With the help of Google.org’s Global Education Commitment, Kolibri prepares to take flight
In the summer of 2012, while I was interning at Khan Academy, some early prototypes I built in collaboration with another intern, using a Raspberry Pi, planted the seeds for what would later become Learning Equality. While the expansion of free online learning materials was shifting and reshaping the educational landscape, low-resource communities around the world with limited connectivity were being left behind. Two thirds of the world’s population — and in the lowest-income countries, over 90% — was still offline, which meant that the learners with the greatest need for new opportunities were the same ones who had the least access. What if we could build a system to distribute Khan Academy’s content for use in offline settings? If we could achieve that, we wouldn’t have to leave generations behind while waiting for the slow expansion of the Internet — we could immediately jump in and provide high-quality educational materials to learners in low-resource communities.
Over the past four years, I’ve been thrilled by what the Learning Equality team has accomplished, and what it has become. Through partnerships and grassroots adoption, KA Lite is now being used by millions of learners in over 175 countries and territories. From the beginning, though, we knew that KA Lite was only a small part of our broader vision of bridging the digital divide to support high quality digital education for the disconnected world. Recognizing that learners needed locally aligned, high quality educational materials, and that instructors needed more guidance and support in tracking and understanding their learners, our team began working on our new software platform, Kolibri.
Today, we are honored to report that Learning Equality is being announced as one of the first grant recipients under Google.org’s Global Education Commitment. With $5 million in funding over three years, along with in-kind assistance leveraging Google’s expertise and resources, Google.org’s support will help us to realize our vision for Kolibri: an open-source ed-tech platform and toolkit designed for low-resource communities, focused on overcoming infrastructural barriers preventing equitable access, increasing the availability of relevant, aligned learning materials, and fostering innovative pedagogy and boosting learning outcomes.
We are humbled to be among a cohort of incredible organizations that are taking innovative approaches to today’s biggest global challenges in education. We’re thrilled that Google.org is bringing together and supporting a group of organizations that are so aligned around this same vision of closing the global learning gap. Together, we will continue to work hard over the coming months and years to accelerate universal access to tools, content, and pedagogy that support the success of both students and teachers, in some of the world’s most challenging contexts.
Thank you to all our friends and collaborators for your ongoing support, and we look forward to working alongside you on the path ahead, towards a more equitable and inclusive world for all! We encourage you to sign up for updates so we can let you know once Kolibri is ready to take flight.
