Phases Overview

Introduction

Appropriate overlapping stages will vary from country to country and in different regions within a country.

The phases described in subsections here  are intended to summarize key stages in both the area of coverage, density of adoption and intensity of use on the one hand and infrastructure required for battery charging and postal/courier communications and telecommunications on the other hand. Corresponding material in the technology evolution

section describes an evolutionary development of necessary software and hardware procurement to be available in time to match the resources, capabilities and requirements for sending and receiving information at each stage. That is primarily relevant to a first national deployment. Once relevant Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) technology is readily available suitable for all stages it may be appropriate to accelerate procurement and deployment within regions where infrastructure is already available. The key point is to maximize the usefulness of whatever is actually possible within the constraints of what is already in place, including preparing for the next phase within a region by using the facilities provided by a phase to accelerate providing the infrastructure and resources needed for the next phase.

Phase 1 - One Cardpod Per School (OCPS)

This is the lowest density of adoption and intensity of use. By requiring no additional infrastructure it ensures the widest possible area of coverage and justifies the central resources required to produce relevant audio content.

Essentially the idea is very close to that of One Media Player Per Teacher

(OMPT) so the web site for that independent project should be consulted for detailed information on the basic ideas and benefits.

 

The proposal for the first phase of an initial case study in Nepal is actually "One Cardpod Per Literacy Volunteer" (OCPLV) to provide distance education for each of the 40,000 or so volunteers conducting literacy classes that are presumably associated with a similar number of local schools.

 

 

OMPT is basically an enhancement to the well established approach of Interactive Radio Instruction (IRI)

as promoted widely in the least developed countries. The detailed IRI toolkit produced in 2005 available from that link strongly confirms that IRI broadcasts are cost effective both for distance education of teachers and for distance education more generally.

 

The benefits of using MP3 players instead of just radio receivers are that for similar costs of equipment and battery power you get a much more convenient and interactive medium which can handle a much larger volume of material organized into more "channels" using podcasting available any time the user wants to listen and without the costs of broadcast transmission.

 

The convenience and greater interactivity enabled by being able to start and pause a playback at any time is particularly relevant in the least developed countries with dispersed settlement patterns where people spend a lot of time walking. For example students and teachers may spend an hour a day walking to and from a local primary school. This "wasted" time can be put to good use with an MP3 player and earphones in a way that is not feasible for scheduled broadcasts (which may also have reception problems while walking).

 

MP3 players and educational podcasts are widely used for education in developed countries. They are seen as computer peripherals dependent on updates from a computer connected to the internet (and also dependent on overnight battery recharge from domestic power points connected to the grid). But as demonstrated by OMPT this mode of operation is not essential.

 

 

Cassette players and CDROM players have some similarities and are are often used in conjunction with IRI. However they have been basically made obsolete by MP3 players which are cheaper, more convenient and use less battery power.

 

Key differences with the ideas at ompt.org are:

Mass Rollout

This first stage is intended to be a mass rollout to all schools in all areas of each country as a preliminary to later stages. That enables a large order to manufacturers of MP3 recorders for lowest prices and to establish arrangements for developing enhanced firmware to include features required by later stages. OMPT is more oriented towards sponsorship of individual projects, which was necessary for proof of concept but much more expensive per unit of results obtained. OCPS is based on an evaluation of the proof of concept already provided by the OMPT project to authorize a mass rollout procurement decision for the required equipment production of audio content.

Distance Education for Teachers

The focus of OCPS and the next phase is on distance education for teachers rather than classes for students. This avoids a need to immediately procure loudspeakers and should save costs on battery electricity since only earphones are needed whereas loudspeakers use much more battery power. The intention is to add loudspeakers when arrangements have been made for cheaper local charging of batteries at later phases and use the service provided by OCPS to help organize that cheaper local charging through such means as a school based Battery Charging Station (BCS) also used to supply power for domestic White LED lighting, and a household delivery service based on school children carrying rechargeable batteries between home and the BCS.

Initially each deployed MP3 without loudspeaker can either be powered using non-rechargeable batteries that are widely used for radio broadcast receivers and can be purchased from rural market centres or they can use minimum size and cost solar panels or windup or pedal generators. By keeping this phase as short as possible and using it to immediately establish more scalable Battery Charging Stations at each school supplying a larger output at a lower cost per Watt hour of battery power the cost of battery charging for later phases can be kept down without delaying a decision to begin mass rollout.

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