The COVID-19 outbreak has created a situation that poses a colossal threat, now and in the future, to children and their families. A grim reality especially compounded among children already affected by poverty, disability or social exclusion. Experts predict that, given high contagion risks and the time needed to distribute a vaccine, COVID-19 is poised to be a long-term global health and welfare crisis.
The global school shutdowns and health crisis exacerbate already challenging realities for lower-income countries: with the limited or non-existent access to learning resources in underserved languages, their current education, as well as future opportunities and welfare, are significantly set back. According to the UN, 100 million more children fail basic reading skills because of COVID-19.
This situation proves how critical it is to accelerate the development of open educational resources and make them available in relevant languages for children and their communities.
The Education.dev concept
The Education.dev concept is part of the Global Digital Library (GDL) platform.
The idea behind Education.dev emerged as part of the collaborative space of content creators, technical developers and partners that have contributed to the GDL platform.
Too often, scarce public and international development resources are spent investing in new software code, tools, data collection, content and innovations for sector-specific solutions that are locked away behind licensing fees, with data only used by and available to specific initiatives.
An open approach to digital development can help to increase collaboration in the digital development community and avoid duplicating work that has already been done. Programs can maximize their resources, and ultimately their impact, through open standards, open data, open source technologies, and open innovation.
In a situation where new educational projects are launched every week, we seek to be the platform that supports other platforms and projects to reach their goals faster and with higher quality.
Our Mission: Curate and develop educational building blocks as a technical foundation for open educational resources development.
Our Goal: Help governments, programs and organizations maximize their resources, and ultimately their impact through open education and open source.
Project outputs:
The Global Digital Library: Increase the availability of high-quality learning resources for early childhood education in underserved languages for use in schools an at home.
EduPix.io: Create a large repository of quality assured images, audio and illustrations specifically designed for educational purposes.
Translate a Story: Develop an innovative platform for quality assurance of content, using a combination of machine learning and crowdsourcing.
Develop a full math curriculum for K-12 that is platform agnostic.
Topics.dev: Develop a generic learning taxonomy for early childhood education.
Develop content creation and curation guidelines and best practices that we share on Education.dev.
