Title of Innovation: EDBox (Education digitale box)
Year of implementation: 2016
Implemented by: ED4free
Country/Countries where the Innovation is being implemented: Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Comoros, Côte d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Mali, Senegal, Togo
Problem being solved
Of all the digital revolutions, the e-education revolution is arguably the most strategic for Africa, as only a significant contribution of digital educational resources will support the need for education and training of hundreds of millions of young Africans. And yet this opportunity, which makes sense in a context of lack of schools and universities, seems totally ignored. That's why ED4free, which is committed to digital solutions, has designed the digital education box to provide access to tens of thousands of educational content, accessible without the internet.
Description of innovation
EDBox is a nano server that allows students, teachers and parents of students to access tens of thousands of educational content without access to the internet. Teachers can use these digital resources in the classroom.
Accompanied by a mini projector, EDBox can be used to simulate concepts that are difficult to represent, to show or demonstrate the functioning of a mathematical, biological, physical, chemical, etc. process. The box is also a library of downloadable resources that allow students to have documentary resources from all disciplines and formats from developed countries. This gives students equal opportunity in access to knowledge.
The pedagogical uses of this device are numerous: (self) teacher training, preparation of a course, courses in front of students, provision of free educational content for download on smartphones in wifi, for teachers, parents, students. They apply to schools, adult training center, universities.
Finally, EDBox also incorporates an open-access cloud that collects and distributes educational resources that will be accessible online and via nanoservers.
It is completely modular in that the content it hosts can be selected according to the type of education (primary, college, high school, higher education, adult education) and located according to the countries.
Technically, it's a Raspberry PI nanocomputer, with Raspbian as the operating system.
Outcomes and Impact
The impact of this technology is enormous from the point of view of access to knowledge and quality of education.
It allows learners to access content from all over the world and more accurately address themes with demonstrations, simulations and interactive activities. This probably contributes to a wider access to knowledge and allows a student to have the same educational content as his classmate who is on the other side of the world.
The effect this will have is an increase in the quality of education and a new chance of access to knowledge for those who were out of school.
Potential to be scaled and replicated
Our technology has the advantage of being very modular in its design. EDBox is already used in several African countries and for each country, the content is contextualized, tailored as needed. The box is already showing its ability to reproduce and adapt. It adapts to all contexts and works with simple batteries for areas with no electrical current. These two links show EDBox in Côte d'Ivoire and Benin:
Site web : http://ed4free.ovh/
