Khan Academy is a free educational website containing more than 4000 short, high-quality lectures covering topics ranging from math and the sciences to economics and the humanities. Access to Khan Academy empowers both students and teachers. Students with a broadband-connected computer can watch the short lectures and complete quizzes. Teachers can track students' progress. It's no wonder that Khan Academy is used by millions of learners and educators worldwide.
Since most schools in Bhutan do not have access to the Internet, or the access is painfully slow, viewing online lectures is usually impossible. Today, however, with unbelievably-cheap computing power, and thanks to projects such as KA-Lite (Khan Academy Offline), it is possible to avail the power of Khan Academy to any school in Bhutan.
One of Khan's thousands of videos, served offline |
Imagine: For around Nu. 5000, any school, college, library or community centre in Bhutan can offer unlimited access to one of the world's top educational resources; no internet required.
If you want to watch a demo of the Khan Academy server in action, join us this Saturday for our Sherig Collection launch event.
How we built it
Bhutan's first Raspberry Pi, toiling as a Khan Academy wireless server |
In addition to the computer board itself, a 64 GB SD card ($50) is needed to store the computer's software as well as the thousands of MP4 videos. A USB Wi-Fi dongle, which turns the Pi into a wireless access point (it already has a wireline Ethernet port), adds $5 to the bill. Throw in a few more bucks for a plastic box and a power adapter to round off the cost to $99.
For the software part, we are indebted to Jamie Alexandre and the rest of the good folks at Learning Equality for creating KA Lite, an offline version of Khan Academy. We also used other open source software for running the server: The Debian-based Raspbian Linux distribution, as well as dnsmasq and hostapd for managing the wireless access point.
This puts puts some awe in awesome! Incredible work and thanks for the inspiration!
ReplyDeletePlease post the details of your configuration, including hostapd, dnsmasq, webserver etc. so that I could reproduce your system.
ReplyDeleteWow that's a good initiative. Keep up the job folks.
ReplyDelete