OE Global 2018

Learning Equality has developed an education technology platform, Kolibri, which is comprised of an offline repository of quality open educational resources (OER), tools to support content curation and pedagogy, and an integrated learning management system. To help bridge the digital divide and promote equity, Kolibri is designed to support educational practices in low-resource and offline settings and to be used by teachers of all experience levels. Through the use of Kolibri, teachers around the world have increased access to quality instructional materials and, with them, the opportunity to improve teaching and learning practices in the classroom.To support teachers with a wide range of skill and experiences, Learning Equality is developing a teacher toolkit with training materials and resources to be used in parallel with the Kolibri platform. This toolkit is intended to guide administrators and educators in their pathway for integrating Kolibri into daily instruction using blended learning models. Teachers, especially those in low-resource settings, face a multitude of challenges in their path to delivering effective lessons. Beyond traditional challenges of limited or no formal teacher training, constraints in these contexts also include limitations within a school or district around particular teaching practices, being pulled into numerous commitments at school beyond just teaching, and many others. Learning Equality is committed to designing and building its open-source tools in a collaborative and inclusive way. This session aims to engage participants around exploring how open educational practices can be fostered, while being realistic about the challenges and opportunities presented by working in low-resource and low-income environments. In this session, we plan to facilitate a design thinking activity to brainstorm a set of guidelines necessary for improving teaching and learning outcomes, through the use, alignment, and modification of open educational resources.