What do we do differently / better?

[Matthew McGinn]

Hi all!

I wanted to open a discussion on where we think collectively our edge is. In my eyes, the minimal-ness of the MVP should reflect what sets us apart from the other organizations that do similar things. If we have nothing special that we do better than others, we do not provide much value to anyone. Some of the biggest other players in this space are (feel free to add more, this is off the top of my head):

Khan Academy
One Laptop Per Child
iSchool (Zambia)
Global Literacy Project

In my mind, what sets us apart is primarily leveraging technology to deliver & manage the content. I would think this means:
self-building / healing networking layer, capable of
consensus recommendation engine split across users
openness of design & codebase

What do others think makes our group & mission special?

[Bodo Hoenen]

Good topic, here are my points:

1. We are building for the children at the bottom of the pyramid, the children that have the least and are in the most challenging of circumstances. The ones that live in disaster areas, conflict zones and in areas that restrict open education. In the latter especially, these devices need to be built to operate standalone, disconnected from the internet and traditional forms of support. This approach then leads us to be unique in a few additional areas:
1. Our core focus on Mesh Networking for secure 'self-building/healing networks' so that we can enable distributed computing and various educational matching processes to occur. This layer also provides significant added utility to the device as a free (secure and private) communications tool.
2. Our use of an on-device LRS, analytics engine and feedback mechanism. essentially creating a supervised machine learning loop and allowing the recommendation engine to uniquely evolve independently.
3. A —by default— distributed approach (I.E each device operates independent of each other), but allowing for a decentralized approach if a community wants to go that route (I.E a number of devices in addition to pushing the child's data to the on-device LRS also pushes it to a centralized LRS like a school). But we are fundamentally not building a centralized approach.
   
   By building for the children in the most challenging of environments, we are building for children in all environments.
   
   
2. Our data approach (See Fig 1). As mentioned in our manifesto, core to what we are doing is ensuring we empower users to own and control their tools and data. By default no data will need to be shared back with us, only when explicitly agreed to by the child/guardian. Our data approach overcomes many of the child data concerns rightfully had by many who fear their childrens data getting into the hands of the wrong people and being nefariously used. Our distributed, standalone model makes for some very unique value propositions to parents and children, especially those that move around alot and need to plug into various educational environments. having the childs data in their control makes this process safer and easier. 
   
   We are approaching this as concerned parents, how would we want our childs data used? 
     
3. Long term approach. (This may not really apply to the list you provided but it is still something that sets us apart) Most EdTech companies have the disadvantage of needing to aim for short term gains and profits so that they can satisfy the needs of their VC's, political backers, donors and customers. Even those that have rather socially minded backers in the beginning tend to be gradually forced to shift their focus to more immediate goals. This then forces them to aim for the biggest markets and the bigger customers, I.E the status quo.
   
   This team was started out of a passion for these children, we came together as volunteers working to solve this challenge no matter how long it takes. We are not working on this for reward, salaries or out of obligation, we all are working on this for one reason, the children. This puts us in a powerful position as we are not 'serving two masters', our only focus is the children.
   
   
4. We are aiming to solve the children's educational challenges. This may seem obvious but this is not what's happening in EdTech today. The dominant focus is on solving the Schools issues or the States issues, or the parents issues or the teachers issues, the focus is on someone's political agenda, the status quo the protection of tradition, the dogma. Those of us on this team recognize that education is failing us and has been for many years/decades. The extent of this failure is however downplayed by the industry, and I would say and agree with Sir Ken Robinson and many others that "Education (K through to higher education) is fundamentally broken". 'Fundamentally' is the key word here. The foundation of education is broken its very principles, structures, its sacred cows, the status quo. It's broken and has been for a long time. Today's educational structures were built for an era that has long since passed, designed to train a very different type of people for a very different type of world, and it has not changed to keep up with our needs. Instead the educational system has over the past hundreds of years undergone a slow evolution (the reason why, in my opinion, is explained in my third point above 'long term approach' ). However all of these incremental changes were built on the same foundation, the foundation that is broken. The current industry is STILL building new technologies, ideas and educational solutions for this current educational system and therefore being built on and for a fundamentally broken foundation. We are quite unique here. We are not building this to work with current systems, to align to current curriculums, to subscribe to current thoughts on best learning styles. We are not building it to appeal to any ones political, religious or ideological agenda, we are bringing this back to basics, back to first principles: What is education for... Let us do that! . I feel we are at a significant advantage here. We are not experts in Education, we dont know 'How it is supposed to be done', 'How it's always been done'.
   
   Our solution is built on that principle, Let us not assume anyone child is similar to another, let us not assume therefore that any one solution will work for all children, let us think anew and build a platform that can help us find out those answers. Let us listen to the experts but not take their word for anything, instead let the children steer us.  
   
   
5. There are a few more but its late at night, so ill just jot the keywords down Skills map, Radically open, Adaptive engaging UI, Peer-to-Peer learning, training the next generation of teachers. 

(Fig1)

[Misha Eydman]

If I were to summarize and distill what we are creating to a few key points of innovations, it would be the following:

1. Collaborative open source non-profit organizational approach - I think Bodo provided a good detailed explanation on how this works and why we are using this approach.

2. Offline LMS - ability to store and access educational content as well as personal progress record off-line.

3. Universal Learning Map - while there have been prior efforts to do this, we are aiming to create a completely new, system agnostic, standardized way to categorize educational resources available worldwide.

4. Explorative User Interface - allowing kids to explore and learn in a radically new way, without forcing them to follow a rigid curriculum.

5. Recommendation Engine - guiding kids' education based on their individual learning patterns and abilities

6. Social Collaboration - as Matthew explained, by using Mesh networking, we can allow children who do not have access to a classroom to experience education as if there were studying in one.

[Misha Eydman]

I wanted to build on top of this conversation. As shared by @Thibault, here are some interesting resources about OLPT and what has or has NOT worked for them. One recurring theme I am noticing is that usability and child engagement play a major role. Without an intuitive, self-guided interface not supervisory or teacher support, there is a significant drop-off in positive outcome with these laptops.

https://edutechdebate.org/archive/one-laptop-per-child-impact/

[Diana Sharp]

This is a very helpful thread with great info.  Does anyone know how the "special sauce" described here for Dev4x compares with what this group is doing:
http://www.curiouslearning.org/
and are they participating in x-prize?

[Miles Lasater]

Diana, my impression is that Curious Learning was until recently known as the Global Literacy Project.  They would make a great partner and have published some very intriguing research about their work in Ethiopia.  This is mentioned on the main www.dev4x.com home page, in fact.  Confusing, I know because I think they changed their name or are a spin off?

I found this paper from them to be inspring reading: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/globallit-website-hosting-documents/Wolf-3.pdf

To more specifically answer your question, I have not seen them publish their software publicly.  In reading the site so far, I have only found reference to using off-the-shelf apps or using students to write new ones.  I would be interested to hear if anyone has found otherwise?

I think Bodo may have talked to them a while back?

Miles

[Miles Lasater]

There is a really interesting conversation going on in the XPrize forums about the LA public school/Pearson iPad project failure.  I think it is worth reading and discussing what John Grave posted there.

http://forum.xprize.org/t/us-schools-seek-apple-ipad-refunds/1502/3

Miles

----

I'm going to disagree with Ed here, but only because failure is a good teacher and I think we should milk the LA iPad fiasco for every lesson we can. Let's see if we can find some relevance. Take a look at the Los Angeles Unified School District memo of 15 March 2015 with its "bug report" on the Pearson iPad software.

Issue #1: Technical issues left students unable to log in to access the content.

I am virtually certain that for some Global Learning XPRIZE team this very same issue is going to be a problem.

Issues # 2: Content often is missing, incorrect, or can’t be accessed.

This is a quality control problem. Teams need to be aware of this issue and take steps to minimize the errors in their code. Because there will be errors.

Issue # 3: Incomplete content

What happens to that really successful team whose learners breeze through all the supplied learning material in 6 months and then don't have anything for the learner to look at for a year before their post-test? Beware the forgetting curve.

Issue # 4: App will not allow students to stay logged in.

As, for example, when all the animations, voice processing and video burn through the battery ...

Just saying. 

[Misha Eydman]

In my opinion, this is an issue between Pearson and LA School District and it has more to do with how the contract was awarded and how Person executed the project, than with supplementing education with digital products. While there may be some residual backlash against digital education, I think it will be minimal and will likely have no impact on XPrize or what we are building.

Misha @ Dev4X

[Stu Holmes]

Here's a GLEXP competitor from the Netherlands. [LINK]. Similar concept to our approach. 

[Bodo Hoenen]

Thank you Stu, I was actually calling them today, but we could not connect the call due to internet issues. we will be calling each other tomorrow again.