#FindFLN — a community outreach for Foundational Literacy and Numeracy digital learning resources
Learning Equality is seeking support to scope the FLN digital resource landscape to identify resources that can serve learners in low-resource environments. By sharing back our findings as a public good, this effort will ultimately support all young learners who have had their learning disrupted amid the pandemic.
We are in the midst of a learning crisis that is deeply impacting marginalized learners in low-resource environments. The magnitude of the learning crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic is highlighted in this World Bank-UNESCO-UNICEF report. This is a time when inequities in education are at risk of widening more than ever, especially for young learners across the globe, who withstood long-standing school closures amid the pandemic.
To help mitigate learning loss, the homework gap, and to support continuity of learning for those who do not have access to the Internet, we, at Learning Equality, have been working on creating free and open-source offline-first solutions for the past 8 years.
More recently, and in response to the needs brought about by the pandemic, we focused our efforts on developing functionality to support self-directed, at-home, and hybrid learning. The newly released version of the Kolibri Learning Platform, the “Take Home” release enables seamless continuity of learning from the home to the school or any other learning environment.
In this model, individual learner data can be synced to provide more personalized support, so that learning can happen no matter where it's taking place without disruptions, and educators can provide guidance, even when not physically present. All without requiring Internet connectivity.
In order to enable effective learning through education technology, we believe that it is critical to give educators and young learners access to quality Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) resources that can help overcome learning barriers, develop children’s lifelong competencies, and improve their future opportunities.
We are interested in developing a deeper understanding of the breadth of existing FLN resources available to identify which can be made available for use in low-resource learning environments. Our goal is to expand what’s offered in the Kolibri Content Library, as well as to build our own knowledge of the gaps that may exist in FLN materials that are ready to be used in low-resource, low-connectivity contexts. We’re eager to hear from those who have already been thinking deeply about this area of work.
For that reason, we are inviting all content creators, educators, implementing organizations, multilateral agencies, and any individuals to join us in this initiative and share their knowledge of digital FLN resources to help underserved learners and educators globally.
We’re seeking to understand the availability, language coverage, licensing, technical formats, and if they are readily available or can be adapted for use without the Internet. For context, these are the definitions we're using:
FOUNDATIONAL LITERACY is the ability to read with meaning FOUNDATIONAL NUMERACY is having a clear sense of numbers
We’ve created a survey to gather these insights. It shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to respond with resources that you know, and we encourage you to share this with your networks to support this effort.
Here's a 'Click to Tweet' for you to share this effort via Twitter
Following this effort, we’ll report on the findings of the survey which will be made available for others to reference and use.
We hope to be able to integrate some of these resources into our library of openly-licensed materials for use via the offline-first Kolibri Learning Platform in low-resource and low-connectivity contexts.
The survey is available in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese, but we want to know about resources in any language, especially in:
Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Chewa, English, Farsi, French, Fulfulde Mbororoore, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hausa, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Khmer, Korean, Marathi, Portuguese (Brazilian and Mozambican), Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swahili, Telugu, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Yoruba.
We hope you’ll support this initiative and help us spread the word about it!
Thank you!
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You can download Kolibri v0.15 here. And there are many ways in which you too can help make quality educational materials and digital tools accessible by everyone:
- If you’re bilingual or multilingual and are interested in translating Kolibri into your language, email us at i18nteam@learningequality.org.
- See a bug? Don’t hesitate to file an issue on Github or send us feedback via the Community Forum.
- Already using Kolibri? Share your story with us via the Community Forum or send us an email at info@learningequality.org.
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