The eNeighborhood Project

This solution is designed to serve populations in low income urban and remote communities in Africa by providing learners with educational resources delivered through a wholistic educational technology solution.  

Our solution addresses many of the mistakes that caused previous education technology implementations to fail and bring long-lasting impact to African communities.

Our implementation design is built around:

• What students, teachers and administrators need - in contrast with what the project sponsors assume they need;
• Optimization of the solution to address the unique challenges found in these communities.

This package will include all that is needed to bring online learning, online libraries and student management to these communities, including hardware and other infrastructure where needed.  More specifically, it will contain: 

Hardware

• 3G/4G networking equipment;
• A sim card with data on it for use during the pilots;
• An internet access antenna (if there are problems with 3G/4G reception there);
• A wi-fi antenna to allow the local network to be seen from entire school campus and, depending on the terrain, the local community;
• A rolling cart for laptops with a built-in charging station or, for smaller communities, we will build a small, community-based tech lab that will be shared by multiple schools and will be available to adults in the evenings;
• 15 laptops for students/teachers;
• A small, battery-powered server - this will use Hyperconvergence technology to allow for expansion (more power and disk space) and will allow more than one operating system to be supported in the same system;
• A DC-only solar energy (no inverters or AC adapters required).

Software

1. Since students in the pilot schools do not currently have unique Student ID numbers, we could use the VSI Ipseity product to create them and manage corresponding Active Directory computer accounts for the students.  
2. A Student Information Management cloud-based application will be made available to administrators and teachers at the schools.  This will allow them to enter student information, including student demographics, enrollments, and course registrations.  This information will be stored in a combined database, allowing analysis at the national level.  After student information has been completely entered in, teachers will then have the capability of recording attendance and grades.
3. A library of books will be made available online.
4. A library of learning materials including textbooks, videos, audio recordings and teacher's resource materials.  This will include, for each country, their national curriculum.
5. Software that is designed to help students or adults catch up on missed schooling - this application tests students to find out what they know in reading and mathematics and only teaches them the parts they don't already know.

This package is designed around a self-contained solution (the only external requirement is that a cell tower be within approximately 20 miles from the school) tailored to the actual needs of those communities.  It is not an all-encompassing solution including items such as robotics and virtual reality, but it is designed to provide a large "step-up" from where they are and give them a foundation for the more advanced technologies while keeping costs at a minimum.

With regard to funding in many low-income African countries, PK-12 education technology has regularly taken a back seat to more pressing issues, such as the running of the government, defense, infrastructure and emergency projects such as their COVID response.

Over the past three years, we have taken seven trips to nine different African countries and met with students, teachers, school administrators, and national leaders to learn:

• what already exists in schools, both urban and remote;
• what educational technology would be helpful in African schools;
• the government's vision for educational technology nationwide in order to meet UN Sustainable Development Goals;
• what technology pilots have tried to do already;
• for past pilots, what worked well and what caused the pilot programs to fail.

In our visits to these locations over the past three years, we spent time in these communities performing extended question and answer sessions with students and staff at schools and in-depth conversations with national leaders (Office of the President, VP, PM, several people at the ministerial level, and with Ministry-level committees) to make sure that what we would provide matches what they need, fits into government long-term plans, and is relevant in the target communities.

We have also met with more than 100 other contacts in Africa through zoom meetings where we were able to refine our process with knowledge gained from their experiences.

We found that some technology projects have been done in remote areas, but most of them have been in urban areas and more have failed than were successful in the long run.

Technically, we did find that at least 3G wireless was almost universally available (using a high gain outdoor cell phone booster antenna), but data was not affordable in most places (see chart for more information (https://www.eneighborhood.org/...)

Three of the biggest areas of concern we found were:

1. The high cost of internet data was unaffordable once the project sponsors left and the systems were decommissioned;
2. The equipment deployed in these pilots was either outdated (recycled European or US machines), not capable enough to support the needs of the schools (OLPC for example), or they couldn't survive in the harsh environments very long;
3. Most schools we visited either have no electricity or if they do have electricity, it is not reliable.
4. Sustainability:  this includes many components, but some of the leading issues include:
   1. Affordability - once the project sponsors finish the project, what is left behind must be affordable by those who will pay for its upkeep;
   2. Support - once the project sponsors finish the project, it is important that local resources have been adequately trained during the project and have sufficient resources to support the system independently from the project sponsor.

Students indicated that, although they appreciate the computers as a vehicle for delivering educational materials, they also wanted to use them to learn computer technologies and how to code.  Old or limited machines either don't support realistic code development or the machines were so old that students can only learn what was current practice 10-15 years ago.  Learning to code in an unrealistic development environment will not allow students to find employment after they graduate.

In summary, we are bringing many of the benefits of education technology to communities who have never had the chance to benefit from it.  Additionally, we are bringing learning resources that will provide instruction in STEM subject areas as well as provide the ability to "catch up" for other groups of adults, who for one reason or another, were not able to attend school when they were younger.

Some of the impacts we expect to see are:

• Better quality education - this is the result of many factors including 
  • Access to all subjects in all schools for every child - not dependent on the current expertise of the current staff
  • Software that helps students or adults "catch up", learning the parts of their education they may have missed
• Computer literacy training for all students.  
  • For one of our pilots, we will be developing ICDL training that would help students obtain an official certificate of computer literacy, helping them get better paying jobs when they graduate.
• Re-integrating students from nomadic families
  • By maintaining detailed information about each child's progress in a cloud-based database, when a child moves and enters a new school, the teachers there will have access to information about what the child already knows.  This reduces the frustration felt by most parents of those children because every child gets a continuous, complete education instead of re-learning the introduction to every subject.

The eNeighborhood Project was established out of a desire for the for-profit company Visual Software, Inc. to provide help to low-income African nations with similar products and services as it has provided for wealthy nations, but on a not-for-profit basis.

Core staffing at The eNeighborhood Project comes from the same resource pool as Visual Software.  Therefore, even though The eNeighborhood Project is relatively new, it comes with many years of experience deploying solutions such as these on national, regional and state-levels.  

More specifically,

Level 1:  "Bringing self-contained and sustainable K-12 and adult learning technology centers to low income and remote communities in Africa."

Level 2: The software we use has been used to collect data for No Child Left Behind implementations and similar programs in The UK and Australia.  It consolidates this data into a cloud-based, partitioned, common database located at a central monitoring location at the state or national level.

Level 3: in Sierra Leone, for example, the DSTI organization has assigned a staff member to pre-test and monitor progress on our project there in order to see what has resulted from the implementation there.  When the pilot project is finished, they will product a report.  We are encouraging similar activities in other location where we have a relationship with the national government.

Level 4:  Since this software has been used for the past 20 years, it has been evaluated for effectiveness many times.  If requested, we can provide information on these results.

Level 5:  Since each new organization is significantly different, having such standardized procedures that works well in all environments may not be possible.  We do, however, have a very large library of detail-level challenges and responses that we use internally and make available for other customers to use.

One of the first applications we will put in place at a school implementation is the Student Management System and supporting software (such as Identity and Account Management).  This will be the only system that is required to connect regularly to the Internet to update a common central database.  From this central database, we will be able to track student attendance and achievement without requiring school staff to submit regular reports.

The principle here is to give them a tool that will reduce reporting requirements by taking what is needed automatically from their operating data.  The user interfaces they would use could be made similar to the paper forms they presently use, reducing the need for training and increasing buy-in from teachers.

The most significant advantage of using operating data for reporting as opposed to submitted reports is that the data will be current and much more accurate than what they have now.  The software we use has a built-in component that can test the incoming data against national policies and remind the users in the school when the data is entered incorrectly.

This software is the same that has been successfully used to implement No Child Left Behind in several US states and similar programs in the UK and Australia.

Indicators include student course registrations, attendance, test scores, learning materials accessed and optionally items such as discipline incidents and health-related information.

With respect to UN Sustainable Development Goals alignment, see: https://www.eneighborhood.org/...

Bringing self-contained and sustainable K-12 and adult learning technology centers to low income and remote communities in Africa.

We realize that systems such as ours are only going to be scalable to a national level through standardization.  This includes hardware, systems-level software and application software, but more importantly how the software is used in the context of a school to improve the quality and accessibility of the education delivered.

The plans we are making for our national clients actually extend out to 8 years, where the initial implementations are performed during the first five years.  The remaining three years will be the key to sustainability:

• Are these implementations affordable to keep using when the responsibility for the cost of maintaining it falls with the school?
• Will the equipment continue to operate for years to come and will the hardware maintenance be able to be done by local staff?
• Will in-country be capable of maintaining the complete system, including hardware, networking and software?
• Are the school staff capable of using the facilities that are available to improve the resulting education for their organization.

For example, Visual Software has worked with Desert Sands Unified School District in California over 12 year period, and through using our software to provide resources and connect the community schools, it enabled them to improve their schools from some of the lowest performing in the state to some of the highest-ranking statewide.  They did this by keeping track, at a detailed level, learning scores by topic.  When they found that one teacher's scores for a given subject were particularly, they scheduled time for the high-performing teachers to show the others how the subject was taught.  They found that all teachers each had their "excellent" subjects and the process of sharing the best techniques became a highly valued time for all teachers.

Desert Sands has a similar demographic as some of the places we're working with in Africa - they have one small wealthy neighborhood in their district (Coachella Valley), but the remainder of students in the district (97%) have receive lunch assistance and are not likely to have electricity or other technology at home..

Our largest challenge where LEAP fellows could help is to take the teaching methodologies employed at Desert Sands (or other highly successful teaching methodologies) and adapt them to work well in low-income African communities.