The high costs of producing appropriate teaching resources means that teachers often have to do without. Now the WikiEducator project is working on this. You all know about Wikipedia. Well, this is the education version with attitude.

Wikieducator is free and open teaching resources such as lesson plans and digital content to support them, initially created by committed teachers. Everything is freely available for any teacher to download and use. But it doesn’t stop there. Teachers can modify, adapt and re-purpose this material for their own use, on the understanding that they store the modified work back at WikiEducator.

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The technological evolution of Web 2.0 tools has produced a global platform that empowers the collective wisdom and intelligence of the crowd. Powerful arrays of technologies are emerging as ecosystems for extending, enhancing and enabling learning in an accelerated mode.

Deemed “Learning 2.0”, these online collaborative, interactive, and just-in-time information delivery technologies are encroaching on mainstream education in developed economies. The planets in Pakistan’s education constellation are aligning for universal adoption with its rapidly growing Internet infrastructure, increased funding from donor nations and an overwhelming demand from an illiterate population for which only scaling via Learning 2.0 technologies can provide the solution.

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More than 60% of students who qualify for University or tertiary education in the developing countries are not able to join due to limited physical infrastructure. With the introduction of elearning, these students can be admitted in extra mural programs. The concept of brick universities has to be replaced with click technology.

Higher institutions of learning like universities and technical colleges need to embrace this model, to deliver elearning to their students located within the main campus and satellite campuses. The deployment can be based on a push model where the main server is connected to the national backbone, and through online updates from a high speed Internet connection, the content is posted through the Extranets (National Backbone).

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Young people make up 18 percent of the world’s population today, or 1.2 billion in absolute terms. Of these 15-24 year-olds, 87% live in developing countries. At the same time, their basic educational needs are not being met. More than one-third of all youth around the world are not in the classroom – 73% of youth in sub-Saharan Africa and 51% in South and West Asia.

Yet developing world governments cannot expand traditional educational facilitates to these youth or the even larger cohort behind them. Demand for higher education in Asia and Africa will grow from 48 million enrollments in 1990 to 159 million enrollments in 2025, but India spent only 3.2% of GDP in 2005 on education, ranking it 140th of 180 countries tracked by the CIA World Factbook.

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Today, I approach the issues of disability and accessibility in the case of education in developing countries from the perspective of someone who grew up in Morocco with a visual impairment. While I led a privileged lifestyle, which allowed me to attend a private school, the concept of accessibility and accommodation remained rather foreign to me for most of my schooling. The differences between various disabilities aren’t as nuanced as they are in the North American context.

In Morocco, you were either blind or deaf, but not visually impaired or hard of hearing (except if you’re older and in that case, you either turn up the volume of the TV or radio and have people speak louder). From my experience, there were no in-between categories.

I never thought of myself as disabled because I wasn’t raised to think of it that way. The words, “disability”, “accessibility” and “accommodation” didn’t really become a part of my vocabulary until I moved to North America.

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Children who are challenged by disability and extreme poverty face the greatest danger of being deprived of their right to education and freedom of expression. For this population, technology must not only be accessible; it must also fit within a context of severe limitations in infrastructure and income. The right solution will address the presence of numerous languages within the same region and will empower local people, disabled or otherwise, to contribute to their own knowledge and culture repository.

Technology that relies on access to grid electricity will not serve the poorest 1.5 billion people. Sadly, this barrier isn’t likely to be removed soon – the International Energy Agency predicts 1.3 billion people will remain without electricity for the next 20 years.

Alternative energy options are ideal, but one should proceed with caution, as the practical amortized cost will often exceed what is possible for consumer-sustained revenues or even for government education budgets. When an education ministry has USD 100 a year per student to split between teacher pay, books, furniture, and construction of running water and toilets, little remains for new educational technologies. Program designers need to thoroughly measure and disclose the total cost of ownership of any solution, particularly technology based solutions.

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In countries like Afghanistan (where I live) those without disabilities may not be able to access education. The needs of the deaf, blind and those with other disabilities (physical and psychological) are often neglected. For the deaf, communication between parents / teachers and children can be almost impossible and there is a severe shortage of sign language, braille and assistive expertise, never mind the resources to pay for them.

What we are lacking is high quality (preferably creative commons or similarly licensed) localized content for both children and adults, such as interactive video sign language courses. Often we lack localized text to speech software. Because parents often can’t afford or can’t find the resources they need to communicate with their children they often find themselves completely excluded, and such frustration can easily foster worse problems.

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NVDA is an open source screen reader, with the ability to install on individual computers, or to run from a CD or a thumb drive. While it is over ten years behind other popular screen readers in development, in practice, the developer team is able to build on previous industry experience, as well as prioritizing […]

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The biggest challenge in bringing access to the digital realm to kids with disabilities in developing countries, and with it access to education and eventually employment, is the adoption of public policy and NGO strategies that are truly scalable. Traditional strategies have no chance of fundamentally changing the horrible statistics that prevail among persons with disabilities given the relatively minuscule resources available to help this community.

Right now, some initiatives run by departments of education and most initiatives run by NGOs spend some of their very limited resources on software-based assistive technologies such as screen readers or virtual keyboards that are extremely expensive. As a result, a very small minority of kids with disabilities get access to technology and then they do, they become dependent on software that they, their families, and future prospective employers cannot afford. Such an approach is just as ineffective whether one is talking about software that runs on PCs, netbooks, or cell phones since the best-known cell phone assistive technologies are extremely expensive.

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The major roadblock to accessing digital content in the developing world, where more than ninety percent of the world’s visually impaired live, are affordability and access. A more affluent, English speaking resident of India with a desktop computer or smartphone has access to much of the print disability technology and content available in the developed world. But this is not the case for the wide majority of the poor. Their visual learning is often restricted to what others care to read to them and to what content is available locally in hard copy form.

Blind and visually impaired children are at a distinct disadvantage in school without the visual aids and technology that many children in the West now take for granted. With such a high rate of adoption in the developing world, cell phones offer a potential solution to address the challenges of content access and learning for the visually impaired.

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