Nepal’s education system urgently needs to address the issues of quality, access, and disparity. With a literacy rate of 45%, Nepal has a large number of individuals who have been denied their right to basic education. According to the 2003 EFA National Plan of Action, 1.6 million of Nepal’s school-age children never attend school. Of those that do attend school, 46% drop out before grade five. The rapid annual population growth rate of 2.1% adds to the problem of preparing the nation’s young people to become educated and productive adults. The Department of Education (DoE) estimates that in the next 4-5 years, more than 50,000 additional classrooms and approximately 40,000 additional teachers are needed to meet the projected demand for educational services.

Furthermore, the school sector in Nepal is plagued by the problems of low education quality, regional disparities and gender discrimination. There is evidence that students consistently rank poorly in mathematics and science by international standards. Poor learning outcomes coupled with 50 to 70 percent failure rates in national school board exams suggest that the quality of education in Nepali schools needs to be improved significantly. There is also an increasing disparity in education quality across school types, locations, and population groups. In particular, students from public schools and from schools in remote areas are severely disadvantaged in terms of the quality of education they receive. Given the poor infrastructure, high student teacher ratio (typically 50:1), and general lack of resources, there needs to be a clear strategy for ensuring educational quality for all students.

Effective use of ICT in education is one viable approach to changing this situation. We at OLE Nepal believe that providing freely accessible high-quality interactive teaching-learning materials along with an education-centered virtual library would be a major step towards addressing the problems of quality, access, and disparity in education.

In May 2007, Nepal’s Minister of Education announced that the Ministry of Education would pilot the One Laptop Per Child project in several Nepali public schools in spring of 2008. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project aims to revolutionize education by providing children in poor countries with inexpensive, durable, and kid-powered laptops. We at OLE Nepal believe that the OLPC XO laptop is indeed a revolutionary device for delivering education; but the key to utilizing this technology for educational purposes is the availability of appropriate educational content. The emphasis of OLE Nepal is, therefore, on digital content development and on the training of teachers to use these materials rather than on the distribution of laptops.

Accordingly, OLE Nepal is currently developing national curriculum based digital educational material that can be accessed from a repository via the Internet. OLE Nepal is working with the Nepali government, teachers at public and private schools, and other groups active in the education sector to develop a comprehensive set of free and open source education materials.

Importance of Open Source

Open Source is essential to the long term development of quality educational materials. "Open Source" roughly means that materials can be modified, copied, and legally redistributed free of cost -- but credit must be given to the original author. Further enhancements to the materials must be shared freely. This ensures the continual improvement and expansion of the learning materials.

OLE Nepal has committed to developing only open-source learning materials. This means materials developed in one country can be translated, made culturally appropriate, and remixed by teachers in another. We believe that exclusively working with open source materials is the most effective way to create a comprehensive set of learning materials. We believe that if the government or foundations support the development of educational materials, those materials should be available free to the public in digital form. Furthermore, other educators should be able to translate those materials into different languages, add pictures, or divide into small learning activities, etc. free of cost. This is simply best use of scarce public funds for education.