 I'm speaking on the first person in the microphone so that it's recorded well the camera is here anyway so whether we are here or over there it doesn't matter really I think René do you see us René we don't hear René are you okay are you here you see me here okay good so we have yeah man here Manuel Ruby sorry for putting you on the hot spot here yeah so welcome everyone to this session dedicated to education programs resources tools in the offline or poorly connected world an important question does anyone understand English or is there are there some you speak French but you speak English but René is that okay with you if we are fully in English or do you need us to speak part of it in French I speak in French sorry about I'm friendly French speaking but I can try to English but not my main so then you speak you speak you speak you speak in French I translate if you need but it's okay if you hear us in English everything okay yeah okay yeah it works for me I hear in English good okay so welcome everyone before we start a short summary there is a Wikipedian Wikimedian offline user group as does everyone is aware of it no yes Wikipedian okay so we have set up a few years ago a user group which is an affiliated super informal group approved by the Wikimedia Foundation so if you need any information the group is mentioned on the meta page most of the pages are dated yeah I fear but at least the basic pages are here and we can communicate through telegram channels or very few people use it or the offline mailing list and of course the names of the people interested in topic or mentioned so it's it's very easy to get in contact with them so here you have a couple of the people this guy was initially not on this panel but he's here and since he's an important person in the offline is on the spot spot and there's so that's Emmanuel from Qix I have a next to him is Ruby Ruby from of war open foundation West Africa and then you can explain more and then we have sorry you we have Renee Renee who got involved in several offline projects as well so he was involved with me with one of my project which I will mention afterwards and in 2023 he will run Qix for school program if I understood well and as far as I am concerned I am involved in two ways back in 2017 we created with the help of Qix a system software called Wikifundi which allowed to edit Wikipedia offline or to edit wiki pages offline and I've been running a project called wiki challenge in cold Africa with within a partnership with the foundation range since 2017 as well so this panel was actually initially suggested by Renee so I will lead him leave him speak first unfortunately I think Renee didn't get a scholarship so that's why he's online but Renee please can you introduce yourself start and maybe explain your project okay thank you for this opportunity and for this handle Florence okay my name is Renee Billy and my username for Wikimedia project Wikimedia project is there in it yeah so what is the concern today is offline education discussion is the panel which is the concern today so so is many discussion about the project around the education on rural areas yeah I will continue in French because it's my main yeah I can speak a bit in English and I can try I can try myself to understand English but I'm not feeling on that so I will continue in French thank you so Wikimedia offers the numerous possibilities in various domains across the world education is found little by little these brands several continents followed the path despite the penetration rate of the internet very weak in some in some countries it's the case of Africa and it's also the case of several rural areas called rural areas to be more comfortable so it's the case of it's not only in Africa right okay so we thought was here before it comes back so one of the the point you mentioned is that activity and we see we see continue in this sense in the eyes of the young population who are in the African continent and advantage to reduce considerably the gap of information that we could record between the population in rural areas and those in urban areas so the focus here is the population in rural areas that do not benefit from the advantage my memory is about three words so I cannot remember so much let me tell a little bit about all the English to the English speakers here okay so what really was okay sorry sorry yeah the Wikipedia project has been expanding for the past 22 years now but it still has some difficulty to get set up and penetrate some places in the world so of course he's speaking from Africa but it's also the case of some South American places even though there's no South African people but you can probably mention that because your Wikiwigs has been working with some some places in South Africa South America about this so what is in particular mentioning is internet access complicated in Africa generally but in particular in rural areas I could mention as well that's my words that it's not only a question of rural or versus city it's not only a question of internet with internet or without internet it's more generally the problem of reliability of data connection in terms of speed so if I take the example of Cape Town which some of you know as being my second hometown now because we can we can Africa association is located in Cape Town well Cape Town doesn't have electricity 24 hours a day even though it's a very big city it has currently internet only about two-third of the day so every couple of hours they have two hours without electricity entirely so people survive by filling up batteries and then being offline for two hours and and going all day along like this and as many of you have experienced it's also sometimes without internet or with a poor connection or a connection that goes on and off so the other thing that when it was mentioning is the fact that a significant part of the population is quite young so this he has been working in this area in particular with the young people yeah and that we need to reduce the gap of information between the population of rural areas and the urban areas that is our our focus to did you notice that he moved back to English all by himself ok so it would be when we said that it would be important it would be important to specify the interest that we are bringing for rural areas this one is registering a phase in access to information which is one of the priority of the goals of the mill for development in working on the population of the population of the area around the projects such as QX for school reading reading Wikipedia a plaza could improve the right to education and the right to access to information so our goals around this panel will be to exchange the media initiatives in terms of education in rural areas to also exchange on the media projects or not allowing access to knowledge in rural areas to share the experience of education in terms of through Wikipedia or well from Wikimedia this is what I would do in rural areas and to find in rural areas and see at least one way to allow the implementation of the work through the world I will use the word Florence which will be the first intervention so I will not intervene because the panel is it is enough for us there are a lot of spirit that I left the space in Florence and then the others to be able to entertain us on the question of online education I thank you thank you René so he said that in particular he was mostly interested with the question of setting up programs in rural areas which is an important point because in fact most of the programs are actually set up in cities if only for access questions because it costs money to go and travel and access all the schools and the second thing he wanted to do is to discuss both the initiative the resources but and the tools and the different programs he mentioned in particular two programs so that's the Kiwis for school program and he also mentioned Wikimedia in your classroom so one of the question I wanted to ask you I don't know how familiar you are with these all the tools and programs that are currently existing in the offline sector how much are you aware of that and what are you mostly interested with yourself do you have an offline program do you want to set one up from scratch what's the current situation for you Anthony and if you have no idea just want to come here because it's warm that's fine as well all right so there are the time where we engage with the Wikifundi but you have not done much in my community for that okay so I will super quickly comment on on each of the mentioned dawn the Wikifundi is the tool that we created in 2017 it was done way after the job done by Kiwis which is more about giving access to a whole bunch of resources way beyond Wikimedia itself in our case it was mostly to try to find a way to make it possible for them to try editing on a wiki because consuming is one thing but becoming producer is a second thing so it was so interesting to see what concerning offline so I'm Matthew from Wikimedia France and I'm project like education project manager and we don't really have an offline program so far but I think we could we should definitely set something like for rural rural part of France that don't have a lot of connection and there definitely something there is something to do to be done I don't think there's so many places in France without yes wait just a second René do you want to comment something I just I just did good for the initiative yeah one thing I would like to mention I would like to ask you to say a few words about Wikidia and what you want to do with wiki wiki dear well we should definitely try to promote the use of Wikidia as a learning tool because Wikipedia has like shown to be complicated for for teenagers because editing there has become sort of a battlefield since when you're a beginner you don't necessarily know the rules or you make mistakes and it's okay to make mistakes you're learning but the some editors will be less likely to nicely explain the mistakes you've done while on Wikidia people are pretty young and it's it makes it super easy like for for a beginner like just to to start step by step and people like there was a session about mentorship and I think it's definitely the right place to do so in Wikidia but yet for English speakers maybe you don't know Wikidia so saying it very quickly that was an encyclopedia for children that has been started in the French space but it's also available in English though I must say it's not very active in English and the focus is 8 to 15 years old so for example my project is being run on Wikidia but I don't think that's your case so you will have to explain to us how you do that with the kids what are you interested in okay okay my name is Belagia from Tanzania we have been in Qix okay open for we were working together with Open Foundation West Africa as he mentored us on Qix so we did one we did Qix in some of the schools as a pilot project so they like they see it in a very good way and find it's something they can work with something they can access it so we are hoping to introduce it to most of the schools especially in rural areas and also in the city so it's something good for Qix you will be next to explain to us quickly don't use one we'll do this right first and we go to Ruby so mine is also I'm Yujin Masiku I'm also from Open Foundation West Africa I believe Ruby is going to speak a lot about it but I'm just going to give a brief before she comes on so we implemented the Kerberx for Schools project it started way back in 2016 where we train about 1,200 students and 1,200 students from Ghana and to date we've touched about eight regions in Ghana whereby students have been thought about how to use Kerberx we went to schools we spoke to teachers we spoke to the ICT teachers thought them how exactly they can deploy the software on your computer labs in the schools and they in turn also thought the students how to use it and this year we're fortunate enough to go beyond Ghana so we did the Kerberx for Schools Africa mentorship program where we gave the opportunity to 64 participants all over Africa to partake in a course on how exactly they can deploy Kerberx in their various regions so this 64 participants graduated successfully and we are fortunate also enough to have five pilot projects from this course so we had people from South Sudan Nigeria Peggy from Tanzania here and Congo and then Burundi so yeah Tanzania and Nigeria and South Sudan do you have anything to say before I go to Ruby you're completely new to this so we're going to ask I think it's best to ask do you want to say something before I why are you here yeah I know I live in Canada I have incredible internet connections and I don't have the challenges that all of you have in your lives I really love the work that you're doing though as it turns out I have to talk about how Wikimedia is used in education in Wikipedia is used in education and what its future is in a seminar in a couple of months and I was so excited to see this program so I'm here learning so much from you all thank you okay that's fine Emmanuel can you shortly explain to us what Kiwix is I will try Kiwix is a project and the goal of the project is to provide a software tool set to help people enjoy content of the web website even if they are not online so this is what we want to do is what we try to do and we have dozen of software different software allowing to do different things to do that and the flagship product is a Kiwix reader itself which allowed to read Wikipedia offline so we have a reader called Kiwix available on almost all platform all different kind of software mobile or desktop all different kind of hardware mobile or desktop and partly to the software we publish so offline version of Wikipedia and hundreds of other sources so first year we are at Wikimedia conference Wikimedia so dictionary wiki spaces etc etc etc and as well non-viki non-viki media and content like the Gutenberg project the stack exchange website I fix it Viki how we can provide a lot of infibrility to YouTube channels etc they have been around for quite a while lots of stuff desktop version mobile version server versions anything depending on the project that can be set up which is of interest to people and then some time ago they decided to start the Kiwix for school program I'm not I didn't understand who decided to start it I was it actually from you guys or was it other communities that decided to do that can you explain yeah so the Kiwix for school Africa mentorship program like you Jen said I don't want to go into that history but I think he Jen has done a lot of introduction it started as a volunteer I think first of all Felix nothing to do is Kiwix after a one Wikimedia conference where he met Stefan and he did it in one school in the northern region and when I joined open foundation West Africa I saw Maxwell doing Kiwix in schools so whilst he was doing that I decided to design some evaluation form for him to like ask teachers their feedback ask students their feedback and based on those feedbacks that we're getting I realized that this is a very good program and this is something that is useful for a lot of the schools because we are facing a real challenge in Africa especially when in my community in Ghana this is a real challenge most of the schools secondary schools don't have internet running all the time and that limits students ability to research something that should be a basic need is not a basic thing in Africa is a luxury to have internet and so we saw that we could leverage on volunteer model because we have volunteers spread across the region in Ghana so we develop the program where we train these volunteers and then they take the Kiwix to the school so the way that we do it is we tailor the content because Kiwix makes it easy for us to put whatever content that we want to put on and serve these schools so we look at contents that are useful for the schools and then we put those content on a pendrive and that makes it even easier because I don't need a Raspberry Pi necessarily because that also also comes with a cost that if you're not ready for it can become a barrier we can you we just use a basic pendrive where we download all these content on and then give the volunteers a package sort of like a pendrive some little little things that they need and basic transportation to take it to the schools that are in their community that needs the Kiwix and so when they take it to the schools what they do is that it's not just installing it in the computers on the school because they have to download it on each computer in the school when they get to the school but they also teach the children or the students how to navigate it on their computers and that's how we do the training okay and also we've seen that Kiwix is a very I mean this Kiwix program that we're doing is a very good model that we've seen in our very good tool that we're using to introduce students to Wikimedia projects because Wikimedia has great resources and there are a lot of content on all of these Wikimedia projects but a lot of the times people don't know about it and I'll use myself as an example until 2019 I didn't even know there's a community behind Wikipedia I didn't know I could actually write on Wikipedia I thought there were some professors that were actually writing on Wikipedia and all of the content and I knew only Wikipedia I didn't know about Wikimedia commons to talk about Wikiversity and Wikicoats and all these amazing resources that we have in our communities and so this is one of the ways that we used to also train the students that oh there are projects like this we also make we also make tailored content like for instance if it's Rikishnari we don't put the entire Rikishnari which aspects of the Rikishnari maybe English Rikishnari is more useful for this community if it's Wikipedia we're looking at is it biology is it maths is it chemistry that is useful for the students okay so we put content that are useful for the students I think it's it's really been amazing and the internet challenge is real I'm going to tell you a story I went to a particular remote area and the moment I got there internet was off I couldn't contact my family even to make a call this is very difficult and before you could make a call you have to stand at a particular pole and that's how far you walk before you can make a call so whenever that we wanted to call our families we had to go to that place and this is something that is real a lot of places in Ghana are experiencing that when we went to Rikin Daba we also got contacted because people were hearing about our k-wigs program and they were like they really having the same issue in their country and so that inspired us to launch the k-wigs for school african mentorship program and what that does is that we took the opportunity to mentor community members in other african countries how to have the skill how to develop their own k-wigs projects like we're doing in Ghana because we have experimented it for the past three years and so we taught them the model there were lots of lessons that we learned along the way we made them known because some of the lessons that we are learning right now devices are a challenge okay so we contacted k-wigs so all the k-wigs for school african mentorship program is in connection with k-wigs itself so it's a partnership that we reach out to k-wigs and know why don't we bring k-wigs on board because k-wigs has the expertise so if you're having any technical challenge if you're having challenge with turning the same files of a particular website k-wigs is there to support us so k-wigs brought into the idea so I've been working closely with Stefan Immanuel I know behind the scenes yeah and and I must say that Stefan has been really amazing and supportive throughout the entire program and we're really really really grateful for the opportunity yeah I just wanted to clarify that Stefan is the ED of k-wigs this is the face and you are the brain sorry that is the take okay is a non-take okay um wanted to ask you obi are you are you planning to I don't know why are you here just because it's she's your sister and you're supporting her yes from supporting I'm my I'm an educator and I've trained Odaher with the k-wigs program mentorship and for my for my country Nigeria it's a tool that will really really benefit from because we have the same challenge of internet connectivity and we have another challenge of educational content controlling educational content we give to our students or students can have access to so with k-wigs is a lot easier because now you they won't have they don't have to face the problem of interferences from social media or other avenues so that's why I'm here I'm telling you the Nigerian story okay so before I ask you a painful question I'm going to ask the remaining people here do you have a comment to make are you involved in such a problem you don't want to speak you're just listening I don't want to scare you what about you guys are you just interested you don't know what the offline programs are are you planning to implement something you want the microphone so we are also we also participated in the mentorship program the qx mentorship program from with ofwa the qx so with me with my community we are going to in the next month we're going to implement a qx training to one of the schools in russia just as a pilot to see how it goes then later on we'll scale it up to to do it yeah yeah yeah you don't know yet where which what about you no okay you have a question um so for Nigeria one one challenge you have with education is that the curriculum is very much backward um as soon as Nigerian right that I grew up in Nigeria schools in Nigeria I don't know the key weeks online resources that you have is it cool is this formula for Nigerians and the currency relevance to our curriculum because I mean it's great that we have online resources right can go and read from and can benefit from but how does it help them in school or how do you take the needs of the curriculum and students into play when giving them these resources one two Nigeria has a culture of seeing the computer in schools as kind of like a shrine where nobody goes to or even open you never allow to touch its rights because they will beat you or something happen to you in classes so how do you battle the mindset of that computer as a shrine issue in Nigeria when did you leave school NY 2020 so I don't know the type of curriculum you use that you're telling us it's backwards it's not I know we have um it's not perfect if I should put it that way I where my set was the first set that started the CIS 334 system good and after that there's been a kind of improvement on the curriculum so I shouldn't say it's backward it's not secondly it's not all schools you said they see computer as a shrine no in Nigerian system with there's what they call the school structure is divided into two public school and private school in private schools they are allowed to use computer in fact on the prospectus your parents are asked to buy one for you so a student is supposed to own a computer in the public school is not like that under public school there are two sets the ones under federal government care and the one under state government care the one under federal government's care some schools are used as pilot schools they set up computer centers in those schools my school is one of them we have the CISCO we have the school media and the government aspect we have like three computer labs but some schools they don't have so the idea of seeing computer as a shrine let me say it's just 20 percent then for the key weeks it's originated from Ghana not Nigeria no but but that's the Ghana that brought it to us is Ghanaian that brought it to us yeah a key which is not i've never i've never heard of it until i started the mentorship program under the offer or offer yeah it was then i got to know that the it's so it's originated from yes the two yeah so i'm going to stop you here because we're nearly done i would like to okay i'm sorry about that okay i would like to have two more two more points one from you and one back from rene i would like to know if you actually implement some offline education program in tunisia and to rene i think is the first one to implement the key weeks for cool school program in the french speaking country but i'm not sure of that so maybe you can further comment so in tunisia there is already program with wiki africa using wiki funding so it's already yeah the challenge for several it has been running for several years which is very good and also yeah with the qx we are working on new program a new program that will allow us to generate offline application offline mobile application using wiki data sparkle queries so you can write a query to select some some articles and build a mobile application for that so this application can be used for education for culture for everything so and we can provide this application for students so they can they can read for example a topic about the topic or about so as a subject given subject side note we are currently producing the offline report of the year that would be interesting that you write a little something about that so that people can go and dig but do you mean i am taking the opportunities to finish that report yes um yeah because i i do the work of asking them all the time and it's sometimes painful to get them to do it um yeah further mentioning it's quite funny because the key weeks postcode program is currently mostly developing in the english speaking world the wiki challenge program has been there for six years is only in french speaking world so maybe the sort of division but we also use key weeks anyway so you are the the pillar there yeah otherwise it doesn't yeah so we also been working with the french community and renee was the coordinator more of the regional coordinator for the french community so that's that's what i just wanted to add do you want to say a last word before we part yeah yeah thank you uh thank you all of uh of you guys uh it's a pleasure to be uh to have you in the session in french i'm happy to thank you all for being there it was very instructive very interesting to change and share on the opportunities that offer uh the the non-internet in schools in education uh to finish i will just remind you very quickly that uh my adventure with kx post program school uh it's it's densified in rca which is the centrafecan republic uh during the i mean the french contribution or uh practically during the internet sessions it was very very hard to access that's what honestly motivated me to go to rc these opportunities this type of project of programs that could offer to populations that don't have internet but to acquire the information to break the gap of information between those that don't have internet and those that can have internet access so it's one of the most arduous motivations still in the francophone areas and across the world i thank you uh for this opportunity this facilitation yeah thank you rene thank you everyone i think our time is over by one minute i'm super proud yeah anyone has the last part in world world not world you've really impressed the socks off me let me tell you uh you're doing such great work and reaching parts of our world that have not had access to any kind of quality resources and information that's fantastic my question is what's next we let you with that what's next next year we because that further uh because we didn't really have had the time to talk about the difficulties and they're awesome in particular cost i think and might be one uh but uh we can continue the conversation anyway just 30 seconds right for the what's next so um yeah what next we're still continuing the work a lot of communities have gained the skill to see and they're looking forward to implementing their programs next year we're also looking for more support in african region because one of the real challenges that we also experience in is lack of devices and so we're looking for partnership collaboration there are organizations that are donating laptops we need more of those organizations in africa because this is a real problem devices it's very expensive it's not affordable partners to implement locally to go to the school the last mile is super important i found that really a problem and that's why i can implement the program in with the foundation the second thing is languages most of the resource we have already in english or french so local languages resources might be called in particular when we talk with the primary school kids uh because they need that in other languages that's that's also a problem so the creation of resources uh and i'll part on the final word on this i did the creative commons educator certificate uh in 2020 2022 and i realized that all the resources explaining intellectual property right even at the most basic level for kids all of them were done either by friends or by canada and all of them mentioned internet youtube tiktok blah blah blah so can you believe we cannot provide these these resources to explain internet copyright to kids we do not have internet that wouldn't make any sense so the the creation of resources is really super essential i think i forgot to explain also that we created a game a board game uh that is printable print and play i'm going to introduce it uh tomorrow morning at 11 so to promote if you want to come and play it's explaining wiki's w i n key like the key to open the door and uh it's pretty fun um and so yeah i'm not going to talk too much about it but it explains like how wiki's function and uh like pretty simply in a fun way so uh it's from 12 it's quite fun so that gorgie gold game which is which is cool it's the latest resource i'm aware of are we okay yes pretty much we close thank you very much thank you ronnie as well and uh see you next time thank you i will yeah thank you bye bye