Learning Equality Looks Back on 2021

Reflecting on our trainings and toolkit

Photo: Collectives for Integrated Livelihood Initiatives

Supporting the creation and distribution of Open Educational Resources

Joining together with Kolibri implementers and contributors

Enabling continuity of learning amid COVID-19 and addressing learning loss

In a year where we had to reckon with a prolonged pandemic and its effects on the continuity of learning globally, we look back at our efforts to support learners and educators –and those of our community at large– with a tremendous sense of accomplishment. Ahead, you can read some notable highlights from the various aspects of Learning Equality's work in 2021.

Photo: One African Child

SUPPORTING TRAINERS AND EDUCATORS We expanded the type of support provided to educators to improve their practice to be responsive to the pandemic and blended learning environments. Our training sessions continued to be entirely virtual this year and we have enjoyed learning more of the nuances of virtual facilitation. We hosted a Kolibri Virtual Learning Space on the topic of educator support so our community could learn from the training experiences of others. We were thrilled to feature speakers from organizations spanning multiple regions and then to subsequently join as a facilitator in Pratham’s CreatEd Africa learning series.

Photo: Lewa Wildlife Conservancy

SUPPORTING TRAINERS AND EDUCATORS HIGHLIGHTS

Photo: Lewa Wildlife Conservancy

This year, we made progress towards reaching our goals of providing ongoing support to educators through the creation of new materials in the Kolibri Edtech Toolkit, focused on creating communities of practice, conducting refresher trainings, and self-reflection guides. We hope to continue building on this work in the new year with an emphasis on supporting teacher practice with Kolibri.

Navya Akkinepally, Head of Training and Impact, Learning Equality

CELEBRATING OUR TRAININGS AND TOOLKIT. We hosted 14 training sessions with dedicated Kolibri partners supporting learning in refugee camps, remedial learning centers, community technology access centers and more.

We expanded our Kolibri EdTech Toolkit materials with new training packs, and in new languages to enhance the potential uses of Kolibri particularly during the pandemic. It incorporated lessons and experiences from implementing organizations in formal, non-formal and emergency and crisis learning environments.

Photo: Thomas Van Den Driessche

ENHANCING CONTENT DISCOVERABILITY AND CURRICULUM ALIGNMENT This year, we took some important steps in improving discoverability and reuse of open educational resources to expand their usage and reach, including for curriculum alignment efforts even when the Internet is limited. We conducted a webinar on curriculum alignment, launched a report on curriculum data, and developed a hub for the aggregation of this data.

Photo: Adobe Stock

CONTENT DISCOVERABILITY AND CURRICULUM ALIGNMENT HIGHLIGHTS WEBINARS, DATA MODELS, PORTABILITY, AND COLLABORATIONS, OH MY! We co-organized a webinar on the process of curriculum alignment in collaboration with UNHCR and EdTech Hub attended by over 200 participants from 55 countries.

We developed a data model for digital curriculum with a report and repository to store curriculum data.

We introduced the concept of “portability” how adaptable, contextualizable, and accessible content can be - as a measure of how content to be reused, particularly important when considering content use in low-resource environments.

We collaborated with Common Sense Media and Endless OS Foundation to work with content creators, including Wide Open School partners, to make their resources available for use without the Internet, including on the Endless Key, a USB drive preloaded with Kolibri and a host of learning materials for learners in the U.S. who lack access to Internet connectivity.

Photo: Shift IT

ENGAGING COMMUNITY Our community of implementers and contributors continues to support one another and enhance our ecosystem. We joined together in dialogue to share experiences using Kolibri, as well as to receive valued support in contributions to our translations and codebase.

Photo: "Rhodes Park School Pupils in the School Computer Lab during a LC preparatory session - picture taken by GTP Zambia Team 2_resize" by IICD is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

COMMUNITY HIGHLIGHTS

3 WEBINARS, 500 PARTICIPANTS, 80 COUNTRIES. Our far-reaching community came together to learn and discuss in virtual sessions we organized.

4 FELLOWS. We hosted fellows from both the Google Season of Docs and Google Summer of Code programs contributing across multiple areas of product development, design and storytelling.

5 LANGUAGES ADDED. Our community of translators added 5 new languages to the upcoming version of Kolibri! Kolibri will now be flying in 27 languages, including Hausa, Portuguese Mozambique, Indonesian, Georgian and Greek, particularly to support new projects with collaborators kicking off in 2022 in some of the countries where these languages are spoken.

Photo: I-Saksham

19 COMMUNITY CONTRIBUTORS. A total of 19 community contributors worked on the codebase of our upcoming v0.15 release, with many many of those contributions taking place this year as we pushed closer to its release.

Photo: Screenshot from our webinar on Kolibri for distance learning.

EXPANDING KOLIBRI With the need to support continuity of learning and address learning loss as the result of a prolonged pandemic, we focused our attention on developing functionality that would enable at-home/in-school hybrid and self-directed learning. All of this is informed by our equitable design principles. We also shared why we think that narrowing the discussions of edtech to only no-, low- or high-tech can limit innovation when considering innovations like Kolibri and a continuum of infrastructure availability.

Photo: Agung Pandit Wiguna via Pexels

KOLIBRI HIGHLIGHTS HERE'S HOW OUR LITTLE BIRD SOARED IN 2021.

We started the year with a new and improved Kolibri Studio, featuring a new interface design consistent with the Kolibri Learning Platform to give an overall improved user experience as well as an improved editing experience to prevent data loss for unstable Internet connections, and a fully translated interface in Arabic (pictured below), French, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.

We developed the next version of Kolibri (v0.15) being released in early 2022! This upcoming release will include improved feature support for self-directed learning, discoverability of materials (screenshot below), and continued learning in hybrid contexts.

Learning Equality was announced as a Tools Competition winner, convened and sponsored by Schmidt Futures and Citadel Founder and CEO Ken Griffin, with a project to develop functionality in Kolibri to capture usage data from learners living in contexts with no connectivity with an eye towards anonymous usage data to contribute to learning sciences research.

Photo: Collectives for Integrated Livelihood Initiatives

A sneak peek at Kolibri v0.15's new and improved "Learn" interface, enabling users to filter resources depending on their activity type.

Kolibri Studio localized to Arabic with support from EdTech Hub and Natakallam.

KOLIBRI HIGHLIGHTS, CONTINUED

Data from learners in the half of the world without Internet is generally inaccessible to researchers, thereby ensuring that the learning needs of these populations are absent from the findings of academic and industry research which has significant power to shape the way programs serving them are evaluated, and even the nature of their learning experience itself. We aim to change this by unlocking learning data for learners in low-resource environments.

Richard Tibbles, Co-Founder and Product Lead at Learning Equality, in our Tools Competition winning pitch

Photo: "Good Teacher" by mightyboybrian is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

KOLIBRI HIGHLIGHTS CONTINUED

Our long-term close collaborator Shoulder to Shoulder is one of the key organizations piloting and testing the private release version of the Kolibri Android App in a hybrid learning model: both at-home and in-school. In the Intibucá region of Honduras, 3300 learners, 160 teachers in 50 schools are using the Android App in a project aiming to decrease secondary school dropout rates and mitigate learning loss due to the pandemic. Funded by IADB (InterAmerican Development Bank), the project is being evaluated by a randomized control trial designed by Innovations for Poverty Action.

We continued to expand the Kolibri Content Library in subject areas and languages, now containing 144,000 resources and continuing to grow.

Usage of the library is ongoing, with the top 5 most used channels this year (based on known Kolibri installations) are: Khan Academy English, PhET, CK-12, Global Digital Library Book Collection, and Blockly Games.

The Kolibri Edtech Toolkit (v3) now contains some new additions including: Non-formal Pack Education in Emergencies and Crisis Contexts (EiE) Pack, including case studies based on interviews with coaches supporting refugee and host community learners in Kakuma, Kenya and across Jordan.

Kolibri Studio Pack for support in curriculum alignment Kolibri video tutorials in multiple new languages (via subtitles including Hindi, Marathi, Swahili, French, Portuguese, and Arabic)

Photo: Shoulder to Shoulder

Photo: Elimu

Photo: CARE Peru

Photo: CARE Peru

SHOWCASING LEARNING EQUALITY ONE WAY LEARNING EQUALITY IMPACTS ITS COMMUNITY IS BY SHARING LESSONS LEARNED AND CASE STUDIES ABOUT OUR WORK. HundrED and Learning Equality featured UNHCR Jordan’s work leveraging Kolibri in their pandemic response as well as UNHCR featuring how Kolibri’s flexibility in online and offline.

ITU Broadband Commission spotlighted Kolibri for its adaptability, UNHCR featured Kolibri’s flexibility in a model being offline and online, and the EdTech Hub for Kolibri’s modularity.

UNESCO featured Kolibri as a solution to support learning with in lowresources during the pandemic.

LOOKING AHEAD 2022, HERE WE COME!

2021 was a building year and one of transition with the ongoing effects of the pandemic and dedicated focus on the next version of Kolibri. In 2022, we’re excited to continue our collaborations with close friends such as UNHCR, Vodafone Foundation, UN Women, Shoulder to Shoulder, Kamkalima, and more, and start new projects that focus on local content creation, social-emotional learning, new ways to distribute Kolibri, and doing experimentation within Kolibri to support improved learning experiences such as with Agami supported by the Internet Society Foundation, Amal Alliance, and TIU11 as part of the XPrize Digital Learning Challenge.

As always, we are extremely grateful for the continued support of our implementers, partners, philanthropic supporters, and volunteers, and most importantly the beneficiaries of our work who provide useful feedback so we can continue to improve. We are honored to work with you through another year.

And if you are not part of our community yet, we invite you to join us by volunteering your technical skills to our open code base on GitHub or by making a financial contribution directly to our organization.

Here's to more opportunities to advance open, equitable, and inclusive learning for all in the new year!

With gratitude, The Learning Equality team

Photo: Dids from Pexels

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Photo: Adobe Stock

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