Offline Squared: Project-based learning with Kolibri

We are in the midst of a learning crisis that is deeply impacting marginalized learners in low-resource environments. The magnitude of the learning crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic is highlighted in this recent World Bank-UNESCO-UNICEF report focused on learning losses. For vulnerable and out-of-school children, particularly as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic or other emergencies or crises, there is a critical and urgent need to strengthen foundational, cognitive, interpersonal, and emotional skills. This is a time when inequities in education are at risk of widening more than ever, especially for the 1.3 billion young learners across the globe who suffered with long-standing school closures amid the pandemic. In addition, the share of children living in Learning Poverty could potentially reach 70 percent given the long school closures and the ineffectiveness of remote learning. 

Further, nearly 40 percent of the world does not have access to Internet connectivity to support their learning journey. Often what is found in low-resource learning environments is that there are overall fewer opportunities for students to participate in project-based learning approaches, especially in support of building foundational literacy and numeracy, that can help overcome learning barriers, develop children’s lifelong competencies, and improve their future opportunities. Beyond having access to resources that support project-based learning in the first place, the needed hands-on tools may not be accessible, or there is not appropriate guidance on how to adapt the project-based activities based on what is available in the existing environment. In addition, there are also limited guidance materials for educators to both prepare and facilitate technology-enabled project-based learning. Providing appropriate support for teachers, means giving them access to edtech tools, training, and effective processes for supporting learners which is often more limited in low-resource settings. While the required infrastructure to access relevant digital learning materials may not exist, low-connectivity does not mean no access to technology.

Learning Equality develops, maintains, and supports Kolibri, an end-to-end suite of open-source tools, content, and do-it-yourself support materials, designed specifically for offline-first teaching and learning in an organic adoption model. It is centered around a learning platform with a user interface currently translated into 30 languages, and while it is designed for use without the Internet, it incorporates many of the functionalities available for use in online learning platforms, including engaging content formats and built-in, real-time support for educators to implement differentiated and personalized learning. It is complemented by an adaptable and customizable toolkit of resources to support implementing organizations on the use of the learning platform and the effective implementation of different blended learning models so that Kolibri can be adapted, adopted, and scaled for various contexts and geographies globally. It also includes a library of openly licensed resources spanning grade levels, ages and subject areas with a focus on K-12 learning. Through the learning platform, learners can engage with these resources in the form of videos, exercises, and interactive games and simulations to build foundational concepts. 

While designed for blended learning environments where technology is seamlessly incorporated into learning, what is missing in Kolibri is what we refer to as ‘offline squared’ -- namely the ability to use technology to enable project-based learning to expand skills and knowledge acquisition facilitated through real-life experiences. This is the focus of the current solution.

What this offline-squared expanded use of Kolibri will enable is an integrated and multi-faceted pedagogical approach that helps build foundational literacy and numeracy and is collaborative, problem-based, and inquiry-based. To support this, we will be developing new facilitator materials with teacher lesson plans, leveraging existing open educational resources and creating new ones where needed in order to have additional project based learning materials. We will also develop training materials aimed at building educator capacity and confidence to facilitate project-based learning activities in the classroom with technology. Lastly, we will work with content creators to incorporate additional materials focused on foundational skills and social-emotional learning, particularly those that are contextualized to particular localities. As a result, true blended learning can occur: the newly created educator support materials will both enable meaningful engagement with learning resources within the learning platform, as well as facilitate project-based playful learning activities outside of it. 

What will a program using Kolibri for project-based learning look like in practice?

Through the Kolibri Learning Platform, the teacher will have access to facilitation guides and data dashboard tools to support personalized and differentiated instruction in real-time for learners without the need for the internet. At the beginning of class, the teacher will direct learners to the Kolibri Learning Platform to start with a short video and an exercise on a particular math concept. After watching the video and mastering the exercise at their own pace, learners will participate in a group project to solve a real-world problem, facilitated by the teacher. The session then ends with an interactive closing reflection circle that builds empathy amongst the members of the class. Learners can also use Kolibri on their own for self-exploration of supplemental materials in a self-paced manner, and track their individual growth through learner portfolios. This packaged learning experience incorporates foundational literacy and numeracy digital learning materials for project-based and playful learning, as well as support learners and educators in a platform designed to meet specific pedagogical and contextual needs.

We are currently piloting a specific adaptation of this additional support for project-based learning with Kolibri to support refugee and host community learners in a settlement in northern Uganda by developing a specific curriculum infused with playful learning approaches and an emphasis on social-emotional learning with our collaborators Amal Alliance, incorporating their Colors of Kindness social-emotional learning curriculum, and HAF-Uganda, who is leading implementation of the pilot. Materials developed from this collaboration will contribute to the overall development of Kolibri, and will have been tested and improved through direct educator and student use and informed by the context. 

This new support for project-based learning can also be used to help learners on their own at home with parents. More recently, and in response to the needs brought about by the pandemic, we focused our efforts on developing functionality for self-directed, at-home, and hybrid learning. The newly released version of the Kolibri Learning Platform, the “Take Home” release enables seamless continuity of learning from the home to the school or any other learning environment. In this model, learners can be assigned relevant materials by educators to take home with them, and when they return to school, educators can review their progress -- all without the Internet.

At the core of Learning Equality's work is a strong focus on eliminating as many barriers of access to a quality education as possible. Everything we do is open and built to scale, and as such, any organization wanting to implement project-based learning with Kolibri will have access to adaptable and customizable training materials, implementation guides, pedagogy guides, and documentation via a comprehensive toolkit, as well as staff and community support through Learning Equality’s Community Forum. 

Through our needs-based approach, we collaboratively engage with partners, implementers, and the community at large to gather data and evidence of needs to inform our product roadmap and feature development. This way, we can ensure our solutions are adaptable to meet varied contextual needs and can be used at scale. 

Learning Equality focuses on creating equitable education technology that benefits, and is inclusive of, those who still lack access to the Internet. In 2022, this number is 2.9 billion people globally. We've always focused on boosting learning outcomes in some of the world's most challenging contexts, supporting disconnected learning in refugee camps, rural schools, orphanages, and out-of-school programs. Since we take a needs-driven approach to product design, the combination of co-design and working through implementing organizations enables programs to be designed to meet their own unique needs, thus resulting in learners acquiring the relevant skills to support their livelihood including preparation for exams, acquisition of relevant certifications, and skills for employability. 

Kolibri is specifically designed to benefit learners and educators across grades K-12, in marginalized and disconnected communities around the world. A historic lack of access to quality learning opportunities for learners living in low-resource contexts has created a widening equity gap in learning outcomes.The situation has been further exacerbated due to limited access to offline-first digital technology and lack of limited support to educators as they transition to hybrid learning amid the pandemic and beyond.  

We work closely to co-design Kolibri with a core network of collaborators, including national NGOs, UN agencies, government, and corporate partners and gather data and evidence of needs from our global user community. Here's a practical example: Co-design sessions with refugee and host community teachers in Kakuma Refugee Camp have informed Kolibri content discoverability, user interface design for the learner, resource selection, and modalities for accessing Kolibri across the camp. Learning processes have then been shared across countries: refugee coaches from Kenya trained teachers in Uganda, and Ugandan Ministry secondary level teacher trainers supported professional development and lesson sharing for refugee coaches in Tanzania. 

We will take a similar approach with this project, leading co-design sessions to inform the development of guidance materials, lesson plans, and learning resources to support educators in integrating foundational literacy and numeracy into their practice through blended and project-based learning models. This way, we help to strengthen foundational skills, critical thinking and interpersonal skills, in learners living in low-resource, low-connectivity communities who wouldn't otherwise have access to engaging learning opportunities by means of technology. 

Our team of more than 20, headquartered in San Diego with staff globally, has been deeply embedded in fighting for equity in learning for nearly 9 years. Our founding team includes PhDs in Cognitive Science specifically focused on Learning Sciences. They cultivated the team from the ground up, bringing in individuals with expertise in teacher training, international educational development, engineering, curricula, and accessibility. Most notably, for a nonprofit focused on education through the lens of technology, our Product Lead is both a software developer and a former teacher/trainer. While our team is not representative of those who we serve, we leverage our experience in these areas to develop an adaptable set of solutions that can be locally contextualized. We work closely to co-design the product with a core network of collaborators and their beneficiaries, including national NGOs, UN agencies, government, corporate partners, and grassroots organizations. We take a human-centered design approach to the development of the platform, aggregating and generalizing over insights gathered from Kolibri’s global user community, and then validating assumptions with early testing and interviews with users. We develop our software in the open, on our Github repositories, allowing technical users to follow and test new developments, as well as contribute to bug fixes and new features.

We believe that we can only tackle the challenge of global educational inequity through collective action and by working closely with stakeholders, communities, experts, and other innovators. We are committed to designing and building our open-source tools in a collaborative and inclusive way. Through the Solve global community, we hope to leverage the expertise of like-minded innovators who are working to tackle global challenges and continue to improve upon our solution. Given that we’re breaking the mold as to what is possible with education technology, gaining exposure in the media and at conferences would help us further our reach and more clearly communicate our work and impact. Conversely, we also believe that we can contribute to the Solve community with our expertise in understanding the needs in lower resource learning environments when designing and implementing edtech.

For this particular solution, we will also look to the Solve community of educators and content creators who have developed project-based learning materials to both lean on their guidance for functionality within the Kolibri Learning Platform, as well as to potentially adapt their materials, particularly ones with a focus on foundational skills, for use in lower resource learning environments. 

For Learning Equality, ensuring that we have strong measurement and evaluation is critical but also challenging given we are working in environments with disconnected populations and across varying contexts in terms of hardware, pedagogy, content, language, and implementation. Solve can help Learning Equality with connections to research institutions and expert consultants to help guide our research strategy and strengthen our measurement and evaluation practice in collaboration with our Director of Impact and Evaluation.

This solution is innovative because it combines Kolibri’s existing innovation but expands it to offline-squared learning environments to leverage and benefit from project-based learning activities. To reiterate what was shared above, with this solution, true innovative blended learning can occur. Educators will have access to guidance resources  and a platform designed for use in low-resource environments that will both enable meaningful engagement with foundational literacy and numeracy learning materials within the learning platform, as well as facilitate project-based playful learning activities outside of it.

In our experience, low-connectivity does not mean no technology and for learning, is not just limited to tv, radio or SMS. Our focus is on pedagogies to blend offline-first technology in learning: encouraging activity outside of the platform through project-based learning, sharing lesson plans for teachers, supplemental learning resources aligned for self-study, and interactive activities to simulate what may not be possible in low-resource contexts. Kolibri is designed to support teachers with limited capacity and training, users with limited digital literacy skills, and learning in large class sizes where there may be differing learning abilities within a single class. Overall, this adaptable and flexible approach allows users to contextualize based on needs and address equity constraints. 

Kolibri is innovative because it works within and responds to the infrastructural realities in low-resource environments, while focusing on the learning needs in these contexts. It is an adaptable solution created for and responsive to the diverse learning needs in these environments. It can be leveraged in contexts with limited electricity, and where the Internet is costly and/or not prevalent. 

Kolibri is low maintenance: while it is not low-tech, it is a robust learning platform extensively tested in low-connectivity contexts that does not require significant digital literacy skills to use; educators and learners with limited exposure to technology are able to get started with Kolibri swiftly. 

Kolibri responds to the learning needs where it is being used: it leverages hardware that already exists, from networking infrastructure to existing computer labs, and also runs on a variety of low-cost devices.

Its feature set and flexible hardware model responds directly to limited teacher capacity and training, limited digital literacy, large class sizes, and differing learning abilities among a group of learners. Lastly, it is open-source, which is critical to ensure that learning needs, particularly for the most marginalized learners, are met: it is free and open, it can be used and adapted for one’s own needs, it can benefit from open contributors to build and improve the product, and new functionality is driven and prioritized by the feedback and needs from Kolibri's global users.

With this solution, in the next one year, we aim to strengthen the capacity of educators to deliver effective project-based blended learning and increase the number of learners who meet foundational literacy and numeracy milestones in low-resource settings around the world. To serve this specific set of needs, we will apply the learnings from the pilot in Uganda to future development of Kolibri, and expand the publicly facing Kolibri Content Library, including resources for building foundational knowledge and social-emotional skills, particularly those which are contextually specific. What will result are new sets of curriculum that have content aligned to particular contexts using the Kolibri Studio curricular tool. This provides increased access to relevant learning resources for millions of learners and educators around the world, and directly opens up opportunities to collaborate with organizations working with national governments at a systemic level. 

In 5 years, we aim to reach 50 million users through increased government and public adoption, as well as to create a wide network of educators who are equipped to deliver project-based blended learning. We’re also working on machine learning algorithms to improve content recommendations within the platform so that both educators and learners have access to the most relevant content available for their use. All the while, our aim is to advance technology-enabled, data-driven pedagogy in low-connectivity environments.

Learning Equality monitors the success of Kolibri primarily by observing increases in access to quality learning resources and tools, as well as improvements in educator and learner confidence, development of skills, and boosts to learning outcomes.

For this particular project, we will be measuring our progress based on the availability of relevant materials that support project-based learning and foundational skills development and the use of these materials. This will be measured by the quantity and increase of learning materials that are available in a language that learners understand, as well as by understanding if there are any barriers to accessing these materials (both physically and via the Kolibri Learning Platform itself). Increased availability of aligned materials helps to further reduce equity gaps for marginalized learners. Sourcing aligned content and adapting existing documentation to enable effective implementation program rollouts can be a promising model in contexts around the world. We will also be measuring our progress around changes in teacher practice through baseline, midline, and endline studies through focus group discussions, surveys, classroom observations, and interviews. Beyond this, we will collect quantitative and qualitative data to understand the effectiveness of the educator guidance materials and how they have been contextualized for use in different learning environments and localities.

Additionally, we collect quantitative and qualitative data on teacher and student engagement to drive future designs and predictive models to support targeted recommendations on Kolibri. Measurement includes periodic surveys and/or interviews, depending on access, with key questions pertaining to the ease with which the technology is used, the effectiveness of the Kolibri Learning Platform to directly support learners, and how the technology is helping teachers support learners. In the pilot specifically, we are also looking to understand what changes need to be made to the Kolibri Learning Platform itself to improve the experiences of ‘offline-squared,’ and this will be done through user research including interviews with teachers and students, and classroom observation. 

Kolibri will enable greater access to innovative pedagogical approaches and learning materials for effective facilitation of project-based blended learning in low-resource environments to develop a generation of learners who have the skills, knowledge, and beliefs to make a transformative impact in their communities. The adaptability of the Kolibri Product Ecosystem has already been demonstrated in its use globally (see example impact study from Mexico), with examples of use in varied contexts to support both learners and educators during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

By strengthening the capacity of implementing organizations (providing documentation with guidance on blended learning models, educator training, hardware and other technology support), and garnering buy-in from the local government and surrounding community, we will develop a strong cadre of educators who can effectively implement project-based blended learning with Kolibri through the support of government systems and the community at large. Ultimately, these outputs will translate into outcomes that empower facilitators to work both individually and collaboratively, and help learners improve academic performance and transform their communities, ideally with the investment of the government and community.  

We know that learners and educators need to feel supported in myriad ways in order to improve teaching and learning, and therefore our approach seeks to offer this initial and ongoing support in a holistic manner such as through coaching, support from instructional leaders, and close collaboration from colleagues (Mahon, et al., 2016; Harju & Niemi, 2019). 

This builds on significant research that has shown that one of the main reasons many education innovations and reforms have failed, despite serious effort, is that they have paid insufficient attention to the instructional core, whereby interactions among educators, learners, and educational materials matter most in improving student learning. This is further exacerbated by the pandemic. 

Kolibri therefore provides support for the crucial interactions in the instructional core by:

1. Scaling up quality instruction by providing vetted, aligned, multimedia instructional materials to support teacher instruction.

2. Providing educator guidance materials such as lesson plans, content refresher modules, and video tutorials to implement project-based blended learning. 

3. Facilitating differentiated instruction by providing targeted learning analytics focused on providing actionable insights to the teacher to inform instruction, and allowing targeted assignment of materials based on student needs.

4. Expanding opportunities for student practice by providing a rich bank of interactive exercises that provide instant feedback, and the ability to remix assignments to provide comprehensive review and revisiting of previously engaged material.

5. Increasing student engagement through videos, games, and simulations.

The solution described here is built around the Kolibri Product Ecosystem, a suite of open-source software and tools that we’ve been developing for over 6 years, building on the foundations and lessons we learned from deploying our first platform, KA Lite, for the 4 years prior to that. Our software is built using open-source technologies focused around being adaptable and extensible, having cross-platform and legacy browser support, and running efficiently on low-power devices. For example, our backend is built in pure Python, which has allowed for portability of the core codebase to run on everything from Windows, to macOS, to Android, to Linux, to embedded systems, providing the same full functionality across each of these platforms.

One of the core technologies we have been developing in support of the solution being described here is Morango, a pure Python database replication engine for Django that supports secure peer-to-peer synchronization of data. It is structured as a Django app that can be included in projects to make specific application models syncable. This enables us to synchronize data generated on end-user devices to local offline servers, such as those in a school, during intermittent connectivity between them, and then from there sync at some interval to the Internet, or to another device that itself will be brought somewhere with Internet and synced. In this way, we can leapfrog the last mile problems that prevent effective use of most education technology in disconnected environments, supporting data-driven implementation and asynchronous remote facilitation of student learning.

Our team is cognizant that as we are a white-led non-profit organization based in the Global North, we have a particular responsibility to address the structures and institutions that perpetuate inequalities at home and through our work. Our team employs a distributed management structure which enables and encourages leadership across the team, and we’re also aware that even within this structure we could be perpetuating the implicit norms of a white dominant culture. As a learning organization, we continue to listen, introspect, and learn, and our whole team engages in critical team dialogue in discussions related to identity and power. As an organization, we also implemented rigorous processes to eliminate biases in our hiring practices, and we have worked with consultants to help us on our journey towards being an actively anti-racist organization. 

In the partnerships we form, we focus on collaborating with organizations that are similarly committed to being anti-racist in their cultures and practices, have equity at the core of their work, and benefit underserved learners. Addressing equity fundamentally drives our focus to eliminate infrastructure barriers, such as ensuring our tools work completely offline in order to be inclusive of the half the world without Internet. We also strive to engage and include the communities we serve by providing direct employment opportunities, for instance paying refugee translators for localization. We’re focused on applying principles of accessible design so that any user can engage with our tools and products, and we strive to be inclusive through empowering others to contribute to our open-source solutions. This spirit informs the team’s work internally, fosters collaboration, and empowers individuals from different backgrounds, so we can collectively work toward a world with equitable learning opportunities.

Learning Equality responds to the demands of the market at the intersection of education content distribution and the accessibility and availability of customizable education technology solutions that work offline, specifically targeting the 40% of the world without access to the Internet. Given the offline nature of these beneficiaries, our primary pathway to serving them is through intermediating organizations that leverage our tools to amplify the impact of their educational programs and enable them to serve larger and harder-to-reach groups. These organizations can use our curricular tools to draw from our large library of open content or other sources, and organize them to create a custom curriculum, then use the cross-platform installers for our open-source learning platform to load up their own hardware for offline use within their education programs.

Learning Equality’s business model is a combination of creating and providing open access to educational tools that enable equitable learning, and a services-based model to provide specialized support based on targeted needs. Learning Equality’s partnership model is to work closely with different organizations to learn from and iterate on Kolibri to inform the continuous development of a needs-based, adaptable ecosystem that meets varied learning needs. Learning Equality, as a nonprofit focused on building public goods, is developing open source software and toolkit materials to support implementers with effective integration of technology and new pedagogical models into their educational programs. Given we're primarily focused on serving low-resource communities, we offer all of these tools at no cost, to ensure we don't introduce barriers to adoption for those most in need. To support the production of these public goods, the majority of our funding comes from third party grants and philanthropic funding. This funding supports our core product development, while also allowing us to grow our internal capacity to better understand and support user needs and effective implementation, and adapt Kolibri for use in a diverse range of contexts.

In parallel, we have developed a service-based sustainability model, with implementing organizations contracting with Learning Equality for support, training, guidance, customization, feature development, hosting, and other services. As the core product stabilizes and our emphasis migrates further towards supporting implementation, we envision that contract work and collaborative projects with partners, funded by joint grants, will make up a larger part of our revenue.

Our sustainability model is centered around a combination of philanthropic support for our public goods, and earned revenue from services we provide as part of our close partnerships. With the engine of organic adoption of our free tools continuously spinning, we are able to focus our efforts on close collaborations with larger implementers that both serve as a feedback loop for shared learning, as well as a source of sustainable revenue from the services we provide to these projects. The specialized value-added services we provide to support governments, UN agencies, and NGOs include training sessions, technical support, product and curricular customization, online hosting, and bespoke data analysis and reporting. Over time, we have been shifting the focus of these services from the more labor intensive offerings, such as custom software development, towards the more scalable and higher margin services, such as hosting and data reporting.

One key ingredient in this mutual sustainability model is keeping the cost of implementation as low as possible. Learning Equality creates free and open-source solutions that implementing organizations can contextualize and adopt through a do-it-yourself model. Kolibri is designed to enable these organizations to work within existing infrastructure and initiatives, reducing costs and supporting the sustainability of their work. This also frees up their resources to go towards any of Learning Equality’s value-added services that can support in areas where they may have gaps or needs, or towards other investments (such as hardware or implementation capacity) that increase the scale and impact of their programs.

Our highly scalable impact model, and our focus on enabling truly equitable access for the most marginalized, have also made us an attractive target for philanthropic funding, which we then continually reinvest into core product development and expanding our impact. Our current strategic focus on data also contributes on this front. Learning Equality develops its tools with a focus on collection and analysis of user data, to support centralized monitoring and evaluation, which can otherwise be costly within these disconnected environments. In addition to being a critical, in-demand service, the ability to demonstrate reach and impact that this unlocks plays an important role in securing ongoing philanthropic funding, both for Learning Equality and its partners.

Learning Equality has demonstrated strong success in attracting funding for this work, raising more than $10M over the past 4 years from organizations such as Google.org, Hewlett Foundation, Dalio Philanthropies, Verizon, Vodafone Americas Foundation, Vodafone Foundation, UNHCR, and UN Women through a combination of contracts, general operating support and project-specific funding.

We continue to expand our earned revenue model, and to date, we have brought in over $3M of service revenue, with a growing portion of that revenue coming from our more scalable and streamlined services, such as hosting of online platforms that support various stages of the education program lifecycle, from initial curriculum alignment, to supporting educators and learners, to aggregating and reporting on usage data to inform iterative program design.