OLE Nepal

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Open Learning Exchange Nepal

Open Learning Exchange (OLE) Nepal is a social benefit organization with a mission to increase access to quality education through the integration of technology. OLE Nepal has been working since 2007 to use innovations in technology to improve education quality and access in rural public schools in the country with the belief that inexpensive computers are in the long-term the most cost-effective medium for increasing access to education for Nepali children. The organization aims to increase the quality of education through the creation of open-source digital learning activities combined with teacher training. The introduction of laptops to students and teachers were accompanied by the following activities: Development and distribution of free and open digital educational content, preparing teachers on effective integration of ICT in classroom teaching, research and development of appropriate technology and network infrastructure.

OLE program is currently running in fifty schools in sixteen districts in various forms with support from development partners including Danish Government’s Local Grant Authority, UN World Food Programme (WFP) School Feeding Program (SFP) and Finish Government’s Funds for Local Cooperation.

OLE Nepal and DoE currently started the implementation of OLPC shared model in fifteen schools in three new districts this year based on the review of the program and the feedback received from teachers and school. In the shared-model, students from different classes share a set of laptops but each student has one-to-one access to laptops and digital resources when a particular class is using the laptops. The shared-model has been proposed based on the lessons learned over the past three years. In addition to significant cost savings, what this model makes is easier for schools and teachers to manage the programs.

OLE Nepal resources

• OLE Home
• OLE Projects on Redmine project management tool (user account needed)
• OLE Nepal Deployment Guide
• OLE Nepal Presentation at 1cc - Rabi Karmacharya came to Boston to share insights on what's been happening in Nepal so far.
• More about the OLE Nepal Community.
• OLE Blog which is pretty darn active
• Mailing list for OLPC in Nepal
• OLE IRC chatroom: #olenepal
• How you can get involved

History

In early 2007, Rabi Karmacharya and Bryan Berry, decided to leave their jobs in the technology sector and join force to launch OLE Nepal with the vision of transforming Nepal’s public education system using technology in the classroom teaching-learning process. Prior to that, the two had been part of a group of volunteers who had been meeting and discussing the possibility of leveraging the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) laptops to address the challenges faced by educators in the country. They met and discussed with various educators, teachers, experts, activists, community leaders, donors, and government officials going on to form the Board of Directors, and registering the organization. In the process, they received much support from Mr. Mahabir Pun, who also believed in their common cause. Dr. Saurav Dev Bhatta also joined as one of the founding members when the organization was officially launched in September 2007.

OLE Nepal’s mission is to provide freely accessible high-quality interactive teaching-learning materials along with an education-centered digital library that addressed the problems of quality, access, and disparity in education. OLE Nepal signed an agreement with the Government of Nepal to help implement Nepal's pilot of OLPC in 2008. The agreement has been renewed in subsequent years to expand the technology-based education in more schools and grades.

Current Projects

OLE Nepal’s ICT-based education programs are currently running in 50 schools in 16 districts across Nepal benefitting more than 10,000 students. OLE Nepal has also trained over 300 school teachers on how to integrate technology in classroom teaching/learning process. OLE Nepal has prepared an extensive collection of interactive digital learning materials that are based on the school curricula. OLE Nepal has also developed a digital library that are installed in servers in each school.

Digital Content

OLE Nepal has developed two types of digital content: E-Paath and E-Pustakalaya.

E-Paath

An interactive math activity in E-Paath

E-Paath is a collection of subject-specific, and grade-specific digital learning materials that are conceptualized by educators and curriculum experts. These interactive educational software modules are closely aligned with the national curriculum and are designed to help teachers and students meet the learning objectives outlined in the curriculum. These activities employ various features of technology such as audio, images, animation and text to help students better understand concepts in various subjects.

Each activity has an accompanying “Teacher’s Note” that explains how teachers can integrate the activity in classroom teaching, including the curriculum objectives, learning areas, corresponding textbook chapter, and how the digital activity can be used alongside other learning tools inside and outside the classroom.

E-Pustakalaya

E-Pustakalaya home page

E-Pustakalaya (Go to E-Pustakalaya) is an education-centered digital library containing full-text documents, books, educationational videos, audio books, and interactive educational software that can be freely accessed through an intranet or on the Internet. OLE Nepal started the development of E-Pustakalaya with the aim to improve children’s reading skills and develop a reading culture in schools by giving them free and open access to age-appropriate reading materials.

Users of E-Pustakalaya can browse through various sections looking for items they like, or they can search for specific items based on full or partial author name, title, publisher and/or keywords. Users can read books and documents, view videos, listen to audio clips, play educational games directly from E-Pustakalaya, and in the case of books and documents, download and store for later viewing. The E-Pustakalaya currently holds more than 4000 titles.

While these resources can be accessed online , OLE Nepal has placed special emphasis on making them available in far flung schools that do not have Internet connectivity. E-Pustakalaya is hosted in low-cost low-power servers and installed in schools and community libraries that either do not have Internet connectivity or have low bandwidth connection.

Teacher Training

OLE Nepal has developed and delivered training programs to help teachers integrate laptops and digital learning materials in classroom teaching.Teachers receive an eight-day training before the deployment of computers in schools. They take part in discussions and practice teaching to build both their skills and confidence in using digital resources in their class. In-School Training is used as a monitoring tool to observe how much the teachers are using the integration of ICT in classroom teaching and what issues they have while doing so. This is conducted 4-6 weeks after the teacher training mentioned above. Refresher Training are organised to help teachers to revise what they learnt in previous training. This project also gives opportunity for teachers to share their issues and lessons learned. For OLE Nepal, it is an evaluation tool to review how effective the trainings were and what training strategies or content need to be reviewed.

Technology and Infrastructure

OLE Nepal constantly seeks to utilize the best possible technology solution to implement ICT-based education in under-resourced rural schools. On the hardware front, it uses low-power, low-cost, durable equipment that is readily available and easily serviceable locally. With operating system and software applications, OLE Nepal advocates for open source solutions not only because of cost considerations, but also for ease of customization and localization, which are essential in the development and distribution of effective educational content.

Capacity Building

OLE Nepal has worked in partnership with various central and local level agencies within the Ministry of Education system to ensure that they build the necessary institutional capacity to implement ICT-based Education on a national level. The project has gained tremendously from the inputs provided by government trainers, curriculum experts, district level school supervisors, resource persons and teachers. The OLPC project was implemented in partnership with the Department of Education and the District Education Offices in the program districts. The DoE and OLE Nepal has also worked together to promote awareness about ICT-based Education. Teacher trainings have been conducted with help of government trainers who were prepared in providing ICT-based Education training. OLE Nepal has consulted with subject experts from the Curriculum Development Center in the preparation and review of the E-Paath activities. All in all, OLE Nepal opts to work with and empower existing resources within our public education system instead of creating a parallel system.

Deployment

OLE Nepal has deployed over 4000 laptops to 50 schools in 16 districts in Nepal on August 1, 2012. XO Laptops were installed with interactive learning activities including E-Paath, and distributed to, classes 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Complete information on sites can be found on OLE's deployment sites page of the Redmine project management tool.

Schools By district:

Districts in which OLE has deployed OLPC Nepal so far

Network schematic for Dhadeldrura district

• Banke

• Dhadeldhura

• Doti

• Kavre

• Kapilvastu

• Lalitpur

• Mustang

• Makwanpur

• Rupandehi

• Solukhumbu

• Syangja

• Tanahu

OLE Nepal in Bashuki and Bishwamitra schools

OLPC launched at Bashuki and Bishwamitra schools on April 25th, 2008. Open Learning Exchange Nepal (OLE Nepal) distributed a total of 135 OLPC laptops to grade 2 and 6 students from two schools in the outskirts of Kathmandu Valley. These were addition to the 22 laptops that were handed out to teachers from the schools during the teacher preparation program held a month earlier. The laptop project was undertaken in partnership with Nepal government’s Department of Education (DoE). This project is part of OLE Nepal’s mission to increase quality of education while reducing current disparity in access and quality between school types, regions, and population groups by integrating ICT-based education in daily teaching-learning process. The laptops for the project were donated by the Danish IT Society in Copenhagen.

These pilots focus on integrating laptops into the Nepali educational system and measuring their impact. The laptops and relevant software have been integrated into the Nepali curriculum and teaching process for grades two and six, subjects Mathematics and English. We at OLE Nepal believe that the central challenge of this project is not to get children to use the constructionist tools within the XO, but to utilize the XO to fill gaps, providing previously unavailable tools such as a virtual science lab.

Also see: Evaluation of OLPC Project Nepal: A Summary

Further Resources

OLE Nepal Development

This is a stub for pages relating to the XO/XS software development and deployment activity.

1. Use Traditional Nepali unicode in your XO
2. Procedure to build NEXS form OLPC XS
3. NEXO/NEXS/NEXC development
4. OLE_Nepal:Testing
5. OLE_Nepal:Schoolserver

OLE Nepal Deployment

The current Deployment Guide OLE_Nepal:_Deployment_guide

Technical

• NEXO - Build System
• NEXS - Build System
• NEXC

Older Documents

Many planning documents were produced for the early deployment. Some of these were incorporated in later documents for general deployments.

• Pilot Sites, including selection process, target, and deployment teams
• Jamirkot (Lalitpur), Bishwamitra Ganesh school pilot, including technical planning
• Lakuri Bhanjyang (Lalitpur), Shree Bashuki school pilot, including technical planning
• Teacher Training
• Content Development
  • Content Development Principles
  • EPaath (Etoys) - suite of educational software for grades 2 and 6 developed by OLE Nepal
  • Scratch - A great, intuitive programming language in which students can easily create all sorts of content
• Program Evaluation (to be created)
• Technical Aspects of the Deployment
  • Testing and QA + some non-technical logistics
  • Power Systems -- currently power distribution, hopefully will later encompass power distribution
  • Networking

OLE Nepal Blog

The OLE Nepal Blog is used to document in real-time, the actions and progress of OLE Nepal. Here are some past stories, with information relevant to the deployment of the XO.

• The OLE Nepal Blog Archive for current blog entries please see the OLE Nepal Blog.
  • Announcements The Announcements category includes general announcements pertaining to OLE Nepal.
  • Development The Development category includes documentation and discussion of software development.
  • News and Events The News category catalogues general news items, and information about OLE Nepal events.
  • Testing The Testing category includes information on software and system testing.
  • Uncategorized The Uncategorized category includes general information updates about OLE Nepal.

OLE Nepal Community

The community is accomplishing much. Read through these link to learn about the people and their projects. Additionally, there are some resources such as what projects need help, intern projects, and an intern manual.Please read all this.

• Our Community More about the OLE Nepal Community.
  • OLE Nepal Projects
  • OLE Nepal Interns

See also

• Nepal-Austria Cooperation (still a stub)