Myanmar has a geographically diverse school system with many students in rural areas that do not all have access to same level of education. These remote schools could benefit from a strong network of support for access to high quality teachers. The challenge to providing this support is bridging the the gaps of technology and geography with a limited budget. The goal; improving overall education standards to benefit all students.
The Monastic Education Development Group (MEDG) is a community based organization that supports the improvement of monastic education across Myanmar. Monastic institutions act as low or no cost schools, teaching the national curriculum often to the most disadvantaged children. MEDG recently started using Moodle + BigBlueButton to enable teachers to reach Out of School Children in remote villages.
Bo Swar, IT Manager and Frank Dirks, Chief IT Adviser at MEDG, wanted to use BigBlueButton to deliver live lectures to multiple remote classes simultaneously. “We were already using Moodle. The capabilities of BigBlueButton and it’s deep integration with Moodle, and a successful proof of concept, made it a natural fit.”
Given the low bandwidth available to most schools (all were on an a 3G network). The BigBlueButton project also adapted the software to display the video feed from remote schools to only to the instructor; thus reducing the bandwidth requirements and enabling increased access.
“The vision for the BigBlueButton project has been to enable remote students to have a high-quality online learning experience,” says Fred Dixon, product manager for BigBlueButton. “We’re very happy to be supporting MEDG and the Out of School Children Project to achieve this shared goal.”
