At our offline eLearning demonstration to the community in October, the key stakeholder missing was Malindi’s representative from the federal Ministry of Education. But soon after in November, we had the honour of a private demonstration to one of the federal Cabinet Secretaries for Education, Mr. Zack Kinuthia, who oversees universities, colleges and vocational training.
During a one-day visit to Malindi, he made time at the end of his day, to hear about our offline eLearning solution using the Kolibri platform in schools and our innovation to send our server signal out to the community at large so that students can continue their eLearning at home – at no cost to themselves or their parents.
Mr. Kinuthia kindly gave of his time to fully understand our proposed approach. He expressed much enthusiasm about the potential. It is up to us now to follow up to gain his full support and other colleagues in the Ministry of Education.
“Technology now allows people to connect anytime, anywhere, to anyone in the world, from almost any device. This is dramatically changing the way people work, facilitating 24/7 collaboration with colleagues who are dispersed across time zones, countries, and continents.”
The next steps are to continue building the partnerships and community of support around our concept. The aim is to scale up the initial test pilot which we demonstrated during our October event. The server signal is currently able to serve one school community at a distance of about 2.5 kms. The pilot test involved 11 Grade 4 students and 14 Grade 8 students of a local primary school. Using tablets we provide to them, the school employs our offline eLearning solution two days per week accessing the Kolibri digital content from the server housed at Elimu Resource Centre. The teachers have been able to administer digitized exams to their pupils in the system which automatically corrects and provides immediate reports on performance.
We are seeking support to purchase an additional set of 40 tablets in order to allow the school to continue to work with eLearning in the classrooms throughout the week. This will give us important data on the usage of the platform and the proficiency of use of the students and teachers.
Thanks to Hon. Zack Kinuthia for making time for our presentation and for his positive encouragement! We look forward to hosting a higher level demonstration to key education and ICT stakeholders from across Kenya.