Education is very expensive. This is for many reasons: books, courses, tuition etc..
We've been offering open source material in order to make it possible for all to
educate themselves. Today we are presenting Kolibri. Kolibri makes high quality
education technology available in low-resource communities such as rural school, refugee camps, orphanages, non-formal school systems and prison systems.
We print language learning books, distribute digital language learning
materials, build tailor-made products, print smart notebooks and
more; all our products are to inspire the teachers and students to
achieve their potential in learning a foreign language. That’s what
we care most. We produce an extensive range of top-notch educational
materials including readers and activities, picture
dictionaries, online learning materials in various sizes, formats,
and color, as well as tailor-made products to meet the
customized needs of students and teachers.
Kolibri
installers, updates, and content can be downloaded once to a device
in an area that has an Internet connection.
That
"seeded" device can then share new content and updates with
other devices over an offline local network.
To
reach the most remote communities, a device can be carried by foot to
share installers, updates, and content with other devices over local
networks.
To
facilitate broad, low-cost adoption, Kolibri is designed to run on as
many devices and operating systems as possible, leveraging existing
legacy hardware or low-cost off-the-shelf devices. This includes
Windows, Linux and OSX. The cost of Android tablets is plummeting, so
we're also building Kolibri to run standalone as an Android app.
We
developed special processes to package online learning materials to
be taken offline. One of our innovations is a video compression
technique that convert the pen strokes and objects in a
blackboard-style video into scalable vector objects. In our tests, a
250MB video can now be compressed into just a single megabyte, while
retaining most of the original quality. This reduces the time and
cost needed to download a large set of videos, and allows a large
amount of content to be stored on a small, low-cost device.
Track
educational growth for individuals and groups of learners accurately
and easily, even in informal educational contexts. Kolibri comes with
tools such as a coach dashboard, exam creation, exercises, assignment
of content for differentiated instruction, and a recommendation tool
that displays useful and relevant next steps based on a learner's
history, progress and goals.
