Yuval Noah Harari poses some disturbing challenges enabled by the Internet. While agreeing that the internet can be dangerous, the Open Learning Exchange offers a different perspective: information and communication technologies make it possible for power to shift from the few who, in the past, have controlled the supply of goods, services and goodness to…
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OLE partners with Travis the Translator Massachusetts / The Netherlands In pursuit of its social mission, Travis, a company creating cutting edge voice translation devices, has partnered up with the Open Learning Exchange (OLE), an organization providing learning opportunities for people in emerging economies. When customers pre-order a Travis the Translator device for themselves, they can now…
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Nokia has provided a generous grant to OLE that will be used to expand OLE’s collections of learning resources for Syrian refugee girls that will be available on the Internet in a Free Syrian Library. The Library will be an open multi-media, multi-lingual repository of Arabic, English and other mid-eastern languages. The Library will…
Continue ReadingI have been thinking a lot about the ways that today’s technologies are changing the ways we learn and how those changes affect our societies. Just about everything related to knowledge is changing: Newspapers, radio, TV and the Internet are not what they used to be and are producing changes in the ways we learning…
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Press Release The Open Learning Exchange and Massachusetts General Hospital Global Medicine are pleased to announce an initial round of funding from the Yahoo Employee Foundation for the Planet Health Pilot in Uganda. The Pilot will be carried out in cooperation with Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST) and The Bugoye Health Clinic III…
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Tiger Girls The TIGER Project (These Inspiring Girls Enjoy Reading) is a project of OLE International being carried out in partnership with UNHCR and International Relief & Development with generous support from UNHCR Innovation. The goal of the TIGER project is to demonstrate and document the effectiveness of an innovative and scalable community based approach to…
Continue ReadingPut 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…
Continue ReadingIn mid-June a four-member team from the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) and the Open Learning Exchange (OLE) will visit the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan to evaluate the progress of an innovative community education initiative called the TIGER Girls Program. The TIGER program (These Inspiring Girls Enjoy Reading) is being implemented in partnership with…
Continue ReadingEvery child has a right to a quality basic education. From our beginning OLE has emphasized this right to education, found in Article 27 in the Declaration of Human Rights, however I now think this is a one-sided, seriously flawed statement. I now believe that every right should have responsibilities explicitly connected to it. We…
Continue Reading“Follow the money”, I was told in a recent discussion about OLE’s “business model”. That makes a lot of sense. It get it. One way or another we must to generate enough sustainable income to match sustainable expenses, with a bit more for a rainy day. However business models for satisfying basic human needs must meet multiple requirements. It is a fatal error to focus only on the financial balance sheet.
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