E-Pustakalaya Launched (www.pustakalaya.org)

Open Learning Exchange (OLE) Nepal has been working on its digital library, E-Pustakalaya, since summer 2008. Several accomplishments have been made and E-Pustakalaya (www.pustakalaya.org) has now been launched publicly with some basic features and content; more content as well as features will be added in the future.
The Nepal Library Foundation (NLF), Canada, who assist the Non -Resident Nepali Association to implement their Public Libraries Project, initially provided OLE Nepal with a start up fund to maintain E-Pustakalaya as a robust and publicly available website. This fund had been instrumental in helping OLE Nepal to purchase a server for E-Pustakalaya. Starting January 2009, NLF extended its support to hire two full time staff to work on content acquisition for E-Pustakalaya. The two E-Pustakalaya coordinators have been in touch with many authors, publishers, news agencies and other relevant organisations to solicit material and are working on setting up an editorial board as well as on constantly acquiring new material. In the process of acquiring content for the digital library, OLE Nepal has already established official partnerships with a number of organisations including Room to Read, Save the Children, Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, Rato Bangala Foundation and World Education Nepal. OLE Nepal is currently in the process of forming a partnership with Nepal Water Conservation Foundation as well.
In April 2009, OLE Nepal will launch the pilot phase of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme in over 25 schools in six districts in the country. This will greatly expand the reach and readership of E-Pustakalaya and we hope to get very useful feedback from these schools. Children using the laptops can access E-Pustakalaya through the intranet that OLE Nepal’s network team is setting up at the schools. The teacher-training programme conducted for the teachers from the pilot schools will include training pertaining specifically to E-Pustakalaya. This training will not just educate teachers on the basic functionalities of the digital library, but will also train them to use the material more creatively within their classrooms.
On the technical side, E-Pustakalaya is using two pieces of software: Fedora Commons and Fez. Fedora Commons is the library engine that forms the back-end of the library. This part of E-Pustakalaya has not been modified much and is consistent throughout. The second software, that forms the front-end of Fedora Commons, is called Fez. This front-end, compared to its back-end counterpart, has been heavily modified to make it more user-friendly and to meet the needs of the kind of library we are striving to create.
Various features of the library are already in place and several others are being worked on and will be added in the near future. Some of the features that already exist include one where users can sign up to become registered users and use features that are otherwise not accessible. The bookmark feature is the only feature enabled at the moment, which only registered users have access to. This feature allows a registered user to bookmark up to 20 favourite links that can easily be accessed whenever he/she logs in to his/her account. In the future, we also plan to add features like rating, blogging and others for registered users. The library interface is entirely in Nepali at the moment to cater to our primary audience. However, adding an English version of the library to facilitate use by a more diverse group is in the works.
On the content side, E-Pustakalaya has a wide variety of materials already available, a total of 373 entries to date, with new materials being constantly added. The library is divided into seven main sections, namely Sahitya (Literature), Kala (Art), Bishayagat Pathya Samagri (Course-related Materials), Sandarbha Samagri (Reference Materials), Anya Sikshyaprad Samagri (General Educational Materials), Sikshan Samagri (Teaching Support Materials) and Patrapatrika (Newspapers and Magazines). In addition to literature, primarily for children, in English and Nepali, content highlights include audio books, a Nepali dictionary acquired from Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, School Wikipedia, a map section that is constantly being added to and a video section with educational videos, among others. A Balwiki (Children’s wiki) has also been set up, aimed primarily at children and we hope this will allow exchange of ideas and knowledge but we expect this to take time to fully pick up steam. Wikimedia Foundation’s Wiktionary (dictionary) will also be added on our server in the very near future.
The library also has a link to OLE Nepal’s E-Paath activities. E-Paath activities are interactive digital lessons and related exercises developed at Open Learning Exchange Nepal that meet the learning objectives of the national curriculum and intend to supplement existing learning materials. The entire package is both available for download from OLE Nepal’s website (www.olenepal.org) and included in the One Laptop Per Child’s XO laptop that the organisation is deploying in public schools all over the country. For the moment, they can be accessed from E-Pustakalaya, but not downloaded directly from there. They will be available for download soon. For the time being, however, a link is available on the home page of E-Pustakalaya to OLE Nepal’s website, from where the activities can be downloaded onto users’ computers.
Provision for feedback has also been provided in the form of a feedback form accessible from the homepage of E-Pustakalaya. The idea is to make the library responsive to and as in tune as possible with the needs of its users.
In addition to new features and added content within the main sections, E-Pustakalaya will also be adding a Community/ News and Events page in the near future. This page will provide users with a place to blog with fellow teachers and students as well as share and learn about what is happening at the local level, in Nepal as well as in a larger global context. This section will facilitate dialogue and interchange between people in various different places in unprecedented ways.
The E-Pustakalaya project has quickly picked up momentum and new material is constantly being added to the digital library. Authors and organisations, that have been approached, have mostly responded with enthusiasm and interest in the project, which is a novel concept to a lot of them. There is much reason to believe that there is a great number of materials that can still be collected and

Training of Trainers

Open Learning Exchange Nepal (OLE Nepal) began the first part of training teachers to integrate E-Paati (XO laptops) in classroom teaching-learning process by conducting a four day training workshop on March 22-25, 2009. This training was designed to train master trainers from the Ministry of Education’s teaching training body, the National Center for Education Development (NCED), for the next round of OLPC laptop deployment planned for April 2009. The training covered a wide range of topics including IT literacy, classroom arrangement and management, challenges in using laptops in the classroom, maximizing use of laptops both at home and school, non-technical issues and their possible solutions, parents and community awareness, etc. The workshop was conducted at NCED’s training center in Sano Thimi. The fifteen participants included five trainers from NCED’s central office, as well as four Education Training Centers (ETCs). Program Officers from four District Education Offices also participated in the workshop. These trainers will go out to the pilot districts to train teachers of the schools where the XO laptops will be distributed.The first day of the training started with an opening speech by Rabi Karmacharya, the Executive Director of OLE Nepal. He gave an overview of OLE Nepal’s mission, strategy, goal and the status of its continual effort to integrate ICT based teaching-learning method in Nepal’s education system. That was followed by remarks from Mr. Mahashram Sharma, Director General of Department of Education (DoE), who highlighted on the role that the OLPC project can play in improving the standard of education in Nepal. He also applauded OLE Nepal’s exemplary work in this area. Finally, Mr. Harka Prasad Shrestha, Executive Director of NCED thanked everyone involved in the process and hoped that this training program is the first step in building NCED’s capacity to train teachers in ICT-based education approach.The exposure to E-Paati and its activities were a novelty for the participants. For many, it was the first time that they saw the laptop. They were also amazed to see the variety of things that could be done in such a small machine. All participants agreed that this initiative has the potential to bring a revolution in education by improving quality of and access to education materials.Dr. Saurav Dev Bhatta, Education Director of OLE Nepal, who was also the heart and soul of this workshop, conducted the major parts putting strong emphasis on how this training should be delivered to the teachers.OLE Nepal had prepared a training manual with help from trainers from NCED, DoE officials, and teachers from the current test schools. A copy of the training manual was given to each participant. By the end of the workshop, participants had read through the manual and discussed its strengths and weaknesses. Their feedback was taken positively and necessary amendments were made before it was made ready for the seven day residential training for the teachers of our pilot schools. Most participants commented that this training manual followed a new modality that was very effective and should become NCED’s standard training manual on ICT-based education. They also expressed the opinion that the training program should be turned into one of the standard training programs that NCED offers to public school teachers all over the country.This workshop ended on March 25, and after a one day break these participants joined the residential training for teachers from the pilot schools in Kavre district. During this seven day training program, the master trainers are expected to get a firsthand exposure on how to train teachers to implement the processes outlined in the manual. This training is currently being held at Malpi International School, Panauti. In addition to observing the training sessions for the seventeen teachers from three pilot schools of Kavre district, the trainers are also participating actively by conducting at least couple sessions a day. This time, the work load has been divided among the trainers from NCED and the OLE trainers. The NCED trainers are doing a good job by trying to show the connection between child centric education philosophy, learning styles and the E-Paath activities.It is encouraging to see that eight of these enthusiastic teachers from Kavre district are female and despite their family responsibilities, they have opted to join this training. Two of them have little children and one is in her later stage of pregnancy. Four of these female teachers come from Jana Jyoti school where XO laptops had already been distributed last year. The teachers said that this was the first time they learned how to open the laptops. They commented that they did not know children could have learned so much using these laptops. Although they had taken a long time before deciding to join this training, they do not have second thoughts about their decision. They now feel that the laptops from last year that were being stored in children’s houses will now come to life

Innovation in Education

Since its inception in 2005, the One Laptop Per Child Program (OLPC) with its $200 XO laptop has simultaneously sparked excitement and hype as well as controversy, particularly within the realm of educational discourse. After all, in OLPC chairman Nicholas Negroponte’s own words, “It’s not a laptop project. It’s an education project.” In Nepal, Open Learning Exchange Nepal (OLE Nepal) has created its own model. Instead of simply distributing XO laptops to children, the organization has taken matters a step further by creating original digital learning activities directly supplementing the current national educational curriculum, training teachers to use the new resources to best effect and creating a digital library with a wide range of educational materials before finally distributing the laptops in public schools all over the country. What they are doing in Nepal, in the systematic manner that it is being done, in conjunction with the government, is the first project of its kind and its success could inspire countries around the world to adapt the model to fit their own requirements.
With the start of the new academic year, OLE Nepal is in the midst of deploying nearly 1800 laptops in 26 schools in 6 districts around the country. The deployment was preceded by a series of district-based teacher training program on the basic functionalities of the laptop and how best to use it within a classroom. A detailed teacher-training guide as well as individual lesson plans and guidelines are available for teachers for each of the learning activities known as E-Paath. The laptop and the digital activities in no way intend to replace regular teaching but to complement it instead. E-Paath consists of both lessons and exercises. Students can use the lessons to revisit a lesson already taught by a teacher and use the exercises to deepen their understanding of the material studied. The machine, tailor made to fit educational needs, encourages ‘active learning’ drawing children and teachers away from traditional rote learning methods to learning by doing, hearing and seeing.

Wanted: Enterprise Content Management for Education

One of the tasks that I’ll be working on during my brief stint here in Nepal is researching and (hopefully) implementing a way to organize all the different media objects produced by OLE Nepal as basis for their E-Paath learning activities. Currently we are talking about several thousand images, sounds, texts and videos but it’s not hard to imagine their repository containing hundred thousand or more artefacts in the not-too-distant future. Apart from the specific OLE Nepal use-case I also believe that even larger content repositories have to be a core consideration for both the larger OLPC and SugarLabs efforts.
In order to efficiently handle this quantity of material one needs a solid and scalable solution. Let’s just call it Educational Content Management (ECM), shall we?
The basic requirements for such a solution are as follows:
the ability to handle tens if not hundreds of thousands of multimedia objects
easy to search so existing objects can be quickly retrieved
a version control mechanism, especially for text documents which tend to undergo a lot of revisions
reasonably easy to integrate in the current workflow (I’ll take a closer look at this aspect in just a bit)
the ability to define workflows with the simplest one of them being the review of an object
support for metadata that goes beyond what normal file formats offer
allow for batch processing (upload, download, tagging, etc.)
preferably based on software people already know, e.g. a browser or file explorer
open-source