Put a PLANET in Your Pocket

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Put a PLANET in Your Pocket

OLE is pleased to announce the PLANET learning system: Personalized Learning Accelerated with Networked Energizing Teams: powerful enough to hold thousands of open-learning resources, inexpensive enough for use any place in the world, small enough to fit in your pocket.

Imagine seeing 8-year old Kofi, as we have, running to his Ghanaian village school an hour early to have more time reading. Imagine seeing, as we have, Tiger Teams of adolescent, Syrian-refugee girls before an audience of parents and friends, performing their play, debating the benefits of recycling, and reading their poetry. These experiences of personalized learning, along with hundreds more like them, are energizing OLE to expand our innovative approach to learning, making it available to as many people in as many places as possible.

OLE uses the following principles as it continues to develop better ways to learn:

  • We all require a personal sense of power, meaning, and connection with others in order to thrive.
  • All of us have the right and the responsibility to acquire the knowledge, skills, and values that enable us to thrive personally and contribute to the common welfare.
  • Small, active, solutions-based teams greatly increase learning and promote socially constructive behaviors.
  • Personal, social and economic benefits arise in communities with widely distributed power, transparency, and mutual accountability; whereas societies characterized by concentrated power, secrecy, and blaming others predictably bring out the worst in us and our communities.

With this evidence-based foundation, the PLANET addresses two key problems facing education today: the scarcity of quality learning resources and the lack of qualified teachers. The PLANET’s open software includes a rich multimedia, multilingual digital library, tools for local, multimedia creation, templates for course development, and assessment tools for certifying learning, evaluating the learning system itself and monitoring the demographics of a community. A complete tool kit —server, router, battery, and tablets—can be easily moved from one location to another, can be powered locally, and does not require internet access. Any device with a browser can use the PLANET. To meet the teacher shortage, we have discovered that small, self-organizing learning teams can be highly effective when supported by local talent who use the PLANET to develop their mentoring and coaching skills.

While the PLANET functions off the internet, it can be connected periodically to an online Hub for downloading new resources and uploading locally created content and activity data. These two-way exchanges benefit both previously isolated communities and the rest of the world.

With its powerful tools for personalized learning, its friendly interface and limited infrastructure, the PLANET has shown to be highly effective in formally established schools and communities as well as in informal settings with refugees and internally displaced persons. Its remarkably low cost now makes it possible for every nation to guarantee all of its people unfettered access to a quality basic education.

To learn more about the PLANET and how you might use it, contact us at: [email protected].