And we need your help! Learning Equality’s Curriculum Operations Specialist, Vahid Masrour, shares more.

If you’re teaching or learning during Covid-19 school closures, you’ve probably encountered many solutions proposed for virtual learning environments relying on digital resources. All over the world, people are turning to digital resources — textbooks, lesson plans, videos, tutorials, learning applications, and libraries — to keep them connected to learning. But many solutions are overwhelmingly oriented towards English, and in the most vulnerable contexts, it’s critical to be able to provide an equivalent learning experience in the languages people speak at home, in social situations, in schools, and in their daily lives. 

EdTech Hub and Learning Equality are collaborating to find French content to add to the Kolibri Content Library. This will increase the availability of digital French content for learners in Francophone countries. We’re excited to expand the scope of French resources available for alignment to national curriculum standards, a major need for digital learning when students can’t be in the classroom.

We’ve been working together to source options for these resources, and to date have received recommendations for about 50 resources spanning materials that can be used in primary and secondary education, courses that help learn French as a second language, early writing and reading skills, and even materials that could be used in post-secondary education. The recommendations have included websites from Ministries of Education, higher education institutions, educational material collections, non-profit organizations that have shared materials from countries such as Canada, Côte d’Ivoire, France, Niger, Norway, South Africa, Switzerland, UK and US. Thank you to all those that have generously shared their recommendations with us! 

Expanding our search

Building on what we have evaluated so far, we are still looking for more resources which can be used educationally for the 275 million French speakers who don’t have an easy way to access the internet. We are now narrowing our focus on educational materials that have an explicit open license. In case you are unsure about “open license” content let us tell you more:

Content creators who upload their materials for use in the Kolibri Learning Platform developed by Learning Equality (which is a non-profit organization), can select whichever license is most applicable to their materials. The Kolibri Platform is a free and open source tool for learners and educators. For learning resources to be included in the public Kolibri Content Library, they must have an open license or special permissions license for use in Kolibri (explore the current catalog of materials in the library to understand more). 

The most open licenses are created by Creative Commons. They support full recognition of authorship and are particularly useful for content creators that want to provide broad access to their materials. Contents that use this license are identifiable with one of the visible tags below::

To better serve the millions of learners who speak French across the globe, we are focusing the next stage of our search on education materials that have a CC license tag or for which we can obtain special permission from the author(s) to publish on the Kolibri Learning Platform. But we can’t do this alone! We need your support in identifying these openly licensed sources. 

Getting involved and next steps

We are currently in the process of assessing how to incorporate the 50 sources we have found (with your help) so far.. 

How you can help. Do you have any recommendations for digital educational resources – books, tutorials, courses, libraries, and apps – in French that could help Francophone learners keep up with distance learning?  We are looking for digital educational resources in maths, science, literacy, entrepreneurship, career prep, and any other online teaching and learning materials. We are particularly interested in resources for lower secondary learners but would welcome any and all suggestions. We are not just looking for materials for learners, but also for educators —  lesson plans, with guides for educators and materials for the students are a valuable resource.

You can use this form to share your recommendations. 

Interested in learning more about Kolibri and the Kolibri Content Library? 

Take a look at our Frequently Asked Questions, and start exploring Kolibri.