 Hello, and good afternoon, good evening, or good morning, depending on where you're joining us from. Welcome to Engineering for Change, or E4C for short. Today, we're pleased to bring you this month's E4C webinar focusing on why offline technologies provide better solutions for global education. My name is Mariela Machado, and I'm program manager here at E4C. I'll be the moderator for today's webinar. The webinar you are participating in today will be archived on our webinar's page and our YouTube channel. Both of those URLs are listed on this slide. Information on upcoming webinars is available on our webinar's page. E4C members will receive invitations to upcoming webinars directly. If you have any questions, comments, and recommendations for future topics and speakers, please contact the E4C webinar team at the email listed on the slide, webinars at engineerforchange.org. If you're following us on Twitter today, please join the conversation with our hashtag, hashtag E4C webinars. Before we move on to our presenters, I would like to tell you a bit about Engineering for Change. E4C is a knowledge organization, digital platform and global community of more than one million engineers, designers, development practitioners and social scientists who are leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges faced by underserved communities. Some of those challenges include access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy, improved agriculture, lack of connectivity as the webinar we're speaking of today, and more. We invite you to become a member. E4C membership is free and provides access to news and thought leaders insights on hundreds of technologies in our Solutions Library, professional development resources, and current opportunities such as job, funding calls, fellowships, and more. E4C members also enjoy a unique user experience based on their side behavior and engagement. Essentially, the more you interact with the E4C side, the better we'll be able to serve you resources aligned to your interests. We invite you to visit our website at engineeringforchange.org to learn more and sign up. If you're interested in learning more about tools that enable data creation and data sharing in settings that lack connectivity, like the one we will be speaking about today, the experience that Bruce and Laura will be speaking about today, we invite you to explore the E4C Solutions Library after the webinar. An example of the type of technology that you'll find is what you see on our slide. This solution is called Internet in a Box. It's a software solution that can be implemented in small, low-cost device, Raspberry Pi, for example, to provide essential internet resources without any internet connection. It provides a local copy of terabyte of the world's free information. It includes Wikipedia and 37 languages, a library of 40,000 eBooks, and hundreds of hours of instructional videos, among others. The full report in the Solutions Library provides more information about technical performance, user provision models, and academic research, for example. All the information is sourced by E4C research fellows, and you can compare this to other solutions that are trying to solve the same challenge. This solution is reviewed by our community of experts, and most importantly, it's available to E4C members free of charge. So we turn to check it out. So let's practice a little bit now, and let's do a very important housekeeping item before we get started. Let's take a moment now and use the WebEx platform. Please type right now in the chat window what part of the world are you joining us from. Please use the chat window, which is located at the bottom right of your screen, and just type your location. If the chat is not open on your screen, try clicking the chat icon at the bottom of the screen in the middle of the slide. Let's see where everyone is joining us from today. I'm seeing North Carolina, Colorado, the Netherlands, Indonesia. Welcome, everyone. Arizona, I know. Welcome. A couple of important instructions, and you can use this window that you just used to share remarks during the webinar. And if you have technical questions, you can also send a private chat to Injunion for Change admin. If you're listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any trouble, try hitting stop and then start. You may also want to try opening WebEx in a different browser. During the webinar, please use the Q&A window, or you can use the chat window located below the chat to type in your questions for the presenter. Again, if you don't see it, click the Q&A icon at the bottom of the screen in the middle of the slides. We'll gather these questions to ask the presenters at the end of the webinar. We'll leave at least 10 minutes for Q&A, so be sure to send out your questions beforehand. E-4C and finally, E-4C webinars qualify engineers for one professional development hour. To request your PDH, please sign in and go to your member dashboard to access the PDH. You can see also the link on our slides. Without further to say, I want to introduce our presenters today. And I will start with Dr. Laura Hosman. She's a solar spell co-founder and director. Dr. Laura Hosman works as an associate professor at Arizona State University and is a board member of SPIDER, the Swedish program for ICT in development regions. Her action-oriented work focuses on the role for new technologies in developing countries, particularly in education. She brings her passion for experimental learning to the classroom and beyond. To real-world-focused project-based courses that bring students and student-built technologies to the field for implementation. Welcome, Dr. Laura. We also have Bruce Beke. Bruce has 28 years of experience in computer engineering, telecom internet networks, green data centers and storage, and renewable energy in ICT. His work has focused on consulting services to industry leaders, technical organizations, universities, and governments to improve their technology portfolios and implementations. He previously was executive director at Indinio and worked directly with large project funders such as Google, Facebook, USAID, and Oxfam. Bruce was my boss at Indinio, so I'm very thrilled to have him present this webinar today together with Laura. Welcome, Dr. Laura and Bruce, and thanks for joining us. And without further to say, I will pass it on to Dr. Laura. You're on mute. Oh, can you hear me? Yes, now. Great. Okay. Thank you so much, Mariela, for the introduction. And I also would like to extend a thanks. Thanks to E4C for having us today. And thank you to all of the people who have joined for taking this hour out of your day to join us and share in this discussion. We're glad that you're interested in this topic like we are. So, another further word to set some context about Arizona State University. ASU has been ranked number one in innovation for the last four years running by us in the world reports. And I think one of the main reasons that we keep having that designation is because we're not just innovating to innovate. We actually have a charter that the innovation that we're doing needs to bring about positive impact in the world, have a true value for our community and community is defined as our local or global community. So, further, I'm in a school called the school for the future of innovation in society that has a mandate to build a better future for everyone. The future is for everyone is our motto. So that just situates a little bit where solar spell is within a university ASU. And if you didn't know about ASU about its innovation or the fact that it's now the largest public university in the United States, I encourage you to look it up Google it. With that recommendation, I'm revealing something that all of us on this call having common and that is that we are connected to the Internet. So that is not a reality for everyone in the world. About 53% of people on this planet still don't have internet access. And the statistic is inherently misleading and it's probably a little bit out of date. The United Nations actually defines being online is having used the Internet from any device in any location, at least once in the past three months. So imagine, I mean, those of us who are connected all the time with someone who has used the Internet from a kiosk internet kiosk in the last three months we're all connected. Also, if you're online in most of the developing world, your internet situation is on your mobile phone, you pay by the bite, your data is expensive, and therefore precious. So you're not using this precious data to search for educational content or for any content for that matter that you don't know exists. So many people on this call will know Eric Hirstman is the founder of brick. He estimates that about 80 to 90% of people across the entire continent of Africa can't afford to buy data, even if they theoretically had coverage. So this brings me to another aspect of the Internet that I feel is frequently not spoken about. It seems a bit ironic or more than ironic to me that we have something that has been labeled both a human right and a public good and infrastructure that is the Internet. So to the best of my knowledge, it is the only thing that is considered a human right, a public good and infrastructure that even economic experts around the world are perfectly fine with leaving to the market to provide. So if we leave something like this to private for profit companies to build out both the infrastructure and provide the service. So what do we have right by definition if a company has a profit motive and a mandate, it's not going to provide services where it doesn't believe it's going to realize a profit. That's sort of the definition of what it takes to operate in the market. So companies need to realize profits to stay in business. Perhaps not all of us on this call would have found it shocking, but the Guardian last year reported it as a surprise that the growth in Internet access. It slowed down so dramatically that the ITU, the UN, all of the organizations that estimate how many people have access to the Internet, had to re revise their estimates of when we were actually going to reach that tipping point of half the world being online. But again, let's be a bit skeptical about that statistic because we know that online can also mean you connected once from anywhere in the last three months. And of course, this data is all self reported. So now I'm going to get even more grim. The same publication, the same organization, the ITU, International Telecommunications Union in 2014 in their annual reports about the Internet Society reported that over 90% of school across the developing world, that is Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, don't have Internet. Perhaps a shocking statistic, if you haven't visited Internet, or if you haven't been visiting schools in the developing world. So this statistic is also a bit misleading, right, because that even the ITU acknowledges that they don't really know how many schools are not connected. And that's again, because nobody's out pounding the pavement counting schools that are not connected. So why would this be the case? Why is it such a shocking number that is so many schools that don't have the Internet? Now, I have a lot of thoughts as to why this is the case. When ministries of education can't pay teachers regularly and predictably and reliably, for example, which is the case in most of the countries that Bruce and I have worked in, then paying an electricity bill or an Internet connectivity bill is also not a reality. Most schools that I have visited also don't have electricity. So there is infrastructure that's required for the Internet that most governments can't afford in the first place. So you need to build out that Internet, the infrastructure of electricity first. Then there's infrastructure for Internet connectivity. So not only does that cost money, but it takes experts both to build it out and to maintain it once you've got it at a school. So a ministry of education needs to pay that monthly bill for Internet connectivity, a salary for an IT staff person to keep it going. And for every single school that would be connected, this suddenly gets unbelievably expensive for a ministry of education. So this becomes very unrealistic. So what you have around the world is a vast majority of schools that are not connected. So again, perhaps it's not shocking to see this statistic that the ITU also reports, and it corresponds exactly with the previous slide, 95% of teachers in schools don't have Internet related skills. So I found it very surprising that the same report, the ITU study about the Internet society, recommended that improving ICT skills begins at school. This is a snapshot from their report. And so I would like to propose this as a problematic statement. Ladies and gentlemen, if improving schools begin, improving ICT skills begin that school, but 95% of schools don't have the Internet and 95% of teachers don't have the related skills. We have a problem. Not only that, I want to make another argument that, and this is another argument that Bruce and I hear in the field quite a bit, which is that all we need to do is connect these schools and job done mission accomplished, they're going to be set. And that's it. We can walk away and they'll figure the rest out. Well, actually, it's not that easy. So, many of you may know that the World Wide Web celebrated its 30th anniversary this spring. And the person widely acknowledged as the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, took the opportunity to make op-eds and videos, not to celebrate how great things are going, but to point out all of the challenges and the issues that the Web is facing in its 30th year, because in truth, the World Wide Web has become a wild, wild West. So, for the inventor of the Internet to, you know, take this august occasion to bring up all of the challenges that are facing the Web says quite a bit about this. It's truly a challenge that we're facing, right? So before we go about thinking that the Internet is the solution to all of the problems facing developing world locations, I would also like to remind us that there are certain things that only those of us who are connected have the pleasure of experiencing, or that was ironic, I want to point out, but I personally have had at least two of these crimes committed against me just this year. And so these are very unpleasant things that only those of us who are connected get to experience. And I will also posit further that those who are less experienced and those who are younger, like kids, are even more susceptible to being targeted by these scams. And by the way, this is not a complete list. This is just off of Wikipedia. So, if we have the most vulnerable in society, being the most susceptible to these crimes, what happens when we're introducing the Internet into schools? Okay, so it turns out, and now I'm going to bring some academic studies into this. I have some colleagues who were studying Internet use among youth or middle and high school students in California's Central Valley, and now we're talking about the United States, but a more rural and certainly agriculturally, economically speaking, agriculturally dominated economy comprised of many minorities and lower income families. And what they found among the use for Internet use is the best predictor of whether youth could carry out research online, knew the difference between fake news and real news, and could tell whether a site was trustworthy enough to give their private information or credit card information, for example. The best predictor was whether they had Internet at home. So by proxy, that means whether their parents had the savvy tech skills to teach them the difference between trustworthy and untrustworthy. To prepare them for the scary wild, wild west that is the worldwide web these days. And if these skills are not taught in school, which they are really not taught across the vast majority of places where we are connected in the world, then how do kids learn these skills except at home. But again, we have a problem if the Internet is provided to places where almost by definition, the grownups don't have experience with the Internet. So, for example, what happens when the Internet is suddenly introduced into a place where, you know, by definition that the adults don't have experience with the Internet because it's just coming there for the first time. And by the way, we who have been connected for 20 years, 30 years, take for granted that it is absolutely positively a skill set that we need to develop over time and that we have developed over time. But as human beings, we tend to take for granted everything that we can. It's how we move forward. I'm guilty of it too. But once we forget about that, it's easy to fall into the trap, the fallacy that all they need is the Internet and then we'll be done. Absolutely not. The skills need to be developed to go along with it, and this academic research shows the same. So back to my hypothetical, what happens when you introduce the Internet to a society for the first time where the grownups don't necessarily have the skill set to be teaching the kids who are being introduced to Internet for the first time? And the answer is Facebook. So everywhere I've gone around the world, Facebook is in high demand beyond anything else I've seen. I'm not going to entirely demonize it because I have seen it be a true lifeline for people who need to keep in touch with their family around the world. Their families have moved far across the globe and they need to reach them to send money or tell about a birth or a death or a wedding or all of these things. So I have seen it completely be a lifeline for people. And on the other hand, it can also be used for ginning up ethnic hatred and planning out the Easter day bombings in Sri Lanka this past spring. It can be used to live stream mass murders. So the problem is that when you have people who are getting their information from only one source and whether that's not just your family information that you want to share with people but also all of your news. And why does this happen? Well, it turns out that Facebook zero. And by the way, this was an attempt to get a lot of people connected. So there's always, you know, features and drawbacks to any new technology, but Facebook zero, which is a service whereby people on mobile phones can connect for free to Facebook not using any data. It's absolutely free for them is being offered in 42 different countries. And as of 2016, which is four years ago. So this number is way out of date. Hundreds of millions of people over over 375 million people across Africa were using Facebook zero for free. So again, it's a free service. Anybody who has a smartphone can suddenly have free access to the internet, which again is designed to get people online. But if it is your only source of information, this can lead to a very dangerous situation. So I told you about all of the scary bad horrible no good very bad things that are on that are associated with the World Wide Web or that are online. And that is why I believe we can do better. I believe that we can create a reality that allows people to feel safe, feel welcomed. It can be an educational space. Basically, the way that we think about a library, those of us who have had the opportunity to visit libraries and are in our lifetimes. I call it offline. We can take the best of the internet and not the worst of the internet and pull it together into one place called a library and take it offline and make sure that the content that's on this library. This is the place where students can see themselves no matter where they're from so that they understand their value to the world and their, their roles in society, we can make it an empowering place. Kids don't know necessarily to dream of being an astronaut if they don't know that people have been to the moon right so we want to provide information to them that is going to inspire them and allow them to have dreams that they might never have otherwise. Thought of before and thus bringing it to places that don't have the internet don't have electricity. This can be a challenge. So we decided to look at technologies that overcame infrastructural obstacles and learned along the way, how important it is that content be hyper localized, if you will, so that these kids in the Solomon Islands can see themselves in the content that's on this library so that they engage so that they feel empowered and inspired. And of course, wherever there's a challenge, there's an opportunity. So we came up with this idea of something that is ultra hyper portable that can fit into impact can be powered anywhere at solar powered and offers up a Wi Fi hotspot that any Wi Fi enabled device and connect to. So the opportunity is to be bringing this library to places that don't have the internet yet and by the way we just learned that that's over half the world and over 90% of schools and schools present a safe welcoming space for kids to learn the good parts of the internet. So to develop internet ready skills and information literacy skills, even in the absence of the internet so that they're ready for it when it comes to them because of course we're all hoping for a future where we are all connected. So what we came up with is called solar spell and because I'm an academic it's an acronym spell stands for solar powered educational learning library. And as you saw in a previous picture it's durable it's portable solar power so that it can go anywhere. And it looks and feels like you're online so that you're learning internet ready skills, even in its absence. Our goal is to provide relevant localized educational content and whether that educational content by the way it is the health sector or the agriculture sector or just the educational sector. It's all relevant. And we want to bring this to all resource constrained locations around the world. We have a dual mission actually which is to include students in every aspect so our team includes university students, interns, librarians, faculty and staff. And we do include students in every aspect so they're building the solar spells they're building, as you can see here that means the library but also the hardware, but the library is actually digital so they're helping build the library's content in every way shape and form to have any given semester Bruce and I have about 50 students from ASU and beyond, working on the solar spell. In all aspects from, we always say any major can be involved so they could be electrical engineering to marketing and communication so all all students are welcome and not only do we engage them on campus but it's a priority of mine to have them be in these courses where they're working on the solar spell as part of the curriculum for that course. We call it experiential learning, but it's extremely important to me that they also go to the field at the end of the day and meet the partners that they're working with and for and it tends to be a life changing opportunity for these students it truly changes the trajectory of their career path and decisions in life. We also have been working with Peace Corps volunteers around the world, and they have been our number one collaborators in the field. And a few years ago, we were asked, you know, could the Peace Corps volunteers local counterparts come so I want to give a tiny little bit of context with Peace Corps volunteers they are volunteers who go to location around the world for two years so they are embedded in communities around the world with a priority on rural and remote communities and they're paired with a local counterpart to define what the challenges are in that community and be of assistance if they can and most volunteers that I've ever talked to say I learned more than I was able to teach so it's definitely a two way experience for these volunteers and so when we give a training to both Peace Corps volunteers and local counterparts it helps build a local champion and these folks are the ones who are bringing the solar cells back to their communities back to their schools and healthcare clinics. And so that has been something. In fact, we are always improving every aspect of the solar cell and so improving the training with just one aspect where we're continually improving the hardware the software the training the impact evaluation so up to today, we have 25 of the solar cell digital libraries in the field in the five Pacific Island countries that you see in the upper row of the left box up there, and three East African countries and Bruce and I are actually just back from South Sudan two weeks ago. So here I have a goal of bringing 350 solar cells to the field in across new island nations in the Pacific, Mexico, Kenya, developing a health and agriculture version of the library, as well as bringing the solar cell to refugee camps especially across East Africa and building a French and Spanish version so we have big plans for the next year hoping to truly expand a lot. I'm going to switch the the podium over to Bruce right now to talk about how solar cell works. So one of the goals that we have with our both our engineering and computer science students is how do we actually deliver a digital library that self powered and requires very little or no maintenance because if you can imagine these are going into rural schools where there is no internet there is no electricity and so that it just has to work. So we have, for example last semester I had five different student teams made up of about 25 students total that work specifically to how do we improve each aspect whether it's the charging from the solar panel, the battery down to all the code that's running on the Raspberry Pi off the SD card to make sure that it is also bullet proof from the standpoint that it just works when the when the teacher or the student turns on the solar cell that it just works. And so we put a lot of time and effort in creating this self powered offline environment that from an engineering standpoint works in all environments and can survive the heat in the humidity of the Pacific or the dryness in the intense heat in South Sudan for example. So I'll pass it back to you Laura since I can't seem to forward the slide. I just forwarded it I don't know if that was me or you. Maybe I can pass it. Bruce do you need help passing the slides I can do that. Yes please. And the other thing that's quite interesting that we run into all the time is because this is a Wi-Fi enabled device. However, it's not connected to the Internet. There's always it's quite interesting going into these situations where it's confused with that there's costs to it that it's using cellular data and so it's interesting part of the education to the school administration and to the teachers is that this is a it's while it's using Wi-Fi it's Wi-Fi not connected to the Internet and a lot of us use Wi-Fi as a generic term of connecting to the Internet but it's actually just the technology to connect an IP connection from one device to another. And so we have to emphasize that using the solar spell is that it is not connected to the Internet. You're connected to this to an internet of private content or educational resources that does not affect mobile data or cellular data or and there's and there's not not any cost to connect and use this technology. And on the the library itself. We've also tried to keep it as straightforward and simple as possible meaning what we look at are the available browser environments that are on smartphones, tablets, Chromebooks, laptops and desktops and of those browser environments what type of content can we supply in the library that doesn't require a special plug-in that will work with most or every browser that has shipped any file type that'll work with browsers that are with all these devices. And so we've really standardized on just three file formats PDFs, MPEG4s and HTML based content. And because what we want is whether it's a device at the school supplying or whether it's a personal cell phone tablet, Chromebook, etc. that any device can connect. So basically what we say is any device with a Wi-Fi and a browser can then connect to the library and access the content. And so we have focused on all open source content that can be not only access but also can be downloaded to the user's device and shared freely as well as content that will work on any device that has a browser and a Wi-Fi connection. So the solar cell library is made up of from an educational standpoint all types of information that's available of course on the internet whether it's creative arts, environmental health, English as a second language, local and regional topics, math, sciences and references. But the other part of being at a university is part of our student teams. We rely on very heavily to curate and collect content that is locally relevant. For example, we're just back from South Sudan and one of the key things there was the government had just published their 2019 textbooks, but they're only available digitally because of the cost of printing. And so we worked with our local partner in the Ministry of Education to obtain those textbooks and put them in a format PDF that could be easily accessible on the library. So we do understand the need for localized content and relevant localized content in all of these areas as well as finding the best content that's available on the internet. So I'll pass it back to Dr. Hausman at this time. Great. Thank you, Bruce. And so I wanted to go through a couple of quick slides of what I believe makes solar spell unique because we're not the only offline digital library. We're not the only people out there who have realized that half the world doesn't have the internet and should still have access to information. I hope that these slides might help address some of the questions that I've seen coming up in the chat box, which are great questions. So solar spell goes to the field with version one of the library. And then with our partners, we help determine what is missing basically. So I feel that without something in your hands, if you've never used the internet before, it is literally impossible for you to say what's missing. What could I use? Because you don't know what's out there, right? So we again go to the field of version one that starts the process of working with our partners to find what's missing, define what's missing, and then work with them to help curate content. This picture is in Rwanda. We had a team of 40 young scholars helping us curate content and working with, as Bruce just mentioned, the Ministry of Education to get the textbooks on there. So that the content is seen as very valuable to the users. Another example I'll use from South Sudan is the teachers there said, you know, we would really love lesson plans that correspond to the textbooks. So we started working with our teachers college at Arizona State University to have students there start developing lesson plans that use the South Sudanese textbooks. And that's been helpful to teachers in the field. The next thing that we feel we really emphasize is teacher training. So the solar spell is not a technology that we throw over the fence and say, okay, good luck. Godspeed. You're on your own. In the same way that I've made the case that the internet is not, you know, let's get them connected and job done and walk away. Not at all. So, and whether this is teachers by the way or health professionals or the agriculture professionals in the future. Training is important. There are skills that need to be developed. And so in the case of teachers, I'll give the example that teachers, a lot of teachers across the developing world, not only have not been using technology in their teaching, but the style of teaching is memorization and regurgitation, right. And so to have them think about what am I going to do differently now that I have access to a library that I never had before. Most of the places that we are going, people have never had access to a library before. So it is not just technology that we're introducing for the first time. It is a change in mindset. Why would I need to consult an independent source of authority for more information? Or why would I need to look something up when I already know it? Or these are some of the things that we want to address when we do training because asking people to change their behavior is not always an easy thing. But sometimes it is a great thing when you show them that it can actually make things more interesting or their work easier or more rewarding. So trainings are extremely important to us. As I mentioned, and Bruce mentioned, we're at a university. So we're involving many people, including librarians and helping curate this library as well as students. And I also mentioned how important it is that we go to the field. So I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I've learned all of the most important lessons that have brought us to this point by going to the field. As I said before, it's very easy as a human being to take for granted everything that you can take for granted. It is how we move forward as a human race. So it's important to really go to the places where our users are and understand what their challenges are so that we can continue improving every aspect of this library and addressing their needs. And on that note, Solar Spell is not trying to be all things to all people. So advanced internet users, this may not be for you. We're focusing on the people who are really using it for the first time. Again, those of us who have been connected for our whole lives, digital natives, forget about this ocean of information that is now on the internet. And if you are a novice user and don't know where to start and data is expensive, the Solar Spell can help you. It's designed for people who are using it for the first time. And really people who want to be surfing in a safe environment where they especially teachers will know that students are only surfing to educational content and there are no viruses and there are no age and appropriate websites on there. So they can feel comfortable that they and their students can surf with confidence and learn internet skills and be ready. So I am now ready to turn it over to all of you and say, if you would like to get involved, we have one exciting opportunity that I want to make everyone aware of. There is an offline internet consortium that recently launched being spearheaded by ASU, bibliotech, some frontier or libraries without borders, and the International Federation of Libraries Association. So I invite you to, again, you're all on the internet right so look it up online. They have four different areas that they want to focus on. And, you know, we've, we've put a declaration out there of what we believe in. And so some contact information for you if you are interested in being a part of this but you are certainly welcome I invite you. It'll be great to have this consortium grow because those of us who understand that there is an absolute need for what we're calling offline internet. It'll be great to really grow this, this community. And then as a sort of final note, we also have further information available online. You can certainly visit our website to learn more. We have a Facebook page, please like us. We've got a Twitter page as well. So that is just about it for, I mean, I wanted to leave a lot of time for questions and discussion. So I have left it on this slide. Thank you so much, Laura. That was and Bruce, that was very insightful. And I will start with the questions because we have quite a lot here and they are asking for the links, you know, and follow ups. So just as a reminder, this webinar will be uploaded in the next couple of days on our webinar space in case you want any information. I will make sure, you know, Dr. Laura and Bruce, if you guys want to put, you know, any contact information and shared with them, you know, with our participants, feel free to do that. So let's start with the Q&A. I have my first question here comes from Cesar Córdoba. Only information, he's asking, is only information in English, is it possible to download this information to implement this digital libraries? So, so far, the two libraries that we have that are in widespread use are the Pacific Islands Library, which is a regional library and the East Africa Library, which is a regional library. The majority of information on both of those libraries is in English, but we do have an especially a focus on early readers in the local languages. It is in, in remote places where by definition you don't have the internet yet, difficult to find a lot of content that exists in the local languages. It's because the people who live there don't have the digital skills or access yet. So we did start focusing on English. Now I want to add that it's always this goal of mine that Solis Bell would be seen as a way for Indigenous and even at risk languages of being preserved. So that is something for the future. But at, you know, at this moment, that's a goal of mine. The thing that has truly surprised me is the desire and the hunger to learn English that we're hearing around the world. So the English as a second language content that we have on the library continues to be among the most popular content that's on the library. And everywhere we go, we see people, people truly love this Voice of America series that's 52 weeks long of gradually learning English. And so there is that, but we are certainly working on building a Spanish language or also a dual Spanish English language library and a French language library. And our goal in the future, you know, would include an Arabic language library. So we have those goals. And as we grow, we will certainly be developing library in other languages at this moment. Well, for example, in Rwanda, our library is mainly in English because the government has said education will be in English in Rwanda. We also have a lot of early readers from an African storybook series that are in Kenya, Rwanda, because it is extremely important that education at the early ages take places in one's Indigenous or Native language. Perfect. We have many questions. So like, I will try to, yeah, we'll try to go like by priority. So why don't you have cooperated with other offline internet library solutions? How do you make those activities sustainable? Can you repeat the first part of that again? Why don't you have cooperated with other offline internet library solutions? So I guess, you know, I could reframe the question. And have you cooperated with other offline internet library solutions? And the second question. Yeah, how do you make those activities? I'm just going to inform the slides about the consortium, but we are absolutely trying to build even more cooperation in. And so I would invite you to look at those slides and find out more about the consortium and consider joining it. We are trying to build more cooperation so we can go further. Great. And I have another, I don't know if you guys know Dr. Laura and Bruce and my assanka.com. So one of our attendees put the resource online. It says it's an offline library that for school team in Ghana. And I checked it out and it's very interesting. So thanks for sharing. I will be sure to pass it along to Dr. Laura and Bruce. And we sure will put the email now in the chat of the consortium, like the contact person in case, you know, there's people here that would like to join. So I have another question here regarding joining this movement. So I said, I'm from Kenya and will be interested in participating in your program. What do I need to do to get on board? And I think you guys mentioned that you were going to Kenya, right? So our model at this point is to work with development organizations. So you heard me mention that we're working with Peace Corps volunteers in Kenya. We would be working with the UNHCR and there's an organization in the Maasai community called Merck Maasai Education Resource Center. Those are our two organizations that we're working with. But what I want to point out is that it's we get a lot of requests to work with individuals or at an individual school. And because it takes the development of an entire library in order to actually serve any individual school, it's extremely important to us to be able to have a reach that is far beyond an individual school, which is why we work with organizations that have a bigger reach, not only so that we can reach more schools and actually make it feasible that we're developing an entire library that is localized to a location, but also because it's extremely important to us, again, not to throw technology over the fence. And so we're providing training on site. We're providing ongoing support. We're providing impact evaluations so we know the impact that this library is having and so that it feeds back into improving every aspect of the library. So it is not possible for us to do that with one school at a time, one location at a time. So we're working with organizations that provide us the opportunity to, let's say, gather people together for a training that involves 50 people at the same time. And then we can have those people together for a week. But if the question was on how to get involved and join for the consortium, there is kind of tech detail on the consortium and how to join the offline internet consortium. Yes, sorry. Because I did see another question in the chat about how does an individual, a school, etc. So sorry if I was leaping ahead. Okay, so should I put this slide, this slide here for the membership? Is that what they need to, like they need to retail to Jim? Okay, so I will leave this slide here while we do the rest of the Q&A. So we have a long question here. So I will try to, and it's very comprehensive. I can see that Mitra, it's in this space. So she says, of course we have to learn from the field, but I'm seeing a stack evolve in this space with content developers, Khan Academy, Wikipedia, etc. Servers, we keep Colibri and then packages like Rachel and then people who curate content and deploy installed training country. Our internet archive server, for example, is now incorporated in IAB and can be installed on top of Rachel. It seems that you're trying to do vertically integrated and do it all from content through to installation and training. How will you solve these scaling issues that have stopped other volgunitarian programs reaching the potential of their technologies? I believe that that question has to do with who we partner with, who we work with in the field. So if we're working with organizations that are already carrying out education, already carrying out training, then that's one of the ways that I believe we can overcome those challenges. We also are, as I stated at the beginning now, at the largest public university in the United States. And so with the power of ASU comprising our team, I believe that also can help us overcome some obstacles that have been faced in the past. As well as the work that the consortium is doing to address those issues. So those are some of the issues that the consortium was formed in order to be able to address together, stronger together. That's great to hear. And I know there's so many initiatives that have tried to do what you guys are doing. I think you have overcome most of the challenges and you have kept going, which is the hardest thing. So I'm very excited to see that this consortium is being created to overcome the challenges ahead. So another question here from Cori. What other uses for Solis fell do you foresee in the future? For example, as a reference for doctors in the field. Oh, yes. That's exactly one of the things that we are launching with South Sudan right now. So that was one of the two key things that we started in our recent trip to South Sudan. We met with health providers in terms of the nursing school and the school of health at the Juba University. And we plan to make health focused libraries that also can be fit into a backpack and the health professionals can bring with them for both teaching and patient focused use. But Bruce, I want to pass the mic to you for answering some other ways that solar spell can be used. Well, and just another comment on the health. It is really what we're focusing on in South Sudan is the health educators and how do we bring content that can train nurses better than can train the health care professionals in those environments with eventually getting out to the field and having information that's available in health care clinics and rural hospitals. We're starting with improving the health care education. Other areas that we see that we're expanding to are using this platform for agriculture and how can we help in these rural areas once again where there is no internet, where electricity is non-existent or not affordable. And so we're continuing looking at different aspects of these rural areas and the help and support they need, whether it's in education, health care, agriculture, et cetera. So we're actually working with our student population on those different types of solutions and approaches. Excellent. I have another question here from Roger Drust. Are there any plans to work in remote regions of Nicaragua where my organization works? Do you anticipate having a Spanish version available if there's any timeline for that? So the Spanish version we have actually been working on for a while and our library and it's not on this call, but I would say in the next year for specific locations that's more difficult for me to predict. So we're working with partners as they become available as we are able to respond to work with partners. Excellent. There's another question here regarding partnering with BRIC. Have you guys partnered with BRIC in the past? You mentioned them. But there's a question here from one of our... We haven't partnered with BRIC. I think the approach that we've taken is actually trying to address the electricity concern and having a completely self-powered solar powered digital library. So we see the schools that we're going into are schools that are really left off the grid both from an internet and electricity standpoint. And as Dr. Hosman mentioned earlier, we're not trying to be everything to everyone and we view BRIC as a different space in the market than the market that we're addressing. And in fact, if I might give an example, maybe a lot of the people on this call will have heard of wider net or e-grainery. That's part of wider net at University of North Carolina. And we love what they're doing. We love what everyone in the sector is doing actually. We feel that there are unique things that Solar Spell is doing. So just to give possibly the most, I don't know, clear example that e-grainery has a solution that is trying to bring as much information as possible to places. It's used in a lot of universities, for example, around the world. And just by contrast for Solar Spell, you could think of us as targeting primary schools where people are getting online for the first time. So it's absolutely complimentary work that we're doing and in fact, we're working with them in South Sudan. So there's teamwork. We feel, you know, at the end of the day, I believe all of our goals is to bring relevant, useful information to places and to people that don't have it yet. So however we can figure out how best to do that, and, you know, that's what we're going to do. So. Excellent. Laura. So Dr. Laura and Ruth, I have one more question. I haven't seen you more, but let's see if we can cover at least two before we finish. I have one question regarding that partnership and maybe this is, you know, related to the consortium. Are you... Is the software and the content that is included in the library for Solar Spell compatible with what Rachel has or Internet in a box? And if not, you know, how is this consortium meant to do that integration to make it so that, you know, you can download the modules and it can be like an open source content sharing or open source. Yes, absolutely. Everything that is on our library is open access. It can be freely downloaded and shared with anyone. And that is, you know, absolutely the point. So I can say yes to Rachel. It's absolutely 100% compatible. I'm not familiar with what's on Internet in a box, so I can't speak to that. But as Ruth pointed out, you know, only as the content open access is freely shareable, it's either in a PDF file, MP4 or interactive HTML. So any device anywhere can open all of those things without needing any plugins or software or anything. So... And that's also a big part of what the offline Internet consortium is about, is how do we actually share those content resources as well as the innovations that we put in each of these technologies in the open community. So that is, whether it's Brick or Rachel or, you know, the other 40 or 50 different type of solutions that people have come up with, you know, how do we make all of this work as a contribution to solving this issue in these rural places as a group and as a betterment. So it's really the, you know, the goal of the consortium is to take the advantage of all this great work that's being done and share it open and freely. Excellent. So I have one last question, and with this we wrap it up. So the tools that you presented here seem very powerful. But since this is a voluntary driven project, is technical support provider after the technology is delivered? So yes. And once again, you know, we rely on our ASU students and our student volunteers and student workers that we work actively with our partners in the field to do that support, just as an important not only support but also doing measurement and evaluation. That's a very important part to continually monitor how the solution is working from a content standpoint, from a technology standpoint. And what improvements or other approaches we should be taking to minimize field support to improve the content to have bigger impact in the regions that we're going. So I would say not only support but measurement and evaluation are two key areas that we use our student population at Arizona State University to help to support this initiative. That's excellent. And I think this is a great point to finish out this webinar. I really want to thank you, Bruce and Laura. This webinar has been very insightful. And we invite everyone to look up of the webinar afterwards. It will be uploaded on our webinars page. So feel free to look that up for more information on how to join this program and become a member of the Offline Internet Consortium. Thank you so much and have a great day. Thank you.