 And welcome to OEG Live, I'm Alan Levine, and I'm running the show today, but I'm really not in charge of anything, but I'm really excited to bring you this project that I've been following from Dan McGuire and Catherine Kure are here with us to tell us all about this amazing effort that's going on with bringing, putting OER to use for elementary learning in Africa. And so I'm not gonna try to explain it, but we're just gonna have a casual conversation here. And this of course will be recorded. And first of all, you know, sadly disappointed that we can't make this work at the conference next week for OEG Level, but this is sort of a way to open things up. And so hello and welcome, I'll start, I'm gonna start with Catherine. Dan comes first, but Catherine it's great to have you here tuning in from South Africa and in a very interesting location, right? Yes, I'm in, I'm in a guest house in the Kroot, Mariko. So we're in the Northwest province. So I'm having to borrow ethernet. It's 36 degrees today. So yeah, it's a fairly 36 degrees Celsius. What's that in Fahrenheit, Dan? Hot. Upper 90s probably. That's what I'm sort of, yeah. So, but thank you. It's wonderful to be here. And I guess it's this kind of remote area with, we have issues with electricity as well as with Wi-Fi connectivity. And those are exactly the kinds of problems that the Moodlebox has been designed to solve in terms of the challenges of being in poor areas with a lack of resources. And I was incredibly blessed that Dan called me and said, hey, I've got this project already going in Angana. Would you like to join us in South Africa and bring South Africa on board? So it was just really very exciting. Thank you. Thank you. I'm really keen to learn about Moodlebox. I followed a little bit from Dan, but can you tell us about the STEAM Foundation that is your organization? SEED funded by Siemens Stiftung, which is the German based nonprofit. We've always had a very strong focus on science, education and under resourced schools. And what we find is that the context between the global South and the global North is so very, very different. That solutions for the global North are just not applicable in the global South. So we've been really, we love the concept. We loved how they looked at hands-on experimentation, but we've been really trying to ensure that we solve it in terms of enabling very strong lesson plans for teachers where we consider our teacher to be our first learner. And then obviously during the pandemic, we pivoted to online. And then we've been looking at various alimeses and more sort of blended learning approaches. But one of our key problems is that it just breaks down when you are now dealing with a remote area with intermittent electricity with little to no cellular signal. You might be in areas where there's literally no mobile signal. So how do you do that? And then obviously that's where the Moodlebox and its promise comes into play. That you can run it off a power bank. Obviously somewhere along the line, you need data and connectivity, but it can be that the teacher uses the cell phone, downloads, puts it onto the Moodlebox. And then the Moodlebox basically, which is a credit card size, you know, Raspberry Pi, it's basically a portable server. And then it starts, it's its own little Wi-Fi. There we go, Dan's got one. And in South Africa, we've also, as you can see, we're 36 degrees and we're not one of the hottest places in Africa. So the case that we bought has a little fan as well. So that we can sort of work with it. But we've been looking at all the different challenges around that and this really is very, very exciting in terms of its promise because obviously not every school is like that. But if we cannot solve for the poorest and least resource schools, then you cannot actually scale to the whole country. And those are the schools with the greatest need for equipment, often the logistics of getting there. We've got a lot of mountainous terrain. We've got river crossings. I mean, when we delivered books or in other projects, you've had to get four by fours with river crossing capabilities and mountain, whereas something like this is really solves a lot of those challenges and we now having to get it to work within the country. This is so exciting. And so we're going to see more hopefully and learn more about this. And Dan, thank you for showing the box. I've been eager to see one. But hello and welcome, your OE artist. I love that title, but tell us a little bit about yourself. Yes, the title I will credit to my wife, Casey. She was, we were on a walk one day and she says, you know, how do I tell people what you do? Nobody understands that. I started, so it's all about her. She said, well, are you then kind of like an OE artist? I said, well, yeah, I kind of like that. Let's go with that. So I really do like that. Anyway, so I've been doing professional development for teachers relative to the use of a digital tool, specifically open source learning management systems, and then added in OER in about 2011. I've been doing that all through the pandemic, but what was really interesting was a little over a year ago when I started exploring the Moodle box, this device that I just held up, which is a version of Moodle, which is the learning management system, which is most widely used all across the globe. The Open University in UK uses it. Most of the universities in South Africa use it. It's used by universities all over the world. And as Catherine so nicely put it, we do have to those solve for those who have the least resources. And so that's what the Moodle box does. So I was looking at that and trying to figure out how it works and how we can apply it. And I happened on LinkedIn to meet up with Peter. I'm a lobby who lives in Tamali Ghana. And he has started a several years ago, a nonprofit to acquire resources for his school and the neighboring schools and his northern suburb part of Tamali. And we connected and I chat, I said, would you be interested in looking at maybe using this technology device? And he said, yes, let's try it. And it's just been delightful working with him. He's an incredible, talented, innovative teacher that is just so dedicated. And he has helped me learn how to apply this in classrooms. So we've built this over the year and we've got, we, as Catherine pointed out, tried various devices. But one of the issues we struggled with was what was the best device to use with students to access the Moodle box in the classroom. And we ended up, after experimenting with cell phones and various other and laptops, settling on a 10-inch tablet, which we were able to acquire in Tamali. And then, so we developed that device and then I started showing Peter how to add content onto the Moodle box so the students could access it. And we then found African Storybook, which is a phenomenal organization that was founded by Sadie, the South African Institute for Distance Education, several years ago. And it's probably one of the largest OER repositories that lots of people at OE Global don't know about, primarily because it's all early literacy, primary books, picture books. But we're able to download those, put them on the Moodle box and the students loved seeing them, they're bright in color. And then Peter found that on African Storybook, they actually have books in Dagbani. I'd never heard of the Kingdom of Dagbani, which has been in existence for many centuries. And it's the area around Tamali and all of the people in that area speak Dagbani. Well, that's their first language. And he was able to find books on African Storybook in Dagbani, which he was able to put onto the Moodle box. So now the students are looking at their mother tongue in books on their devices, which is phenomenal for them. And these are students who had never had a device in their hands, who their families don't own electronic devices. There is not internet available in the area. So now these fifth graders can look at their mother tongue on their own devices. This is like a wow, this is big. Not only that, but we can, the books that are on African Storybook in English, and translate them into Dagbani. So that's just a matter of finding, I tried it in, I tried doing it with ChatGPT and ChatGPT doesn't get Dagbani. So, we're relying on the translating. And then we go on to add assessments, because that's one of the things about the learning management systems, is that you can also add assessments. Because as a teacher, we know that just presenting the book to the student, is this only the first step? Has the student actually read the book? Do they understand it? What are their misunderstandings as they're reading the book? This is true at every level of education. We have to find out what the system is about. So we use the assessment tools in the learning management system to do that. Because it's open source and because the content is all OER, we can translate it into Dagbani. This teacher can modify it for the specific needs of their students. We don't have to rely on the legacy publishers to provide us with the assessment. The teacher can do that. And I'll show you an example of that at some point here too, how we can actually do that. But I'll pause and let you ask a question. I just think it's worth explaining this situation that exists in Ghana and South Africa as I understand it, of mandating education in local languages, which is commendable, but leaving teachers to figure it out on their own. And so what do teachers typically do when they're forced to do this and what are they able to do now? Catherine, do you wanna speak to that a bit? I can't, sure. I can't really speak so much for the Ghanaian situation, but in South Africa, we have 11 different official languages. And only quite recently have we really realized the impact of not starting in your mother tongue. And the importance of that. So the reality is they are publishing books out there, but again, you've got issues of logistics, distribution, access in terms of accessibility, in terms of price point and so on. And that is where something like being able to take a digital book, because with one Moodle box, you can have 100 books, 200 books, you know. There are organizations like Book Dash as well, which is translating into mother tongues and story weaver, but again, if you're wanting, they come with straight story books, they're not going to be using a learning management system and so on. So yes, there is a big deficit. And I think in the presentation, Dan, it was something like 43% of households in South Africa don't even have a single book. So if you are, you know, that is a massive problem. And we see it now, you know, impacting on the literacy and the literacy levels that we are not performing as well as we should in terms of Pearl's terms, all of the international standardized tests. And there is now a big drive, especially in the early years. And up until recently, your kindergarten year was your gracious, your early education centers were actually handled by the Department of Social Development. We had lots of small centers with not necessarily a woman who were particularly well, predominantly women obviously. And now that's recently been incorporated within the Department of Basic Education. So kindergarten was never a formal year of schooling. It was often being run by a lot of independent people in groups. And there's again, this just highlights how critical those early literacy books are. I don't know, it's a similar situation with the 11 languages in Ghana as well. Dan? Same, interesting that there's the same number. Both Ghana and South Africa have 11 English languages. And English is one of them in both countries, you know. So, and as Peter has pointed out, I said, well, I mean, doesn't the Department of Education send you books? And he said, well, yeah, sometimes. And that's 10 books, and rarely in Daibani. Because as a practical matter, how is a country, the Department of Education in a country that's struggling to meet its basic needs in some cases, how are they going to afford to print large quantities of books in 11 different languages? I mean, that's almost going to be hard to do if they had the money. As Catherine pointed out, then delivering of them becomes an issue. So digital LMS is really, really address a huge problem. And that's true of all over Africa. And it's also true in South Asia and lots of places in the world where, the literacy people are figuring out that it's better to teach kids, as Catherine pointed out, in their mother tongue first, how to read. And then introduce the dominant official language of the government. Then we have multilingual kids, which is what we want. But trying to force them to learn a new language as they're learning this concept of, well, you know, CAT means cat. Well, what's a cat if that's not in your language? It's sort of obvious when you think about it, we've been getting it the wrong way for many years. Exactly. Well, let's give us a little, oh, go ahead, Catherine. No, I think one of the other things I'm wanting to heart out is that English is about as non-transparent to languages you get. Most of your African languages or of the parts, what you read is what you say. You don't have said spelled, said should be S-E-D, not S-A-R-D, you know. So you've got the complexity of English being the dominant language or the lingua franca as it were of the world, but now it's an extraordinarily difficult language even for a first language English speaker to learn to read and write because it's just grabbed every noun from every other country in the world and not, so it's a very non-transparent language. And that just adds to the complexity. So now you're having to learn a different language from your mother tongue and it's non-transparent. So your capacity to learn quite quickly is obviously impacted. And what's been really exciting, I was recently at a NASCII conference, the National Association for Social Change Entities and Education, and the University of Selibosh, their ReCEP group, R-E-S-E-P, have actually created a template for working out at the end of, let's say, kindergarten or grade one. If you, Issy Cosa or Issy Zulu, how many words should you have mastered? And they actually went all the way back to scratch and they've created a very exciting methodology for understanding because, you know, the funders who are coming in are saying, well, okay, so in mother tongue, what should we be expecting? What are the benchmarks? How do we assess the child? How many words should they have mastered and so on? One of the women involved in the research gave us a very exciting presentation, which like really, and what was interesting was that again, it's a global self-solution. It's got nothing, you know, they said these methodologies will not work in this country and they went all the way back down to scratch and they've created a whole new template. So that's exciting. Yes. All right, so let's, if you don't mind, Dan, let's get a sense about how this all works. You're gonna do a little bit of screen sharing demo, right? Sure, happy to, I'd love to, I guess. So this is obviously the Lion Runs and Cow Walks. It's a first year reading book that is popular all over the world. This one is actually written in Cambodia, I think, by the South Asia and it's been translated into lots of different languages. I'll just run through it real quick here. So the Lion Runs, Cow Walks, that goes in water. All right, so obviously this is very concrete animals things, water, air, wood, the things that we wanna teach students in the beginning. Now, we took this book and we worked with the chat GPT and I asked in Cambodia for some help in fixing it and this is what it looks like when you translate it into Isihosa. We just had to reformat it a little bit, but again, it shows up pretty much the same. I'm not gonna try to pronounce those words, but anyway. All right, so, but now we have, that's actually how easy it is, really. Again, we just need to have a few. Thankfully, we have an envoy here to translate this and make it right. And we're working with limited languages, but it's a pattern and it's a model that I think we can expand on and use in other places. We've done the same thing with that Bonnie in Ghana. I don't actually have one of those to pull up for you. But now let me jump to the other capabilities of the Moodlebox that I'd like to show you. So, okay, so now, first question is, this says name the insect. So this is actually, we're using the stem concepts. This is science, we're naming insects and when we're talking about the R level it says which is what the envoy calls her kindergarten for a seven year, which is a term I actually like. So this says name the insect. So the Moodlebox, and this is a feature that's available both in Moodle and on Moodlebox. There's the capability of, let's see, if I play this, did that, could you hear that audio? No, I think we didn't get the shared audio, but we can imagine, yeah. But that was my voice trying to say this word, umakula. The point is that the student is able to, so the question is name the insect and so they get an audio prompt. So now what we're asking them to do is say, which one of these words did I just say? And they choose this one and they get this prompt. So, and if I click that, it's actually, that's gonna say, we're very proud of you, good choice. And so they get an audio prompt for confirming that they got the answer right. Now, what's, I think very important here is because this is OER, the content on here, I created this in my voice, but we want the teachers to create it in their voice because obviously the kids in the Western Cape are going to respond better, I think, to their teacher's voice than, you know, an old grandfather from Minnesota. Grandfather type, I don't actually have grandkids yet, but you know, I think that'll work. But the point is the teacher gets to choose. The teacher could hire an actor to do it if they want, if the department will pay for it, of course. But the key is that they get voice prompts, they get voice confirmation on their choice, they get, and then we can do some video prompts too. Here's the same thing, you know, how many, I don't know if you can say that, Catherine, that's the, it's a closer word for butterfly. This probably makes as much sense as butterfly does for a name of this animal. But here again. That's small for me to see. Oh, sorry. But yeah, it's something like, you know. And here's where I try to pronounce that. And again, so this is what happens if a student answers wrong. Oh, and the question is how many of them are there? So the answer is there's one, two, so the student answers three, no, that's three. And the correct answer, we can give them a prompt if I played this, this would be, that's a video response of me saying, you'll have to try a different one. So the R-level students get audio prompts, video prompts, all of these things then can be recreated by their teacher in the classroom using the teacher's own face and voice to do that. That's, this is one of the really powerful tools of being able to use the Moodle box. Cause these are all tools that are built into the Moodle box. There's no additional, nothing needs to be added. So everything that you can do in Moodle in terms of this interaction is run off of the Moodle box locally. Yeah. So it's incredibly powerful. The one thing the Moodle box tends not to allow the plugins because obviously it's quite small. So they do prefer no plugins. So you are finding that Moodle itself is starting to look at, we had a Moodle moot in South Africa recently, which was very exciting, which I attended. And the founder was saying that they are looking at their most popular plugins and trying to incorporate them into core Moodle. Because if it's that popular and that used, then it really should be part of the platform. So there is that distinction that, you know, you might, that there are some functionalities around plugins that you've got to be aware of, but hopefully the most important ones will be incorporated in future. And also is it doing the full like, you know, keeping track of what individual students are doing in terms of, okay. Absolutely. That's one of the other things we've done in Ghana is pull up student achievement reports. Say we've created some math quizzes there too. So Peter can actually show, he can actually pull up and create a Excel spreadsheet of how well each of his individual students are doing on the math quizzes that he's been giving them. And that's, I'm going to bet that the people in Acre that are visiting his classroom probably haven't seen that in Accra. I think he's leading, you know, doing some cutting in stuff. Right. And then I know a big piece of the project is the professional development for teachers. So they can, so if I'm a teacher in a remote area with my Moodle box, I can do some of these changes that you're describing in terms of, yeah, okay. And that's the point of the professional development. Yeah. Is that we show them how to create a quiz, how to make the modifications, how to add content, how to add quizzes. It's, you know, it's not rocket science. But again, we're talking about elementary teachers who have anywhere from 20 to, in some cases, 40 students in their room. And they're, of course, like everywhere in the world overworked and underpaid. So whatever support we can give them to be able to do this. And as Catherine was saying, in some places in South Africa, it's true all over, but the amount of work we're requiring of our teachers for these to introduce the future students of the world to literacy, we're kind of doing it wrong, I think. We need to provide more support. The more support we can provide, the better off everybody. Yeah. And I don't know. I mean, this is probably like, I don't know if it's even possible, but like, let's say I've done some of these customizations as a teacher, wouldn't they be of interest to other? Is there some way of like, you know, organizing all of this content into, I see all the head nodding. So I'll stop and you'll answer. Well, I guess that's part of that, the MoodleNet project to enable sort of a repository of not only open education resources, but also put into an LMS that are then available for anyone worldwide to use, you know, and adapt, obviously, as need be. I mean, that's the whole point of open education, isn't it? There's a little net. Yeah. I'm confused people. We have Moodle, which is the running management system. MoodleBox is the version of Moodle designed for a small server, remote server. MoodleNet is the repository that Moodle and Martin Dougiamas has created to store OER content. If you pull up MoodleBox to show people, it's still in it, they're still building it out, but it's possible to add things to it right now. And you can sort for things and search things. And one of the nice things about MoodleNet is that if you're using Moodle, you can add it to your course with a click, click, click boom in your course. That's it. That's all you have to do. I think it's three clicks. Now, if you're in the US or Canada and using something other than Moodle, you can still download the content and upload it to your LMS, presuming that the proprietary LMS people have given you the ability to do that. It's still possible to do. You just need to have the permissions to do it. Right. And just because people might ask, like, are there creative comments licenses on this content or other kind of things which make this sharing apparent? Okay. Of course. Yeah. And then they weren't necessarily on these test course that we put up here, but yeah, everything is CC licensed. Fantastic. And so, obviously. And with you. Go ahead. I was gonna say with the appropriate license that is OER because not all CC licenses are. If it's ND, it's no derivatives, which means you can't even translate. So, yes, it has to be the correct one. In fact, at the moment, I've still got, I'm waiting for some, a previous work that I did where I'm asking them to re-license it as OER and they initially wanted to last. Anyway, so there's a lot of, we're trying to get content that's been, that is either copyright or is under a Creative Commons license, but which isn't OER to be re-released under a license that enables us to use it in this environment. So, hopefully I'm gonna get some good news on that soon. So, because that is the big issue is that there are a lot of non-profits or education departments out there for whom copyright is just an automatic unthinking application. It's not really. It's like, okay, that's what you do with your material. So, there's a lot of conversations I'm having around in South Africa, including with the Tax Authority to try and get that, that those repositories released under as open education resources so that we all can benefit, not just the few schools or even if it's a lot of schools who've benefited. But yes, it is a requirement with the project that we can only work with such materials. I mean, it's illegal otherwise, really. You know, that's the last thing any funder wants is that risk. Ah, no, you know, no. But that brings up one of the other issues is just the promotion of this whole concept. OER is still a secret for too many people in the world. Especially when we're talking about K-12. Now, OER has tended to operate only in higher ed so far, for the most part. Yes. I think it's a fair thing to say and it's, but that's, we're actually, that's only at the most 20% of the population of students. And maybe, you know, Catherine's got some numbers where it's even less than that. But you said at one point, it's one out of 13. One thirteenth. Yeah, so. Yeah, we'll do the math. Yeah, but so what? Yeah, I'll quickly do that. So far, we haven't, we haven't even really gotten to the students in the world. We're just dealing with the tip of the iceberg or the low hanging fruit, whatever metaphor you want. We need to get to the large group. So if we want to actually promote OER, let's actually start where the students start. We start them out in kindergarten it'll be a no brainer by the time they get to higher ed, what they're, you know, they'll have to use OER. And I think, you know, what you've done is replicable in other places that need this. So are you already working or thinking of other parts of the world that you might put this into play? Yeah, we're actually having conversations. I got off the phone an hour ago with a person in Kenya, where we're starting there. And via this Siemens Stifton Foundation, which Catherine mentioned it as started Steam Foundation, we've been introduced to their South African, I'm sorry, South American CREA department. So Stifton has a different organization that operates in the Spanish speaking world of South America. You know, again, it's a slow process to get everybody changing. You know, these K-12 administrations have been doing things the same way for many, many years all over the world. So getting them to do it differently takes, so all the promotion you can help us with, Alan will appreciate. I'm trying, but like, what kind of things would you need or what should people do if they're interested in this? I think, begin talking about it for one thing. The other thing is at the higher ed level where lots of people who are going to hear this presentation first are going to say, well, okay, so what should we do? Let's go over to the education department. We train teachers and ask them if they know about OER and ask the people in the education departments if they're showing teachers how to use OER. That would be the first thing. What I found is that the answer is going to be for the most part, not really. Maybe not. Yeah, hard to say, like, you know, yeah. I'll say, not really, I'm pretty sure the answer is going to be that in most education departments. And I did an analysis of research that was done by JET Education Services during the pandemic of what was available. For South African students, and it was a vanishing lyre, a tiny, tiny set. Yes, you've got African Storybook, you've got Sea of Woola, you've got Thunderbolts Kids, but that's pretty much it, you run out. So you've got a lot of stuff there that's simply not available. So there's, and again, you know, STEAM has a traditional focus on science. So there is some material out there, but there's a huge amount of material that isn't out there. And so part of it is just to try and get people, I think people, and I'm working on OER policy with universities as well. And what I find is that people see it as giving and they don't realize that they can also take, that there's a reciprocity. You're not merely giving what you create, but you also are able to jumpstart. You're able to get into a place where, you know, I was working on policy and I was saying, hey, I've got all these policies from the Commonwealth of Learning. We can jumpstart this whole process. We're not starting from, okay, clause one, we've got 10 policies here that are open education resources that we can work with. So there is a whole marketing and I think, you know, there's this red herring of, oh, it's less quality. Believe you me, if you're trying to put something out and you know that it can be, you're gonna be a lot more worried about what it looks like than if you're simply running it in a school or so. So I think part of it is just to shift that and to shift the fear because, you know, it's relatively easy to put something up on an LMS if you've got the content, but if you don't have the content, you first have to develop the content and then you put it onto the LMS, you know. So I think that that is one thing. The other challenge that I have been working with very much because of my history in development is we actually are now working with a cellular manufacturer or they assemble, they South African based, they're throughout Africa, but they are looking at creating for us as large and robust devices possible, but one without any cellular capability because I know from working with the Siemens Stiftung funded organizations in South America that the provision of devices is a real problem in terms of theft. So we've got a whole lot of other challenges we are looking at in terms of trying to make sure that the devices are not known to be, that you know that you can't turn it into a cell phone for instance. And then the other thing we have looked at as well is if you do provide the devices, you know, make sure you provide the power banks and so on, but that we are looking at switching profiles. So you don't necessarily need a device, a child, but a device a grade and the students can switch profiles. So there are quite a lot of those kinds of things that I think we think of within our context and I know that the South American context is very similar in terms of poverty and the associated theft, which again, if you're living in West Germany, you don't think about because it's a small amount, but I mean the devices, I mean, we're looking at the devices are coming around about 10% of the volume because again, that is the solution that Africa needs. So yes, so those are the kinds of, because yes, you know, the last thing, yes, you know, there's always the give you money, but I know in the intelligence community, they say, no, no, it's the analysis, it's the understanding, the money's the last thing. You need to solve the problem first, you know. And I think for me, it would be getting people to be a lot more consistent about licensing education materials in K-12 as OER and not just automatically copywriting them because then you've got a lot of resources you can utilize. And I'll just add into that what Catherine's saying as far as changing the mindsets. And we're already spending, when I say we, I mean globally education, we're already spending the money. It's not a matter of sustainability. It's a matter of changing the flow of the money. We're already spending lots of money, more money than we need to actually where the money should be diverted to creating the OER books and the teacher professional development. That's one thing. So it's just a shift in that some people think, well, it will cost them. No, it's not a cost. It's a shift of the focus of the money. The other big thing of thinking that needs to change I think is in K-12, we need an LMS or an LMS like that. We would also like it to be open source. That's why we promote Moodle because it is an LMS and it's open source. And again, from a higher ed perspective, it's like, well, why do we need an LMS? Well, because when we're talking about K-12, we need to assess very frequently. You noticed I showed you that quit where you show a question and then we give them a prompt. We give them feedback. We see if they got it right. As an elementary teacher, you're assessing all day long. And that's very different from a higher ed where traditionally a lecturer lectures all day long and then they assess two or three times a year to get to the semester. Well, when you're an elementary teacher, you're assessing as they come in the door and as they're leaving. So that's why the LMS helps with that part of the instructional process. All right, so we need to encourage the development of many more OER artists out there. And so I really appreciate so much taking time out to bring this to us. And we hope we can get some more people interested in this fantastic work you're doing. Thank you. Thank you, Alan. Thank you so much. Sure, and this, of course, the same link to watch this is now the recording. So this is available for sharing right away. And just thank you again. Fantastic. And we hope we can keep this going. Thanks, Alan. Sure. Excellent. Stay cool, Kat. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.