2023 Reflections: Innovating for Inclusive and Equitable Education
A look back at some of our accomplishments over the year, and the impact we’ve had serving communities and building equity in education across the globe.
Leveraging AI to prioritize equity in our tools
Implementing an edtech project requires thinking about the digital learning materials that will be used. Typically, one would either invest in creating a new set of materials or you take advantage of Open Education Resources (OERs) that have been created by others and released under free and open licenses. These open resources, however, are generally created with a specific context in mind, more often than not in English, and scattered across various sources on the Internet, each of which is organized differently. So interoperability and open use across multiple countries can be challenging.
To support effective learning, to help localize these resources, and make edtech programs more sustainable, the use of OERs need to be supported by curriculum alignment: the process of organizing, adapting, and contextualizing OERs to the learning objectives of a particular national curriculum or textbook.
For the past 5 years, we’ve been collaborating with UNHCR, refugee educators, and other organizations to prototype, design and iterate a semi-automated curriculum alignment tool that maintains a ‘human in the loop’ by engaging curriculum designers at key moments in the process, with the aim of accurately matching open educational resources to a corresponding curricular topic.
This year, we co-hosted a Kaggle machine learning competition which yielded some very efficient and effective algorithms to support the process of matching content to topics within a curricular structure. We’re currently working on integrating these algorithms into our curricular tool, Kolibri Studio to support improved content recommendations.
We’re committed to building out these tools as open-source public goods, for use across any learning platform to benefit learners and educators around the world.
We’d love to hear from you if you’re:
- Engaging in curriculum alignment and want to explore streamlining the process
- Collecting datasets around curricular metadata or OER and want to share to support further training of these models
- Interested in funding these initiatives
Investing in young learners through tech-enabled Project-Based Learning
In the past few years, the world has changed. The pandemic deepened the learning crisis, as well as existing inequities in education, disproportionately impacting those already on the margins both domestically and globally. In Uganda, for example, schools were closed for nearly two years and 30% of learners dropped out as a result.
With 7 out of 10 children by the age of 10 unable to read and comprehend a simple story, the need to address foundational literacy, numeracy, and socioemotional skills in young learners was more critical than ever.
In response, we joined forces with Hopelink Action Foundation Uganda and Amal Alliance, and, with support from the LEGO Foundation, created a program that harnessed our offline edtech platform Kolibri, to enable playful, project-based learning (PBL) when the Internet or resources aren’t available to support this particular teaching and learning methodology.
We piloted this new approach to tech-enabled PBL without the Internet with out-of-school children in Palabek Refugee Settlement in Uganda, with incredible results. In just 12 weeks, through a new tech-enabled innovative curriculum and hands-on projects, a transformational journey unfolded:
- Math scores soared from 44% to an impressive 87%
- Literacy scores surged from 13% to 71%
- The growth in socioemotional skills was also truly inspiring, with scores climbing from 41% to 71%.
- And, the program reignited learners’ motivation to go back to and stay in school.
Building on this approach, we also created an openly licensed Project Based Learning Curriculum and Training Pack, which has been peer-reviewed, and will soon be finalized and integrated into our Kolibri Edtech Toolkit for open use.
How to get involved:
We’re now seeking funding to scale the Flying Colors program in Uganda, and replicate tech-enabled offline PBL globally to make it accessible to even more under-resourced communities. This also includes supporting teachers with professional development activities, and developing an Arabic version of the Project-Based Learning Toolkit and Curriculum. If you’re interested in collaborating, please reach out via partnerships@learningequality.org.
Prioritizing refugee education
Supporting refugee education has been a core focus of Learning Equality’s work. There are approximately 110 million forcibly displaced people globally, many of which may spend their entire lives in a refugee settlement, facing barriers of access to a quality education.
Ensuring all refugees can participate in digital learning, acquire skills for the 21st century, learn in their own language, with materials that are relevant for them is critical to our mission.
This year we invited our friend, former educator in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, Mr. Byaruhanga Nestori for a chat about the importance of providing refugee and host community girls and young women with access to education technology, and the impact it can have on their lives beyond the school setting.
Learning Equality had the honor of being invited to attend UNHCR’s Global Refugee Forum in Geneva, Switzerland, where member states and the global community come together to pledge on a range of issues to support refugees and displaced populations.
We submitted two pledges, one related to the use of Project Based Learning for development of foundational learning, numeracy and socio-emotional skills, and one on our semi-automated alignment work. We also signed onto a multi-stakeholder pledge with other organizations working in the connected education space. The Forum reinforced the need to support and invest in refugee-led organizations. Our Head of Partnerships & Strategy, Lauren Lichtman, who attended the Forum, will share more insights about the event and our work with refugees in a future blog post.
Investing in Community
Community is a key part of Learning Equality’s ethos and Theory of Change. From implementers, to content creators, technologists, funders, academics, and volunteers, the LE community is diverse, passionate, and committed, and we are honored and grateful for another year of fruitful collaborations.
Open-source contributions
- Developer contributions on GitHub
We’d like to take a moment to reflect on the many beautiful opportunities we’ve had to cooperate closely with the open-source developer community in 2023.
We’ve received so many wonderful contributions including bug fixes, accessibility improvements, developer documentation enhancements, new development tooling, components for our design system, maintenance tasks, and much more. Not only our developers, but the whole team, has had regular opportunities to see and celebrate these accomplishments, so we’d like to express our gratitude and appreciation to all volunteer contributors:
Thank you @a6ar55 @adviti-mishra @akash5100 @Akila-I @andreamisuraca @BabyElias @cerdo03 @dbnicholson @Devanshu-Augusty @dylanmccall @EshaanAgg @FireSuperior482 @GarvitSinghal47 @Ghat0tkach @haldaranup @im-NL @indirectlylit @Jaspreet-singh-1032 @katkuskris @KshitijThareja @laynestephens @mhasbini @muditchoudhary @moweiss @nikkuAg @pwithnall @Shashank245 @ShivangRawat30 @Soren568 @thesujai @Tweniee @yash1378. We’re very much looking forward to future cooperation!
2. Google Summer of Code
For the fourth year running, Learning Equality was selected as a Google Summer of Coded mentoring organization. Volunteer contributions from this program have been invaluable to improving Kolibri, so we couldn’t be more excited by the opportunity to participate again this year. We’re grateful to all of those who engaged with us, and are thrilled to highlight some of this year’s contributions:
- Manav Aggarwal worked on enabling the uploading of H5P files through the Kolibri Studio user interface, along with any embedded metadata, which is now extracted and automatically set in its UI.
- Akash Verma used AI to auto-generate captions for resources in Kolibri Studio.
- Akila Induranga Gamage worked on enhancing the accessibility of the Kolibri Learning Platform’s EPUB renderer.
Thank you for your incredible work!
3. Hackathon with IPT
One of the things we love the most about the open-source space is how collaborative it is. This year, we were contacted by the folks at Innovation Process Technology AG, who wanted to host an internal hackathon for its developers to work on an open-source project that “served a greater purpose and benefited more disadvantaged communities.” So, we worked together and created:
- A prototype for using machine learning derived ‘embeddings’ that makes Kolibri’s search more accurate and semantic, including across languages.
- A performance testing suite that helps benchmark the performance of our data synchronization library.
We are grateful for their contributions that will help us fully develop these new features to be integrated in future releases of our products.
Deepening impact through collaborations
This year we’ve been fortunate to start some new collaborations that expand the use of Kolibri and inform its future development, while continuing long-standing joint efforts around supporting quality learning without the Internet.
New in 2023, Learning Equality is working with Digital Promise and a coalition of organizations dedicated to blended learning teaching methodologies and quality, local materials with Blue Butterfly’s Eksploratoryòm science education program for primary schools in rural Haiti. Stay tuned to learn more about this collaboration in 2024.
We also ended the year with a new contribution to the PROSPECTS for Connected Learning, Digital Skills, and Microwork (CLDSM) program in Uganda by collaborating with the International Labour Organization, and their partners UNICEF and UNHCR. Delivered to 15 refugee and host community sites, the program is aimed at improving livelihoods and employment opportunities, and is using Kolibri to support its delivery. It will focus on helping in-and-out of school adolescents and youth through academic and job-specific skills building within the digital economy.
We’re also grateful for the continued engagement with Shoulder to Shoulder in Honduras by kicking off a new set of research with the University of Chicago, supported by the Spencer Foundation, to understand the factors that support an effective Kolibri project implementation; Agami to create Bangla math content and implement Kolibri in Bangladesh with support from the Internet Society Foundation; Amal Alliance implementing Colors of Kindness across Greece; and Vodafone Foundation’s Instant Schools programme in sub-Saharan Africa.
Training the newest Kolibri educators
Learning Equality directly trained over 113 educators this year through our partner projects. These trainings spanned across Guyana, Kenya, Uganda and South Sudan. We continue to revise our sessions to make them more hands-on and engaging, but keeping the core components of knowledge, skills and beliefs around blended learning pedagogies at the heart of the agenda — and collecting all of these learnings to improve the Kolibri Edtech Toolkit.
Building an East Africa Community of Practice
This year, we launched a WhatsApp-based Community of Practice group for Kolibri educators in East Africa. Our Curriculum Designer, Francis Bizoza Bigirimana, who’s also an educator, has been leading these efforts to promote open conversations, the sharing of learnings and peer skills building for teachers working with Kolibri in the region. If you are interested in joining this group of educators, please send us an e-mail at implementations@learningequality.org.
Connecting our community through insights and support
This year, our Community Forum welcomed 112 new registered members. Our Forum is a space for potential and current implementers to connect with each other, ask questions and share successes and challenges. If you haven’t yet joined our Forum, we invite you to sign up!
We’ve also continue to share insights through our work at various convenings and through different discussions around the world, including at the end of this year at Pew’s Broadband Access Summit to share how Kolibri is an alternate solution while we support efforts for Broadband for All in the U.S., and on the Teachers’ Voice podcast about how edtech can support out-of-school learners.
And hot tip: the Kolibri Wizard supports the community in finding the right materials they need to implement Kolibri.
Prioritizing enhanced discoverability of OERs
To support learners and educators with identifying relevant learning materials, our efforts this year were focused on enhanced discoverability of resources.
We’ve been continuing to apply our metadata schema to content in the Kolibri Library to improve discoverability and curation with Kolibri. Now, Kolibri Studio users can also apply metadata to their own content in the Kolibri Studio user interface. Once this metadata is applied in Kolibri Studio, learners can filter by the selected metadata in the Kolibri Learning Platform user interface.
We strategically prioritized the inclusion of metadata to the resources in the Kolibri Library as the addition of metadata enhances the discoverability of relevant materials to a specific context or need. This makes the organization, remixing and creation of channels in Kolibri Studio much easier to support our overall aims of having more sets of materials aligned to curricular standards.
We’ve collaborated with Endless OS Foundation for them to allow pre-curated libraries to be seamlessly loaded onto their Endless Key device with their own version of Kolibri by making changes to core Kolibri to improve this process, and to support our own fleet management of Kolibri in the future.
Beyond this, we continue to expand the Kolibri Library. Here are the new materials that made it into the Kolibri Library this year:
Socio-emotional learning professional development materials for educators.
We added three channels from Childhood Education International in English, French and Arabic
- Childhood Education International
- Éducation internationale de la petite enfance
- منظمة تعليم الطّفولة الدّولية
Learning resources in Ukrainian
Khan Academy (українська): Khan Academy videos are now available with subtitles in Ukrainian, covering pre-school, first and second grades, as well as 6th grade Math.
Language: Ukrainian / Kolibri Studio token: sopus-tahag
PhET (Uk): A wide variety of simulations and interactive activities around Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Biology at all levels of education. Learner materials are available in Ukrainian, while additional educator-facing materials are available in English.
Language: Ukrainian / Kolibri Studio token: folin-zijug
Playful Math resources in Spanish
WiiXii resources are designed for teaching Math through games, riddles and practical challenges. Made up of logic and arithmetic exercises with explanatory videos developed to build a growth mindset, critical thinking, perseverance, number fluency, and creativity in primary, secondary and adult learners.
Language: Spanish / Kolibri Studio token: lutot-kamon
10 years of Learning Equality!
This year, Learning Equality celebrated its 10th anniversary. What a journey it’s been! We feel both privileged and honored for the opportunity to learn from and work with our incredible community, in order to serve learners and educators globally.
It was fantastic to bring everyone together for a celebratory virtual event earlier this month: We reminisced and heard stories from diverse members of our community, and from our team, who also provided a critical perspective on our steadfast commitment to equitable education over the years, and plans for the future.
None of the work that we do would be possible without the support of friends like you, so thank you for your support and friendship over the years. It is an honor to work alongside you. In case you missed the virtual celebration, here’s a recording of the event, our 10-year anniversary video, and the event guestbook, in case you want to leave us a little message!
Looking ahead at 2024
This was an important year for our team. We continued to evolve with new roles focusing primarily on the support that we provide to our projects and educators, our overall organizational sustainability, and our core product development. But we’re really excited to show you what we’ve been working on in early 2024.
We’ll soon be launching the much anticipated Kolibri Android App, which allows Kolibri to run self-contained, on an Android device such as a smartphone or tablet. Accompanying it, Kolibri v0.16, will bring ‘practice quizzes’, allowing learners to take and retake a quiz repeatedly, review their answers and keep practicing. This new version of Kolibri will also enable learners to browse libraries of other Kolibri installations on a local area network to import local content without the Internet.
We’ll also be sharing out our new brand, and announcing some exciting happenings in the new year.
Here’s to the past decade and to everything the next one may bring!
Cheers!
The Learning Equality team.
