Open Learning ExchangeUniversal Basic Education 2015

As Open Learning Exchange prepares to test the alpha version of our Library, we are still closely following developments in the Open Education Resource [OER] community at large. The OLE model is an iterative process, and therefore we continually seek to improve the resources OLE provides to its consortium members. The OLE Library team is reassured they accurately anticipated recent shifts in OER online packages, and our work is still on the cutting edge of this exciting new field of educational service. Look for similar feature to these (and more) when the OLE Library launches in the 4th quarter of 2007 ..

Looking around the web, the open educational resources available out there appear to be growing by leaps and bounds. The OER Grapevine maintains a “neutral” list of OER projects online, and there are a number of interesting and notable projects, like the California Open Source Textbook Project. The COSTP has a project with Wikipedia to create a history curriculum for 9th graders that is based on California State Curriculum Standards.

The tools for sharing educational resources online continue to emerge. EduCommons is an open source courseware management system pioneered and maintained by the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University. And while EduCommons is designed to manage catalogs of courses, Moodle is an open-source software platform designed to facilitate actual online learning through the creation of online learning communities.

Yahoo! has just launched a new online site design to help teachers “create, modify, and share standards-based curriculum”. Maggie Mason describes it:

You can drag and drop any element of a web page while you’re researching, then search for other people’s lesson plans by grade, subject, and state standards. You can even locate nearby teachers who have to teach around the same local events (Chinese New Year in San Francisco, for example). It shows you top-rated, most recent, and most copied lesson plans, and lets you build a network of teachers whose work you trust.

Yet, with all these announcements, we can’t help thinking some things are still missing from existing OER packages. Clearly, there is a vacuum of original, high-quality content for primary school children, and an even greater absence of basic educational curricula sourced from the developing world - but what else is missing out there? What does the world need? What are you looking for?

Recently, one of the founding members of OLE Nepal received what many consider the “Nobel Prize of Asia”. Mahabir Pun received “The 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award ” for his outstanding leadership in Community Development in Nepal. He is being recognized for connecting remote villages in Nepal to the Internet using inexpensive wireless networks. Mahabir did not just use this network for Internet access, he leveraged it to provide education, medical advice, and telephone service for people living in rural areas. One of the important projects of Mahabir’s organization, Nepal Wireless is to develop and collect educational materials and put those materials in the intranet so that the teachers and students will have access to the materials anytime when they need them. Nepal Wireless, has already provided Internet access and innovative services to a number of rural communities in Nepal.

While Mahabir is known for his work with computers and the Internet, Mahabir considers himself an educator. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Education from the University of Nebraska at Kearney and then returned to his home village of Nangi in 1992 to establish a community high school. Prior to that, Nangi had no local high school. Mahabir initially started Nepal Wireless to connect Himanchal School to the Internet. It later expanded to provide a number of important services to the larger community.

Out of many, the biggest problems Nepal Wireless has faced are the relatively high cost of computers and lack of high-quality, digital education materials. In fall of 2006, Mahabir began collaborating with Rabi Karmacharya, Saurav Dev Bhatta, and Bryan Berry to address these problems. In July 2007, they formed OLE Nepal in partnership with OLE Inc. OLE Nepal is currently working towards being a full fledged Non-Government Organization (NGO) in Nepal.

OLE Nepal and Nepal Wireless are joining hands to bring exciting educational content and application to all children in the country by utilizing their extensive experience in implementing community based technology in rural schools of Nepal.

Imagine a world where kids everywhere can open their laptops, get online, and learn anything. Ultimately, that’s the vision of Ole: accessible learning for everyone.

Ages 5 to 18

Ole’s goal is to serve children and youth. While people of many other ages will likely make use of the resources, the core idea is that kids can substantially drive their own learning based on what is meaningful to them. An important additional goal of Ole is to support the kids’ teachers by providing a base curriculum and opportunities for professional development enabling them to teach effectively the full range of knowledge and skills needed by their students.

Pan-lingual

To reach our goal, educational resources must be available in the languages used by the students and their teachers. This requires a world-wide community that will create and translate original content to, and from, local languages.
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