In Focus
Featured Organization: RTI
Celebrating Ten Years of the mEducation Alliance
Written by: Carmen Strigel, Director of Technology for Education and Training
Black spots dance in front of my eyes, my throat is dry, and my heart is beating erratically. It is 2011 and I find myself in a big DC hotel conference room nervously awaiting participants to join me and my colleague for our presentation on “Literacy—it’s in our hands: A demonstration of mobile devices for oral reading assessment data collection”. It was my first presentation at the mEducation Alliance Symposium (then known as the m4Ed4Dev Symposium)– but not my last.
I remember being absolutely psyched about the event. I had just returned from a posting in the Pacific Islands and could not believe my luck that there were so many other people doing what I do and love: designing, implementing, and evaluating technology for international education. My colleague at RTI International, Mike McKay, and I were excited about presenting on Tangerine, the open-source mobile technology platform we developed at RTI to facilitate student early reading assessments. As mobile technology went in those days, Tangerine was cutting edge (and still is 
). It is a multilingual, offline-first platform designed specifically for low resource and low connectivity contexts.
Since then, we have had the opportunity to share many more milestones for Tangerine at many more mEducation Alliance Symposia. From its humble beginning assessing 200 children on a USAID-funded early learning project in Kenya in 2012 to its current status as one of the largest multi-purpose, open access mobile technology platforms, Tangerine has been used by 80+ organizations to support student learning assessments, teacher coaching, data collection, and sector monitoring in more than 60 countries and 100 languages.
Tangerine has come a long way. So has the mEducation Alliance Symposium.
Participation at the Symposium has soared since that first year RTI attended. Through the years, thousands of innovations have been presented, hundreds of partnerships have been forged, and the international membership of the Alliance has expanded to Europe and beyond. In recent years, the Symposium enjoyed the unparalleled modern and light surroundings of the United States Institute of Peace building – a far cry from the rather dark and unwelcoming underground conference center in 2011. There is hardly a better location for an event that always manages to strike a balance between time for structured presentations and informal discussions, between keeping what worked and trying out new session formats, and between inviting new innovators to present their products while allowing others to share new applications and learnings from existing products and approaches.
Since that first presentation in 2011, RTI has not only continuously participated in the event by presenting on Tangerine and many other EdTech innovations and findings but has also had the pleasure to contribute as a sponsor. As a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the human condition, we were delighted to support the conference to include more international participants and a greater diversity of learning experiences.
The 2020 Symposium was special, sad and exciting. It was special in that the event took place entirely virtually. It was sad because I missed chatting away, having coffee, and learning with the friends that I have made over the years: the organizers, the Alliance member organization representatives, and those faithful participants who, like me, had been a constant fixture at the Symposium year after year. It was exciting because going virtual further opened participation by innovators from the Global South and allowed for new approaches to sharing and learning (including a virtual escape room experience!).
This year also marked the incorporation of the mEducation Alliance into an independent non-governmental organization. The entire RTI International education team wishes the Alliance the best of luck in this new function and we look forward to many more Symposia to come!
