General Assembly Case Studies
OLE Nepal has implemented a One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) pilot project during the academic year 2009-10. The project was implemented in 26 schools in six districts spread across various geographic and socio-ethnic communities in partnership with central and local government agencies. Nearly 2000 students from grades 2, 3 and 6 in the program schools received laptops that contained curriculum based interactive learning software while 125 teachers received ten days of training on how to integrate technology in daily teaching learning process. Each of the schools were equipped with a school server containing a digital library that, along with access points, formed a school network. Few of the schools also had Internet connection. Together with a smaller test project in two schools during the previous year (2008-09), OLE Nepal has more than two years of hands-on knowledge about the challenges of introducing technology in rural schools employing the one-to-one model. While this model has a lot of merits, there are many enabling conditions that are required to truly realize the full potential of a large investment such as the OLPC project.
The case presentation will include a review of the methods used to evaluate the cost effectiveness of the project and the preliminary findings of the project outcomes. The case presentation will also review the project’s experiences in teacher preparation and participation, maintenance and support needs, community involvement, and the technical and bureaucratic difficulties faced in developing the local and central capacity to undertake technology-integrated programs in a larger scale.
About the Presenter
Rabi Karmacharya
Rabi Karmacharya is a social entrepreneur who helped launch OLE Nepal with the vision of transforming Nepal's public education by integrating technology in the classroom and giving children the tools and platform necessary to learn and excel. Born and brought up in Kathmandu, Rabi is committed to help build Nepal's economic foundation by improving education quality and access while reducing disparity in the education system. He has extensive experience in technological innovation and management, and a conviction that young educated Nepalis have a critical role to play in nation-building. Rabi holds B.Sc. and M.Eng. in Electrical Engineering from MIT. He worked at 3Com Corporation in Santa Clara, California for three years as a design engineer prior to his return to Nepal, where he co-founded HimalayanTechies, one of the first successful software outsourcing companies in Nepal.
OLE Mexico has initiated a project to develop educational games for the elementary level that can be played online or offline with, or without the assistance of a teacher. A prototype series of basic mathematics games has been developed and is being tested and advance of expanding the games development to a full elementary level curriculum. The long-term goal is for these games to be available to children on low-cost hand held devices.
The case will present ways to assess the cost-effectiveness of the system, compared with other approaches, in settings of this particular kind.
About the Presenter
Antonio Puron
Antonio Puron was a consultant with the McKinsey Company in Latin America for 27 years. Over the past two years he has focused his time and resources on developing educational games software that is compelling to children and that enables them to develop the basic literacy and numeracy skills that are essential to developing higher level academic and work skills. He holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering (Summa Cum Laude) from the Universidad Iberoamericana, and was a candidate for the master's degree in Chemistry. He also earned an M.B.A. from Stanford University. He is currently an associate fellow of CIDAC and participates in the boards of Banco Santander, Nadro, S.A. (JV of McKesson in Mexico), Munal (National Arts Museum), Progresemos (agricultural microfinance) and Centro de Colaboración Cívica.
The Rishi Valley Educational Foundation (RIVER) has over the past two decades developed an activity-oriented pedagogical approach to learning designed to be effective in one room, one teacher, multi-grade elementary schools with no access to electricity. This program has been widely praised for its cost effectiveness, and today more than ten million elementary school students, mainly in India, are using this system. Particular attention is now being given to how to scale the RIVER approach to larger numbers of teachers and how to adapt it for use in other cultures.
This case will present the ways that the RIVER program has been, and is being, evaluated by the Foundation and by governments, what the results so far have shown and how to compare the impact of various adaptations of the RIVER program.
About the Presenter
Y. A. Padmanabha Rao
Y. A. Padmanabha Rao and his wife Rama Rao have led the development and expansion of the RIVER program from its beginning more than two decades ago as a plan for improving the school for their village. It has now become a worldwide movement for small, high quality community-based schools. In 2009 The World Economic Forum (India) named them “Social Entrepreneurs of the Year. ”
OLE Ghana has identified teacher supply and teacher quality as a critical area that needs to be addressed to compliment other efforts by other organizations and the government in the country's bid to achieve QUBE and EFA by 2015, hence its Learning Innovation Teams (LIT) Project.
The LIT Project involves Mentors going to schools and working with teachers and students in their classrooms. Activity-oriented early primary level educational resources will be distributed and discussed. This will be followed by teachers and students viewing videos of these resources in practice. Teachers and students will then use the resources themselves to practice this approach. This practice will be videoed and shown to the classes for comparison with the models. Teachers and students will then agree upon goals for the next round of mentoring which will occur one or two months later. The LIT project will determine the cost-effectiveness of this innovative approach and the feasibility of scaling this approach to thousands of untrained and minimally-trained teachers.
About the Presenter
Kofi Essien
Mr. Kofi Essien has served as a senior school administrator and a classroom practitioner for seventeen years. For two years he worked with the Global eSchools and Community Initiative (GeSCI), a UNICT Taskforce founded organization, as Ghana Country Programme analyst. The programme was based in the Ministry of Education and provided strategic advice on the government's ICT in education policies and deployment plans. He has worked with and trained teachers in 21st century teaching through the World Links project, the Fiankoma project and the INTEL Teach programme.
He holds a BA degree from the University of Ghana, Legon, a post graduate diploma in Education from the University of Cape Coast, a post graduate certificate in Project Management, Comparative Education and Education Research from University of Copenhagen Denmark. He is currently completing his Masters in Information and Communication Technology in Education at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana.
Our proposed case integrates technology and human resources to create a highly efficient, replicable and scalable system across many countries and cultures. The case serves remote villages without Internet access or electricity that are nevertheless less than 2 hours transportation (by means of inexpensive local transport, through some combination of walking, bicycle, moped, car or train) from a town which has both 1) Internet access and regular access to electricity, and 2) a literate population of potential semi-skilled teachers. A semiskilled teacher will be recruited and trained in the town. The teacher will serve approximately 50 students, ages 4-8, in the village. The teacher will be supplied with one TeacherMate handheld computer for each student in the remote village (plus spares). The teacher will charge the units overnight each night and synch the units as necessary with a netbook or tablet that we would supply. The teacher will transport the units back and forth to the village each day.
Ways to assess the cost-effectiveness of the TeacherMate system in settings of this particular kind, compared with other approaches, will be presented for discussion.
About the Presenter
Seth Weinberger
Seth Weinberger is the founder of Innovations for Learning, and the developer of its first software programs. Seth is also a co-founder of the Cherry Preschool in Evanston, IL. Seth is Senior Counsel to the international law firm Mayer Brown, where he has been a member of its Global Information Technology practice for over 25 years.
Different technologies have been used and different goals have been pursued in one-computer-per-child implementations around the world. In addition to educational impact, many projects have achieved not less important social impacts. This case study will:
- show the results obtained in an independent research on social impacts of eight different 1:1 experiences in Uruguay, Argentina, Colombia and Costa Rica
- discuss the importance of community building for supporting both educational and social goals
- analyze the experiences and challenges of three communities build in Uruguay: RAP Ceibal, Flor de Ceibo and ceibalJAM, which independently help the deployment of Plan Ceibal.
About the Presenter
Pablo Flores
Pablo Flores Chiarelli is a computer engineer that has been involved with Plan Ceibal since its inception, giving technical support to LATU and the education team during the initial stages of deployment of the plan, describing his experience on the blog http://proyecto-ceibal.blogspot.com. Flores initiated the "Flor de Ceibo" project, which currently performs with dozens of teachers and hundreds of university students support activities for Plan Ceibal. Founding member of ceibalJAM!, a community of free educational software development. Member of RAP Ceibal (volunteer support network). Active member of the community that has been built around OLPC, has participated in various meetings and independent studies on 1:1 experiences. Currently compiling for Unesco a book about the social mobilization caused by one computer per child projects.
OLE Rwanda is engaged in two parallel projects involving different approaches to the use of technology as learning devices with students. One project involves using the Siyavula Project content from South Africa with the XO laptop (OLPC). The second involves the TeacherMate program of basic literacy and numeracy. OLE Rwanda will compare the cost-effectiveness of these two technologies for acquisition of basic skills in literacy and numeracy.
This case will present the ways that the outcomes of these two different projects can be compared for their cost-effectiveness at the first few elementary level grades.
About the Presenter
Jacques Murinda
Jacques Murinda holds a Masters Degree in Library and Information Science of Makerere University Uganda. He has been a teacher and he worked as the Deputy Chairperson of the Southern Africa Youth Movement in South Africa, an organization that had members in the 14 countries of the Southern Africa Development community. He was involved in capacity building projects for young people and civil society organizations and he was a mentor in youth leadership training that aimed at empowering young people to participate in the development of their communities and countries.
