieving better learning outcomes?
