In South Africa, 78% of Grade 4 learners (around 9-10 years old) cannot read for meaning in English. That's because they're required to switch from learning in their home language to English in that year. It's incredibly tough problem, and something we've started to tacking using an innovative little "offline server" boxes and Drupal.

Read to Learn (RTL) is a project imagined by the amazing people at Oxford University Press (OUP) in South Africa, and something I've been working on with them for around 5 years. I'm the web designer and web developer on the project, and it's been an incredible experience.

What we've created is a highly interactive website where learners can go through lessons, take quizzes, and play interactive games; all powered by Drupal. But the most amazing thing is that we're deploying them to schools in rural areas that don't have any internet connection!

They do however have government-provided computer rooms or low-end android tablets, which has challenged us to build the entire system to work offline. Through a partnership with The Content Company, we've created little boxes that provide an internet signal that the computers connect to, to use the site without an any internet signal. Once a week, the box turns on it's (weak) 3G radio to send simple reports back to the OUP team to analyse.

So far, we've rolled the RTL programme out to a dozen schools across 3 provinces, with support from the Department of Education.

In this talk, I'll be describing the context and problem we're tackling, the hardware that was created, and how we built the website to function in this unique environment.
Session (45 minutes)

Experience level of the audience

Beginner