In August of 2013, I arrived in a small Liberian village deep in the forest near the border with Sierra Leone, where I was sent by the Peace Corps to teach high school. The hunger for education I witnessed there was astounding. My village housed the only high school for many surrounding communities -- some students walked over an hour every day in order to attend the afternoon sessions, often after having worked on their farms since dawn. Others lived farther away, eking out a living in the village during the school week in order to attend, but returning to their distant hometowns on the weekends to support themselves and their families. My students and I believed that education would empower them to change their lives. Their actions every day spoke to that, for they faced great obstacles just to show up.Even still, the school itself often failed to meet their educational needs. Basic resources, like textbooks and stationery, were either entirely absent or not readily available. The teachers themselves were frequently not empowered to succeed due in part to lack of materials or inadequate training. As a self-described "computer person," I always wondered how I could leverage technology to bring all the wonderful and innovative educational tools available to us in Internet-land to an impoverished country like Liberia, where Internet access is severely limited. With overcrowded classes and diverse ability levels, traditional models for education simply break down in Liberia, but the blended classroom model offered by many online educational resources -- where students can follow an individual educational path at their own pace -- stands as a great potential alternative.This made me wonder: How could we use those resources to multiply the efforts of educators in the most challenging contexts' Even in Liberia it was not unheard of to see advanced gadgets like smartphones in surprising places, but there were still many barriers. Among them was the fact that Internet access was virtually unavailable in most parts of the country, and at any rate prohibitively expensive for most. But what if we could develop a system to share these resources via the "sneakernet" of people carrying hardware into otherwise unreachable areas'I learned in the Peace Corps that there are rarely simple solutions to such complicated problems, but I also learned that complicated problems must be chipped away bit by bit, as though carving a statue from a solid block. So when I returned from Liberia, I was excited to discover the nonprofit Learning Equality, which shared my vision and moreover had already developed a free and open-source software platform, KA Lite, that brought online educational resources from Khan Academy to offline settings. It was precisely the kind of tool I would have loved to bring to my rural classroom!I now give my time every day working with Learning Equality to create one piece of the puzzle that will make education a universal reality. After developing KA Lite and deploying it to millions of learners around the world, including classrooms in Liberia and refugee camps in Lebanon, we're now working on the next generation of our free, open-source software, Kolibri, based on the lessons we learned and the feedback we received from our partners on the ground. Kolibri will enable organizations, governments, and teachers to curate custom lessons for offline use, aligned to local curricular standards, and enable collaborative learning with instant feedback, empowering students to work at their own pace, supported by mentors and peers. It's easy to think that as technology advances, these problems will simply vanish on their own. The reality is that it takes a sustained effort by many different people from many different angles to make a difference, which is why I do what I do. You too can make a difference, either by supporting an existing effort that you feel strongly about, or by taking action to directly improve your own community. The world will become a better place incrementally through all our combined efforts.Learning Equality recently launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo's new sister site for free social impact fundraising, Generosity.com, to help build and deploy Kolibri to remote and disconnected areas around the world: https://www.generosity.com/fundraisers/kolibri-free-offline-app-for-universal-education/. The fundraiser is part of Generosity's initiative to support and activate giving back for #GivingTuesday. For #GivingTuesday 2014, more than 350 campaigns raised more than $10M from 45,000 donations. Learn more about #GivingTuesday 2015 on Generosity at igg.me/givingtuesday.This post is part of a series produced by The Huffington Post and the 92nd Street Y, founders of #GivingTuesday, a global day of giving that will take place this year on December 1. These stories highlight the work of organizations and people around the world who are committed to giving back and doing good this #GivingTuesday. -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
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