Kolibri: Supporting educators in low-resource contexts

Bringing the online learning revolution offline by providing just-in-time pedagogy and personalized learning support for teachers

For half of the world’s students, the lack of access to reliable Internet connectivity makes it difficult or impossible to benefit from two specific tools for digital learning: open educational resources and software tools to support blended and personalized learning. The Internet has enabled the creation and distribution of digital open educational resources (OER)—videos, textbooks, lessons and quizzes—that serve as effective replacements or supplements to government-issued textbooks. Also, by tracking student performance data, blended or personalized learning platforms help students make guided, informed progress through material, and help teachers deliver more personalized instruction to their students.

While faced with limited or no Internet connectivity, teachers in low-resource contexts around the world often are under trained to support the different learning needs of every single student in their classrooms, and have limited access to ongoing professional development and in class support tools.

As a non-profit organization, Learning Equality is committed to addressing these challenges through the development of new tools and solutions. Available in a variety of languages, its newest product, Kolibri, is an open-source educational platform that is specifically designed to provide offline access to a curated and openly licensed educational content library with tools to support pedagogy, for use in low-resource and low-connectivity contexts. The Kolibri ecosystem includes the Kolibri application, the Kolibri Studio curriculum tool, and a customizable and adaptable Kolibri Toolkit containing pedagogical and technical guidance for using Kolibri and creating effective learning environments. Kolibri incorporates feedback from its predecessor platform, KA Lite, bringing Khan Academy videos and exercises offline which has reached more than 5 million users in 200 countries and territories since 2012.

The Kolibri roadmap is focused on increasing support for teachers and educators around the world in two ways:

1. Personalized learning for teachers: This is currently supported by allowing content managers to mark content pieces that are educator-facing — such as lesson plans, support materials, and readings for teacher professional development. Teachers can see the educator-facing content on the Kolibri platform, which assists them in planning for and executing a lesson and refreshing their pedagogical and content knowledge. Extending this feature will allow more nuanced support of teacher professional development, both in terms of building pedagogical skills and content knowledge as teachers use Kolibri in their classrooms. This will be further supported by educator reports intentionally designed to scaffold novice and untrained teachers to more advanced practice in differentiation and questioning.

2. Just-in-time recommendations: Using pre-trained predictive models, Kolibri can provide “just-in-time” recommendations to support the development of content knowledge and address misconceptions. In low-resource contexts where there is limited investment in teacher professional development, these pre-trained models and educator-facing materials can provide suggestions for teachers to support their students with content-specific interventions, and also through differentiation, classroom management and grouping. 

   Through Kolibri, we can help to ensure that these benefits reach under-resourced teachers and strive to involve them in a discussion from which they are often excluded, as these features are developed.

Kolibri is a new application, building off existing technology, KA Lite, that brought Khan Academy to low resource contexts.

Kolibri is unique from existing offline or LMS solutions as it supports a library of open educational content. Kolibri puts control into educator’s hands in the way that material is presented to students, and with tools to remix, modify, and create new content.

Kolibri’s architecture and distributed database design allows for peer-to-peer synchronization of data, allowing the most disconnected areas to inform predictive modeling — unique in offline contexts. Kolibri supports both the current work flows of educators and learning for teachers.

Kolibri is an educational technology platform, that through a combination of human centered design and the incremental adoption of machine learning will address the entire classroom ecosystem with interactions between learner and digital learning system, teacher and digital learning system, and teacher and learner, rather than focusing solely on the experience of the learner within a digital learning system. This can help to provide the most relevant information to the teacher when inspecting learner data, highlighting individual student difficulties, and identifying similar groups of learners, as well as providing just-in-time pedagogical suggestions to support teachers’ professional growth and learning.

• Create an adaptable and customizable toolkit to support grassroots adoption of effective blended learning practices.

• Develop educator reporting tools to provide actionable feedback to teachers to support intervention with students

• Enable peer-to-peer data syncing to support educators to prepare lessons outside of school and sync in the classroom while remaining offline

• Enhance content metadata and educator facing content within the content library to allow creation of materials for content-knowledge specific support for teachers and targeted student interventions

• Collect quantitative and qualitative data on teacher and student engagement to drive future designs and predictive models to support targeted recommendations

As Kolibri is an open-source solution, our vision is to make accessible aligned and curated sets of locally relevant content and tools to effectively support its use in a localized platform. Learning Equality’s operational model relies on partnerships. We continually aim to stay focused on our core strengths, providing catalytic inputs into the ecosystem, enabling scale through grassroots adoption, and building local capacity to decrease dependency on our support wherever possible. Close collaboration provides us a tight feedback loop to support ongoing product design and iteration, and to leverage the unique skills and assets of our partners.

We reach our beneficiaries by working closely with collaborators on-the-ground and hardware partners that preload our solutions on their devices; by word-of-mouth by organizations who are looking for offline learning solutions; and users of KA Lite. We retain them and support them through implementation of the Kolibri Toolkit through a do-it-yourself model, and targeted training of trainers. After a device has been “seeded” with Kolibri installers, update and content, that seeded device is physically brought to implementation locations, and the content is shared and accessed over a local network or through peer-to-peer distribution for communities to access Kolibri.

Within 100+ countries, there are 4,700 Kolibri installations with each unique installation representing potentially hundreds of users. The contexts range between formal (primary, secondary and tertiary schools), nonformal (community centers, refugee camps, after school programs), and informal (at home use) settings. The use of Kolibri in these varied contexts are designed to improve upon the baseline learning proxies currently being measured in these contexts, some examples including: mastery of STEM topics and student and teacher digital literacy in classrooms, increased teacher confidence in constructing lesson pathways, and interactions with digital content focused upskilling in vocational trades in non-formal educational settings.

By providing access to the complete Kolibri ecosystem, we aim to serve 1.2 million beneficiaries in 12 months and 2.7 million in three years by helping to improve learning outcomes and teacher professional development. This broad population includes learners (K-12 and adult learners in a range of learning contexts, with a specific focus on women and girls, and refugees), educators (for use with learners, for pre- and in-service training), and teacher trainers (to train on use of Kolibri), as well as indirectly reach content creators to who we can share metrics to improve learning resources.

Our team of technology and education experts have a diverse set of skills and mindsets. Our educators have taught in a range of school settings and hold expertise in training and curriculum design. A deep knowledge of low-resource contexts and international education policies has been integral in building relationships with stakeholders working in these spaces and spreading awareness of our work. Having designers and developers with adept technical skills has enabled our platform to incorporate feedback from partners and continually add new features. Most importantly, our team is passionate and committed across the board to bridging the education equity gap.

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, a core part of our funding comes from third party grants and philanthropic funding.

In parallel over the past several years, we have developed out our service-based sustainability models, with implementing organizations contracting with Learning Equality for support, training, guidance, customization, feature development, hosting, and other services. This revenue stream feeds back into 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.

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.

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.

While designing open source technology for use on existing hardware helps to eliminate barriers to our solution, there are still other obstacles to success. For our users, infrastructure (access to hardware or accessories to establish networks; access to electricity) can still be a significant challenge. For Learning Equality, ensuring that we have strong impact measurement and evaluation is critical but also challenging 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 influence our research strategy.