Access to high-quality education is widely recognized as a critical tool for alleviating poverty, mitigating the spread of disease and malnutrition, promoting the overall well-being of children, and empowering women. It is not surprising that the United Nations states that Quality education is not only a fundamental human right but also a crucial catalyst for economic growth and development..
Endless network, a global organization dedicated to promoting equity and accessibility, strategically invests in companies around the world to address challenges such as limited access to quality education. This article focuses on one such organization, Learning equality.
Learning Equality provides educational opportunities for the 2.6 billion people around the world without Internet access. It focuses on delivering quality teaching and learning through non-internet technology. The nonprofit was founded in response to global adoption of its first-generation learning platform, The Lite, which provided offline access to Khan Academy videos and exercises. This made clear the absolute need and willingness to have offline educational technology tools that address the challenges of connectivity and access to quality digital learning materials in low-resource contexts.
Leveraging learnings from KA Lite, the organization has evolved and expanded its impact by developing an ecosystem of open products and tools called Hummingbirds. Kolibri enables offline access to a curated library of educational content, supports the creation of personalized lesson plans, and facilitates self-paced, differentiated, and self-paced learning. project-based learning.
Recently, EdSurge spoke with Laura Lichtman, head of strategy and partnerships, about Learning Equality's unique collaborative approach to enabling equity in education through technology. Lichtman applies his own experience in building relationships to his passion for identifying solutions that break down barriers to quality learning.
EdSurge: What is the vision of Learning Equality in the field of education?
Lichtman: Learning Equality's vision is to create an equitable world where all students develop their own agency, create positive transformation, and thrive. The approach involves creating adaptable, easy-to-use solutions, promoting the use of organic and scalable educational technology, prioritizing equitable and student-centered learning experiences, advocating for systems change, and actively building learning communities. This is all part of our theory of change. We take a bottom-up approach to educational technology in a contextual and responsible way.
What do you mean by bottom-up approach?
When I say bottom-up, I mean we allow organizations to take ownership of how they contextualize educational technology specific to their local needs and experiences. Our goal is to enable sharing in a non-directive way. Our approach is designed to complement and complement what is already happening in formal classrooms and support the flexible use of educational technology in a variety of learning environments. With Kolibri, we provide a free and open source learning platform that is truly designed for students with limited digital literacy skills, so there aren't as many barriers to adoption. Kolibri doesn't come preloaded with any specific content, but we do have a library of content for organizations, curriculum designers, and others to choose from and tools to organize content based on curriculum. We provide openly licensed documentation, guidance materials, and training materials through the Kolibri edtech Toolkit to help organizations set up Kolibri on their own and train educators and staff on how to blend technology into their learning environments. All of this supports a bottom-up, community-driven approach. This do-it-yourself adoption model is one of the things that makes Learning Equality really unique and its reach really broad: more than 10 million people in 220 countries and territories.
It is important to note that while this model supports broad adoption at scale, Learning Equality also works in partnership with organizations working at scale or in different contexts and sometimes that includes partnering with Ministries of Education to support Kolibri delivery at scale at a higher level. -below. Even here, Kolibri offers educators and organizations the ability to use it in a way that makes sense for the particular learning environment.
How does Learning Equality address the challenge of the digital divide and 2.6 billion people without Internet access?
First, it is important to think about the different facets of the digital divide. The term digital divider It often refers to not having affordable access to the Internet or specific hardware. But another important aspect is to think about digital literacy skills and digital rights. Students who are not connected to the Internet do not have as many opportunities to learn with technology or to develop digital skills that are increasingly necessary for the workforce. This gap will only widen with the emergence of generative ai, the use of which depends on strong internet connectivity.
We think about connectivity along a spectrum; It's not black and white. It often happens that you have some Internet, but it is intermittent and with limited bandwidth. Therefore, we have focused on using connectivity (where it exists) intelligently to improve teaching and learning. For example, Kolibri can be installed and updated with software and content in different ways. One way is directly from the Internet, but the other is by installing it locally with a USB or hard drive or peer-to-peer with nearby devices. Then, even when installing Kolibri, organizations only import the content they need due to bandwidth considerations. Additionally, Kolibri is designed to run on legacy and low-cost devices, so it doesn't need the latest and greatest hardware to run.
How does Learning Equality collaborate with its partners to understand and support the unique needs of different contexts, and how is this reflected in the design of its educational tools?
Getting feedback from our community and partners is a critical aspect of product development. Everything we do in our roadmap is informed and/or developed in collaboration with our community. We have four cores. design principles that drive our product development: equitable access, effective learning, community ownership, and consistent experiences. While we support the do-it-yourself model I already mentioned, we partner directly with organizations to test and iterate Kolibri so we can create a better product.
For example, our next version of Kolibri offers students the ability to practice taking old exams as a self-assessment tool. This new feature arose from feedback from the Vodafone Foundation and UNHCR. Instant Network Schools Program, which has been using Kolibri since 2018 to support refugee students. This release also allows Learning Equality partner organizations to use Kolibri to survey their students, teachers, and administrators to support ongoing monitoring and evaluation throughout a program. This specific feature was initially driven by an evaluation conducted by the Harvard EASEL Lab on using the Amal Alliance Colors of Kindness with Kolibri.
We have also collaborated with organizations such as Shoulder to Shoulder in Honduraswhich works closely with the Department of Education to support better learning outcomes, and its curriculum-aligned CREE content is now publicly listed in the Kolibri Library for anyone to use.
More recently, We are working to understand how to leverage Kolibri to support project-based learning to improve foundational skills through a new project in Uganda. We partnered with two organizations to co-develop and implement this approach with a curriculum aligned to national standards specifically for out-of-school adult refugee students for the equivalent of third grade. In just 12 weeks, we saw math scores increase from 44 to 87 percent, literacy scores increase from 13 to 71 percent, and significant gains in social-emotional skills.
It is important to note that not all of our collaborations exist outside of the United States. For example, we worked with an intermediary unit in Pennsylvania to help students with limited connectivity during COVID ensure they had access to necessary learning materials.
Another use case for Kolibri in the United States is in prison systems. We have supported the Idaho Department of Corrections to assist students with STEM subjects and GED acquisition. Often these students developed the skills to become mentors or coaches within the system, supporting others to learn.
How to get involved in Learning Equality work: There are many ways you too can help make quality educational opportunities accessible to all.
