I work with traditional brick and mortar adult literacy programs (classrooms) that are looking for ways to provide access to learning opportunities for clients that now cannot gather and are not in one common location (e.g. housing project). The clients have the common North American digital divide internet access and device issues. The clients typically have very limited personal devices and very limited digital literacy skills.
The Kolibri product looks to match better to an organized group environment/infrastructure. From my limited investigation it looks like Kolibri would not easily deploy to individuals devices working in physical isolation.
Am it understanding the deployment model correctly - something like a Rachel? It would never be feasible to send each learner a Rachel device.
Thanks
Hello @acherwinski
you’re mostly right, currently Kolibri is being used inside classrooms where there is a server where the students connect to use the resources the teacher or coach has prepared for them. The classroom server does not need Internet but the users must have a connection with their server, what usually happens in their school LAN or WIFI.
However, there are experiences of people using it too in their own personal devices. Even if that’s not how Kolibri has been planned, it’s possible if you do guide the students on how to do it. Kolibri installer together with the needed downloaded channels can be delivered in an usb disk and the student can install it in his/her own windows/linux/mac device.
Obviously, that’s not the perfect method, and it might not be what you are needing. There’s work in progress to solve the use case you have, but it won’t be available in the short term.
José
Thank you José for the quick and clear response. This will help me explain Kolibri to instructors that have found themselves thrown into the deep end of the remote learning pool. I look forward to following the project. Alan
Hello @acherwinski , one last thing I have thought after answering you.
In your post you mention that sending a Rachel device to each student is not possible. I would say it’s not even recommendable as Rachel is setup to be used as a server for several students too.
There is a much, much cheaper solution that I have had in my hands: Kolibri installed in a https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero-w/ . Up to 4 devices could access to it (not fast for four, but it worked). Thinking of sending one device for one user , it could be an affordable solution in case you have the resources to deploy it. If the student has a phone charger, you can prepare a SD card for this device and it will act as a wifi hotspot. Then, the student only has to plug the charger and connect his personal device (a smartphone would work) to the wifi provided by the RPi to begin to learn.