Hello Kolibri community!
I have been working off and on over the last year on understanding the Kolibri Studio platform and trying to bring in more OER content. So far I have mostly been running experiments on automated importing of content from a few different online OER providers/technologies.
I see the potential for bringing lots of new content into the platform and exposing it to the Kolibri userbase, so much cool work being done on OER is not making it to some of the most in-need classrooms.
That being said, so far I have been doing most of my work alone, not really out of choice, I just haven’t really known the best way to try to recruit others to my cause. I’ve been active in the slack instance for volunteer software engineer contributors to the platform, and gotten lots of help from the core Learning Equality team with questions and issues that have arisen as I’ve explored the platform.
I decided to try to make a more general post here to see if others might like to join me in my efforts. I don’t have a strict idea of my exact end goal. I think a first order of business is just trying to get more OER in Kolibri and trying to make it a good central hub for not only viewing and rearranging OER, but the integration with a platform that can manage assignments I think is a real missing piece, especially a platform that is as general purpose as Kolibri and can deliver lots of different content. This completeness of vision in the Kolibri project is contrasted by OER repositories like OER Commons, which has more reach is the US but a less clear path for deploying resources.
Further goals of mine include enabling more of the content to be easily edited, adapted and translated. Lots of OER is distributed as PDFs, and at least some portion of the Kolibri catalog is PDFs, or other hard to edit formats like custom HTML5 websites.
Would love to hear your thoughts on these subjects and schedule time to meet with anyone interested in joining my efforts in this work.
While there is some portion of the work that is technical, I can also use help from teachers and non-programmers of all sorts to help review content after it is imported. I also would love to work with others on translating content, unfortunately my Spanish is still rudimentary (and I know a decent amount of German but it is a less critical language for reaching students in need) and the project of translating lots of content into lots of languages will have to be a big project with many individual contributors. No better time to start than right now!