The Asia-Pacific region has recently embarked on the widespread use of ICT in education. The results of such efforts are only now beginning to become noticeable, but this does not mean that waiting for results needs to be done passively. Intermediate success or results can be measured at various points along the way, in addition to the impact that ICT will make at the end of the program and in the future.  Assessing whether a difference is being made can be accomplished through criteria against which results can be compared. Indicators are required to respond to challenges raised with regard to the role, value and impact of ICT in education.

Wadi D. Haddad, a leading education specialist in ICT in Education asked: "If technologies have the potential to significantly improve the teaching/learning process and revolutionize the education enterprise, in the same manner that they revolutionized business and entertainment, how come we have not experienced such drastic effects in education? Information technology has not made even its barest appearance in most public schools."

Because of the many challenges involved, the burden of showing if success stories exist from the use of ICT in education has become an urgent need. As ICT becomes increasingly widespread, schools and other learning settings, as well as education systems as a whole, need to develop performance indicators to monitor the use and outcomes of the technologies, and to demonstrate accountability to funding sources and the public. These indicators are needed specifically to monitor:

• the types of ICT resources available and their accessibility
  
  
• the extent and nature of professional development efforts
  
  
• changes in teaching/learning practices
  
  
• improvement in what is learned by students

and to show the relationships between technology use and educational reforms, empowerment of teachers, changes in teaching and learning processes and student learning.

An initial assessment of the indicators already developed by others shows their largely quantitative nature. While data that can be collected from these indicators can provide an overall view of infrastructure support and ICT penetration, we should strive to examine more closely indicators that will show how ICTs have been used not only as a basic operational tool but also as a communications tool which promotes the development of creativity, interactivity, collaborative learning, critical thinking and problem-solving.

Eventually, educational policy makers and administrators should mainstream the use of these indicators into their national educational policies and management information systems. In order to put indicators to work in a truly useful way, they need to be regarded as the stimulus for change, rather than as only a snapshot of current conditions.

While the approach of measuring achievements in ICT usage in education using a system of indicators is accepted as an integral part of any ICT program, the issues that we need to look into carefully are:

• What indicators can represent both quantitative and qualitative improvements in education as a result of ICT use?
  
  
• How do we define ICT and what constitutes ICT usage in education?
  
  
• To what visions/goals in various educational tasks do we think ICT can substantially contribute, and in what way?
  
  
• How do we measure ICT usage based on equity which refers to widespread and equal access to ICT?
  
  
• What are the best methods of collecting, processing and promoting application of indicators?
  
  
•  What statistical criteria are required for promoting accurate measurability considering that much socially-embedded knowledge is difficult to quantify and measure?

Finally, it should be remembered that in contemporary educational statistics collection, information pools often contain a superfluous amount of mixed and redundant indices, some of which are only useful to a small number of researchers and not to policy makers and program implementers.