Open Learning ExchangeUniversal Basic Education 2015

The Open Courseware movement has grown up with the Internet, thus effectively limiting its benefits to those with access to the Internet. While this presents few problems in the developed world and for many in urban locations in the developing world, a huge proportion of the world’s population is unable to benefit from Internet-based OCW.
The Open Learning Exchange (OLE) focuses on accelerating the process of ensuring access to Quality Universal Basic Education for all people, especially for the most marginalized children of the world. For them we need scalable, low-cost and Internet-independent access to OCW.
To that end OLE has developed a hybrid model that combines Internet-based resources at the global and national levels and connects these services to offline digital libraries that can be used in remote regions of the world. The five elements of the model are:

Billion Kids BELL.

The Billion Kids Basic E-Learning Library (Billion Kids-BELL) is a drupal-based repository available for no fee on the Internet and designed to include OCW related to basic learning from sources throughout the world. It has been created to enable educators, teachers and students to find highly rated open learning resources and to rate and comment on resources they have used

National BELL.

The National Basic E-Learning Library (National BELL) involves the same basic library system software and is deployed at the national level. It contains those open source materials that are deemed by the educational leaders of that country to be appropriate for their educational system. The National BELL may be openly available on the Internet or it may be established as an Intranet with materials that are limited for use in that country.

School BELL.

OLE’s School Basic E-Learning Library (School BELL) involves establishing a basic public library in remote villages. It employs a stand-alone server that does not require Internet access. It uses only 12 volts of power that can be drawn from solar cells or a manual or pedaled charger. The School BELL downloads from the National BELL thousands of open basic education courseware aligned with the national educational standards, including textbooks and related video, audio, photos. With the option of a printer and projector, in addition to wi-fi, the School BELL provides the entire village with a public library that can include not only basic literacy and numeracy materials but anything of interest to the village.

Personal BELL.

The Personal Basic E-Learning Library (Personal BELL) will be an Android-based software package that runs on any Android device. It will contain the personal library (textbooks, workbooks, videos, etc.) of a learner, downloaded from the School Bell or other sources as they become available. The Personal BELL does not yet exist but it is in OLE’s development plans. OLE is seeking to find individuals and organizations interested in developing and helping to deploy this software.

Open Learning Exchange Founder and CEO Richard Rowe
reflects on OLE’s accomplishments in 2010 and hopes for 2011:

Looking back at 2010 one can see that the Open Learning Exchange began to achieve significant momentum in a number of ways. 2011 promises to be even more dynamic.

Richard Rowe and Jacques Murinda

OLE Rwanda hosted the second OLE General Assembly in Kigali in October. Opened by Rwandan Education Minister Charles Murigande, the assembly actively engaged over 40 representatives from Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America and Australia in addressing the theme “What Works? Exploring Approaches to Quality Universal Basic Education.” A set of guidelines for assessing educational innovations in developing countries will be one of the results of these discussions. The clear outcomes of this assembly included breakthrough deliberations on ways to determine program effectiveness and new agreements to share ideas and resources. One could feel a growing collaborative spirit.

Under the leadership of OLE Rwanda Executive Director Jacques Murinda, several new innovations are being implemented. OLE Rwanda has installed the first School BELL (Basic E-Learning Library) on a pilot basis. This is a low cost standalone digital library designed to enable remote rural villages to have a robust library of basic learning resources that can serve the adults as well as their children. In addition, Seth Weinberger, founder of Innovations for Learning and creator of the TeacherMate, has provided 250 TeacherMate devices to be used over the course of the 2011 school year for basic literacy and numeracy in the early grades. Kari Mruz, administrative assistant for OLE, has assumed leadership of that project. Also, supported by two Danish companies, Systematic and Danfoss, a curriculum development and teacher training project is underway for schools using the laptops distributed by One Laptop per Child. The juxtaposition of these two projects will enable OLE Rwanda to undertake the first study comparing the relative cost effectiveness of these two approaches to accelerating learning. The first results of these studies will be available late in 2011.

OLE Nepal's Rabi Karmacharya

OLE Nepal, under Executive Director Rabi Karmacharya, carried out a comprehensive and independent evaluation of its laptop pilot in rural Nepali schools and moved toward a greater focus on curriculum development and teacher development, working closely with the government to create open educational resources specifically aligned with the Nepali early education curriculum. OLE Nepal is now negotiating the next phase of its work.

OLE Mexico, under the leadership of Antonio Puron, is developing our newest OLE Center and creating a series of interactive games for learning basic math and language. Initially available on the Internet, these games will become available offline as well on the national and local Bell libraries.

OLE Ghana's Kofi Essien

In addition to these active OLE Centers, we are responding to several new requests from social entrepreneurs eager to establish OLE centers in their countries. This includes Malawi, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Peru and Bolivia. We expect these, and others will emerge as strong OLE Centers during 2011.

A key part of OLE International’s strategy for accelerating Quality Universal Basic Education throughout the world remains the development of a multi-faceted tool kit that OLE Centers and others can use to develop and adapt appropriate learning materials and make them available to all children, especially those who are most marginalized by poverty and geography.

We have focused in 2010 upon bringing the Billion Kids Library software into a form that it can readily be installed as a national library and in developing the School BELL (Basic E-Learning Library) as a stand-alone facility that can be installed in remote village schools. Both of these options need further development but are now in a form that national centers and volunteers from around the world can continue to develop and customize the software to the unique requirements of each location.

So, as you can see, OLE is experiencing some remarkable momentum as we begin another year. As we persist with our irrational dream of somehow enabling a billion children to acquire a high quality basic education, we greet 2011 with a growing sense of possibility.

Rwandan students with TeacherMates

Under a joint pilot project sponsored by Innovations for Learning and Open Learning Exchange, handheld devices called TeacherMates will be distributed to approximately 540 students at Remera Catholic II Primary School in Rwanda in January.

The goal of this project will be to provide evidence concerning whether Rwandan teachers, with the aid of the TeacherMate, can in one school year help their students significantly increase their basic literacy and numeracy skills, compared with the conventional methods currently used.

The TeacherMate device has been used successfully in some schools in the United States for native English speakers and those with English as a second language.
 
Rwanda is in a particularly favorable position for this TeacherMate pilot project. In 2009 the official language of instruction for schools in Rwanda was changed to English. This poses a challenge for teachers who were trained in French and Kinyarwanda. Fortunately, the Rwandan government has expressed willingness to explore a wide range of innovative approaches to improving the quality of education.
 
With the TeacherMate handheld device, students learn basic components of early literacy and numeracy independently using interactive activities and games. Headphones and built-in microphones enable students to listen to stories and instruction, as well as record themselves reading out loud. In classrooms with 45+ students, TeacherMate devices allow each student to work at his or her own pace.
 
the TeacherMate device is part of an integrated learning system. Using the TeacherMate Content Management System application on a laptop, teachers can customize the devices for each student, align content to their curricula, create student groupings, set individual or class skill levels, and view student progress reports. Should the TeacherMate project succeed in Remera, it could provide valuable lessons for using low-cost technologies for achieving quality basic education in Rwanda and worldwide.

OLE Rwanda hosted the second annual General Assembly of the Open Learning Exchange Consortium on October 11-15 in Kigali, Rwanda. Participants from Nepal, India, Kenya, Malawi, Ghana, Uruguay, Mexico, Australia and the United States, as well as from Rwanda, took part in the four-day meetings.

The theme of the GA was “What Works.” Charles Murigande, Minister of Education for the national Rwandan government opened the meeting by presenting a strong case for the kind of public-private partnership that OLE Centers around the world foster. Six case studies presented a variety of approaches to achieving Quality Universal Basic Education (QUBE) among severely marginalized children in lesser economically developed parts of the world.
The conference ended with a series of recommendations concerning the ways QUBE programs can be evaluated and a set of guidelines for the development of such programs.
A report on the conference and its recommendations is under development and should be completed before the end of the year.