OLE Nepal Year End Review January 11, 2011

Year End Review

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project in Nepal started in April 2008 with 135 students from grades two and six in two test schools in Lalitpur receiving E-Paati laptops along with 22 teachers trained on laptop integrated teaching methods. The E-Paatis were pre-loaded with curriculum-based interactive educational activities, E-Paath, which is an integral part of this novel approach. It was a humble beginning for an ambitious project that aims to transform education by improving quality and access through the integration of technology in the daily teaching-learning practice. With the long term vision to bring a systemic change, OLE Nepal went beyond simply equipping classrooms with hardware and connectivity, and set out to demonstrate an effective and scalable implementation model that put major emphasis on curriculum-based digital educational materials and teacher preparation. Read more

Literature for Young Adults: Content Creation Project

OLE Nepal has started an ambitious project to create content relevant to young adult in Nepali literature. Over the span of two years we spent collecting and archiving works of Nepali literature, we realized that there was a real dearth of literary materials for young adults between the ages of eleven and eighteen. After a number of discussions on this topic, E-Pustakalaya’s Advisory Panel met on November 30, 2010 at OLE Nepal office to plan the content creation process to meet the literary needs of teenagers in Nepal. Read more

Asia Society’s Asia 21 Young
Leaders Summit

Rabi Karmacharya, Executive Director of OLE Nepal, was chosen among more than 200 emerging leaders from some 30 countries and economies in the Asia-Pacific region to participate in the Asia Society’s fifth annual Asia 21 Young Leaders Summit, held in Jakarta from December 3-5, 2010. Read more

 Open Learning Exchange Nepal  

PO Box 8975, EPC 2394
Kathmandu, Nepal

Telephone: +977-1-554-4441 , +977-1-554-4441  
info@olenepal.org

OLE Nepal, Vietnam and Boston: Part Three June 2, 2010

Content.

Currently OLENepal has a team of 30 people, 15 of those work on creating local content. Rabi showed us a demo of the activities they created for learning English and math. There is enough content to teach several grades all school year! Nepali text-book curriculum was converted into computer- based and improved. The main advantages of a computer based curriculum are that the student gets instant feedback and has infinite number of practice choices, not to mention a game-like interactive way of learning.  The team of creators have to have an educators’ background because as developers they do not know what educators know. Genius techies without any educational experience will not be able to create good programs for students. The goal is to educate all students, not just brilliant ones, but those who are at average and below average.

Educators.

They provided 4 day training to teachers in their first year, now it is 8 days with on-going feedback and support. Teachers are taught different way of teaching: monitoring and helping, not dry lecturing. At the end of the training, teachers convert problems into solutions and they are not afraid of saying “I don’t know but I will get back to you”. It is important to make this process easy for teachers. One of the biggest myths is that you show the teachers what an XO can do and they will create content or customize it. Unfortunately, it is not true. Teachers will not customize it, even if it requires one hour per week,  or improve or create. Why? They do not have time for that. Some of them teach 7-8 periods a day. That is why OLE Nepal started with basics – just transferred from book-based to computer based curriculum. And then created lesson plans and sample activities.

Network.

There should be infrastructure in place. “OLE Nepal has connected all the schools that are part of the pilot program to one another. The schools are also connected to the OLE Nepal central server in Kathmandu, creating an intranet connection between OLE Nepal and its partner schools.Wherever possible, schools have also been connected to the Internet. However, this has depended largely on the pre-availability required infrastructure in the area.

In addition to connecting schools to each other and to OLE Nepal, internal networks have also been set up within the schools. Each school is equipped with a school server that contains E-Pustakalaya and the latest E-Paath updates.
The school server also works as the gateway between the school and the outside network. Each school server is connected to access points in each classroom with network cable. The students can use their laptops to access the server wirelessly through these access points in their respective classrooms.”

Capacity.

OLE Nepal wants the Ministry of Education to have the capacity to take over, that is why they have to involve government in the process on many different levels. At one level it means having right people on the board of directors. Another level – involving policy makers into curriculum creation. Training teachers from the Ministry of Education and paying them for training is another example.  Last year OLE Nepal trained 15 teachers and then sent them to train others to total of 125. They were teaching ICT basic education – info and communication technology. Not just the teachers, but governments, ministries do not want to lose jobs. Instead of threatening them with new technology that might replace them, it is better to involve them into the process and show how it could work well for all participants.

OLE Nepal, Vietnam and Boston: Part Two June 1, 2010

So there we were, at Harvard Square Au Bon Pain, surrounded by chess players, Harvard students, lazy stroller, bums and street performers. Both Rabi and Nancie had Xos with them. We sat down at a table facing the street and engaged in a long conversation about OLPC, technology and life choices.

Rabi said they were very idealistic and naïve when they started OLE Nepal three years ago. They had no funding, but they believed that as long as they are doing good work and can show great results, they will get funding and eventually support from the government. They had a good team and were lucky to interest first sponsor the Danish Embassy in Nepal. Later, there were more sponsors, including Food for education group. The program is giving kids food so that they come to school to study, and if their attendance reaches 75%,parents get a liter of cooking oil every month. Richard and Rabi asked, what if these kids go to school for food at first, but in the future they will come to school for education?  OLENepal’s annual budget in year one and two was 400,000USD.

Rabi named three phases of their demployment:

Phase One from April 2008 to March 2009 (Nepali school year) was testing. They started with 2 schools grades 2 and 6 and 135 OLPC laptops.

In Phase Two from April 2009 to March 2010 the pilot was expanded to 26 schools and 2,000 XOs (2,000 more is coming). Not as big yet as Uruguay (350,000 XOs) or Peru (40-50,000 XOs), but big enough to go nation-wide.

In Phase Three, it is expected that the OLPC project will expand across the entire country. More about phases of the OLE Nepal pilot is here: http://olenepal.org/olpc_pilot.html

AS per Rabi, there are four essential elements in a successful deployment:

1. Content, 2. Educators, 3. Network, 4. Capacity