Large-Scale Deployment of Tablet Computers in Brazil: An Implementation Model for School Districts

Abstract

The Brazilian economy faced a sharp growth between 2002 and 2012, provoking a skilled-worker shortage all over the country, which affected all the economy sectors and threatened the growth in its keenest period. The poor basic education indicators worked as an argument to identify the low quality of basic public education as being one of the main reasons for this problem. One of the initiatives of the Brazilian government to face this problem was the distribution of 600,000 tablet computers among teachers of public schools all over the country. The goal was improving teaching processes and boosting the student's learning outcomes significantly with the use of richer and more dynamic content. However, there were complaints about how the deployment was performed, resulting in refusal from teachers to use the tablet computers and criticism from scholars on the initiative. Thus, this study focuses on the identification of the most important factors to be considered in such deployment in the Brazilian public schools, considering the standpoint of those professionals directly involved with the process and located all over the country, such as teachers, principals, managers, technicians and education policymakers. The study used the Straussian approach of Grounded Theory to analyze the data collected by online survey, interviews, and school visits done in five cities located in different regions of Brazil. This dissertation presents a model that describes sixteen main factors to be considered in such large-scale deployment, as well as their relationships with each other, in order to improve the deployment process and mitigate potential problems. The findings also revealed the problems found in the deployment processes undertook in different cities of Brazil, exemplifying what must be done and what must not. This study fills a gap of investigation on what happens before the tablet computers are implemented in the classroom, during their deployment phase, especially when it involves the large-scale number of devices. There is the expectation that the Large Scale Mobile Device Deployment (LMSDD) model, resulted from this study, can be a guide for future deployments of tablet computers in schools.