Arizona State University has a number of global education initiatives that deliver educational content to developing areas: the SolarSPELL project, a portable, solar-powered digital library designed to provide educational resources to people without reliable internet or electricity; and the MasterCard Foundation Scholars Community platform, creating a social learning network connecting scholars with tools and resources that can be used to contribute to their local communities. Additionally, the Center for Education through eXploration, focused on science learning through explorative digital experiences, is interested in partnering to develop OERs. The ASU Library supports these initiatives, assisting them with finding OERs, content curation, and consulting about licensing and intellectual property rights.
Using open content is critical to the success of these initiative. These programs require content that is freely available for people everywhere to view, and local teachers and learners need to be able to reuse and repurpose resources for their own needs. Trying to teach about copyright, intellectual property, and licensing on a global scale would make these projects impossible.
Our panelists will discuss their hopes for contributing to a healthier and more informed global society, and share ideas about how to overcome the challenges they face, such as:
How to partner with local educators and curate content for communities with different cultures and contexts? Can we augment their curricula and optimize materials, tools, and interfaces to reflect life in those locations?
How to build capacity in underdeveloped areas to sustain digital educational programs, including: teaching with technology, leveraging content for the curricula, developing information literacy skills, and developing local content?
How to create platforms that are easy to use for a wide variety of teachers and learners that incorporate many ways of understanding, knowing and navigating?
Nearly 5 billion people around the world lack basic internet access, putting them at a severe disadvantage in terms of economic, educational, health, and social opportunity. While a number of providers are attempting to address this global digital divide, our panel will explore a collaborative effort to bridge this divide using several low-cost technological solutions, offering enormous potential for reaching the developing world. We will discuss our experiences using Outernet, Keepod, and RACHEL (Remote Area Community Hotspot for Education & Learning). These technologies allow our team to distribute open content to information-poor communities in a cost-effective and efficient way.
In partnership with Outernet, a global broadcast data startup, an IT nonprofit in Malawi called ShiftIT, Salesforce/Heroku, and World Possible, University of Massachusetts Amherst librarians, students, and faculty are transmitting sought-after, openly licensed information to libraries and schools that have no, or very limited, internet access. Under the leadership of the UMass Amherst Libraries a student World Librarians group is providing residents of the developing nation of Malawi with access to information that would otherwise be out of reach. Sites in Malawi request information they want via Twitter and tag the UMass Amherst account. The advantage of Twitter being the reduced cost to cellular data plans. Tweets are then organized and managed within the Salesforce & Heroku Apps, allowing searchers to easily fulfill requests. The preliminary success of this pilot suggests that there is potential for it to be replicated on a much larger scale as well as expanded into other fields such as public health.
