UnaMesa » Newsletter

The last three months have been a very exciting time for the Mobile Research and Education (MORE) project.

We have been working closely with Prof. Islam and SoftEd on the Bangladesh Virtual Classroom project, a distance-learning English language course comprised of 26 lessons featuring interactivity features based on SMS responses. Recording of the videos has been completed and the first lesson will be broadcast by the Bangladesh Open University on April 4th. Initial surveys and small scale tests have shown the SMS interactivity to significantly and quantifiably increase the effectiveness of the education delivered. UnaMesa's involvement in the project ranges from programming guidance and support for SoftEd's programmers for the SMS aggregation software, to financial support and helping to analyse and validate project results. Our key focus is to support, learn from and document the work being done with the aim of developing this interactive pedagogical technique as a sustainable, scalable and universally transferable model for distance learning.

We aim to utilize the knowledge and expertise gained in the course of this work to create another pilot series of courses focused on health-care topics. These courses will be developed for health-care providers in under-served regions to provide them high quality and up-to-date instruction. We hope to conduct these pilots in association with BRAC and their pool of 4000 village caregivers in Bangladesh. Funding, timing and other details such as the delivery mechanism and structure of the lessons for these prototypes is under discussion. Towards this end we are working to arrange a workshop later this year in the Bangladesh/India region, bringing together regional experts, industry partners and leaders in the area of interactive educational delivery to discuss best practices, help set project goals and identify areas for collaboration.

In other related developments we have made significant progress towards being able to offer education and health-care wikis that can both be used online and offline without an internet connection. This opens up exciting possibilities for educators, students and health-care workers in regions with little or no internet connectivity. With the help of our partners at Wikispaces, we have completed such a prototype of the Hesperian health-care manual 'Disabled Village Children', which will serve as the basis for further work in this area.