The Kalahari Learning Management System (LMS) allows students in areas where internet connections are expensive or unavailable to access digital learning resources over their personal devices (e.g. phone) or school supplied computers and tablets.
A demo of the system can be found at lms.kalahariexperience.org
(although a new, improved version build using Svelte is currently under development, more details in Next Steps)
The Problem
Many students especially in rural areas are put at a significant disadvantage in learning the skills needed to study further at university or seek employment due to limited or expensive internet access.
The LMS aims to mitigate these disadvantages by providing free, local access to popular digital learning resources without relying on internet infrastructure.
How It Works
The system itself is made up of two key pieces of hardware:
-
A small computer acting as a Server
This stores all the content for the students to access from their devices. Some are PDFs like past exam papers, some educational videos like those from the amazing Crash Course YouTube channel, and some local downloads of full websites like Wikipedia.
In addition to storage, it also has software on called a web server which allows users to access all of these resources from their web browser (e.g. Google Chrome) -
A WiFi router (or more specifically, a Wireless Access Point)
This allows users to connect to the above described Server to access the resources by connecting to an open WiFi network.
To access the resources, students first get in range of one of the available LMS devices (which are currently deployed at a number of schools and community centres in the Kalahari Education Experience Project project area). They then connect to an open WiFi network called Kalahari LMS and visit the LMS’ webpage using its URL. It is important to note that they can only access the LMS’ webpage and local resources but not the entire internet because they are only accessing the content stored on the Server. They can access all of the available resources when in range of the LMS device, and select a few to download to their personal devices for self study at home.
Next Steps
After deploying the system and working with the users, I noticed an issue with the current system is that users wanted to download resources to take home with them to study (in addition to just working on them when in range of the access point which might be at their school or community centre). While this is currently possible, the user experience was bad because each resource (pdf practise exams, individual videos) had to be downloaded separately and was saved without organisation to the phone’s download folder.
My immediate thoughts were that an app where you could download whole sections of content and retrieve them within the app’s UI while at home. Traditional apps, unfortunately, require the user to have an internet connection to download them from the app store. To avoid this problem, I decided to rewrite the system a Progressive Web App. This uses web-platform technologies to make an app that be downloaded directly from our system but still work offline and appear on the homescreen. The rewrite is in Svelte, and makes use of the IndexedDB API to store each of the downloaded resources in a structured way that is easy to organise.
Other potential improvements include:
- Design a robust enclosure to ensure the hardware of the LMS can survive harsh environmental conditions
- Transition our hardware to be based on the Raspberry Pi 5 for future deployments to add better standardisation and availability of parts between devices.
- Changing the system to run on battery power so that students can continue to learn during the area’s frequent blackouts.
Development and Specifications
Info can be found on the project’s GitHub page
Contact Us
For any questions please use the contact form to get in touch