Modernizing education using technology

Throughout the world, social innovators are working hard to modernize education. When working in developing countries with limited infrastructure, coordinating efforts, sharing work and delivering new course content could be an expensive and time-consuming process for these social innovators. Open source Course Management Systems (CMS) and Virtual learning environments (VLE) could greatly help in addressing these challenges.

Modernizing the education system is one of the main challenges that the developing countries face today.  With the aid of technology, social innovators have made great progress in this area by developing innovative teaching methods and modernizing curriculum. Ashoka-Lemelson fellow Dr.Balaji Sampath is one of the pioneers in the field of education innovation.  He developed an ingenious science experiment kit for teaching science in an effective but inexpensive way. His Eureka project has revolutionized the way science is taught in rural schools and has benefited more than half a million children in southern India.  He is planning to expand his program to cover a million students this year.

While working on a scale like this, social innovators could face challenges in executing tasks like coordinating efforts of multiple volunteer groups, managing and delivering new course content and sharing and standardizing curriculum.  To address these challenges, they can leverage new collaborative technologies like open source course management and virtual learning environment tools.  I recently came across these interesting open source tools which are widely used in the area of course management and virtual learning - moodle and Sakai project. If you are interested in learning more about these tools, this would be a good place to start.   There are some cool case studies  on this site that describe practical applications of this tool.

You can learn more about Dr.Sampath’s Eureka project from this video: