The world’s first satellite-enabled interactive distance learning project is enabling refugee children in Ghana to continue with their education

We tend to think of refugee camps as temporary structures, but most of us fail to realize that many people live in them for several years. This presents serious challenges, specially for children who face serious danger of falling behind with their schooling or dropping out of education altogether as it can be very difficult to get qualified teachers to reach the camps on a regular basis.

But now technology is bringing a cost-effective and viable solution to that problem, in a pilot project recently trialled at the Ampain Refugee Camp in Western Ghana. The camp was established back in 2011 to shelter displaced Ivoirians fleeing the hostilities following the November 2010 Côte d’Ivoire Presidential elections. It is currently home to over 3,000 people, including around 225 school-age children who go to the Ampain Primary school established within the camp.

The Varkey Foundation Teach to Reach Remote Classrooms Project is the first of its kind
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The Varkey Foundation Teach to Reach Remote Classrooms Project (TRC) funded by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is the world’s first satellite enabled live two-way interactive distance learning programme for children living in a refugee camp. Each classroom in the school is equipped with a projector and a low-cost durable computer to receive lessons via a solar-powered satellite link. Since April, the foundation has been running interactive distance lessons from qualified teachers based at its studio in Accra to support the children in the camp with their learning.

While technologies such as Skype have been used for distance learning solutions in the past, but this is the first live, interactive two-way satellite enabled project to reach refugee children in sub-Saharan Africa
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The goal of the Ampaign project is to prove that the concept works in an emergency situation to increase children’s school attendance
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According to Vikas Pota, CEO of the Varkey Foundation, the goal of the Ampaign project is to prove that the concept works in an emergency situation to increase children’s school attendance and build opportunities for teachers and community members that directly impact learning for pupils.

“This project can make a real difference because it is quick to mobilize and can be scaled up, delivering lessons to more refugee settings around the globe. Most importantly, it is a long-lasting solution which is what is required due to the length of time that children often end up staying in refugee camps,” he says.

While technologies such as Skype have been used for distance learning solutions in the past, but this is the first live, interactive two-way satellite enabled project to reach refugee children in sub-Saharan Africa. The Ampain primary school has been fitted with a satellite dish, which, through solar powered technology, receives a live link to highly qualified teachers in a studio in Accra who broadcast lessons direct to the refugee camp. Each classroom has a projector so all the children can see the teacher giving the lessons, and each classroom has also been provided with a computer so that children can interact with the teacher in a direct, live, two-way link.

This project can make a real difference because it is quick to mobilize and can be scaled up
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This allows the refugee children – who are currently out of school and at risk of dropping out of education – to not only catch up with their basic education through literacy and numeracy lessons, but also learn the language of their host country, which is crucial for integration.

Ms. Ioli Kimyaci, UNHCR Ghana Country Representative says that this is a cost-effective way to enable children who otherwise would have been denied a quality education to have access to qualified teachers. “The beauty of this project is that it allows one good teacher’s reach to extend anywhere with the use of satellite technology, solar powered computer hardware and an interactive live feed inside the classroom,” she says.

The program also offers after-school sessions for both boys and girls to address gender specific issues and life skills, helping to create a safe environment that empowers pupils with leadership and decision-making skills.

The Teach to Reach program is based on the successful Making Ghanaian Girls Great! project
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The “Wonder Women” after-school program, for example, teaches young girls about reproductive health, preventing early pregnancy, human rights awareness and financial literacy. It also emphasizes leadership skills that develop girls’ ability to advocate for themselves, interact with leaders in their community and stand up for issues important to them. The goal is to raise their self esteem and empower them to stay in school and reach their full potential.

Boys also learn these core skills to support them with specific challenges they face and encourage them to continue in their schooling, while also tackling harmful gender stereotypes through discussion and role-play, showing boys how a change in their behavior can help their sisters and female peers, and therefore their entire communities.

“Every child deserves an education, but refugees in particular are more often than not denied this right. According to UNESCO, refugees are five times more likely to be out of school than the global average. More than half of the 6m school-age children under UNESCO’s mandate have no school to go to, with some 1.75m refugee children not in primary school and 1.95m refugee adolescents not in secondary school,” says Leonora Dowley, Ghana Country Director at the Varkey Foundation. “What makes this project so exciting is that gives refugee children access to high quality teachers and does so extremely cost-effectively – we can reach more than 200 children who otherwise would not be getting any education at low cost but with significant results.”

The Teach to Reach program is based on the successful Making Ghanaian Girls Great! project (known as MGCubed), aimed at enhancing the quality of education for more than 10,000 marginalized children in Ghana since it was established in 2014. The Varkey Foundation is part of the #WithRefugees Coalition who are supporting the #WithRefugees campaign, a group of more than 100 universities, FBOs, youth groups, UN Agencies, and NGOs working with UNHCR to promote tolerance and respect for persons forced to flee. It also founded the Global Teacher Prize to shine a spotlight on the incredible work teachers do all over the world.

“Nothing beats having access to a great teacher who can add important context, stimulate discussion among children to help them truly grasp what they’re learning and broaden young minds,” says Dowley. “We believe it’s a highly replicable solution that could be deployed in other settings, and given the extent of the refugee crisis it will be exciting to see how things could develop on this front in future,” concludes Dowley.

This article was originally published on IDG Connect

How technology is helping education reach refugee children, by @alicebonasio from @CIOonline https://t.co/9UgA59FCJA

— Technology Experts (@IDGCN) June 27, 2017

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Alice Bonasio is a VR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

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Broadcasters such as the BBC are increasingly investing in Virtual Reality. We Wait tells the story of a refugee family making the perilous journey from war-torn Syria to Europe, and is the corporation’s first release for Oculus.

The production, which was a partnership with Aardman Digita, is an example of how VR experimentation is becoming a strategic concern for large-scale content producers. Read the full article on UploadVR

Broadcasters such as the BBC are increasingly investing in #VR content
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We Wait enabled us to explore how VR can deepen audiences’ understanding in a way they wouldn’t otherwise be able to experience
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2016 has been a busy year in VR for the BBC, as it started to figure out what role the medium will play in its future by releasing a range of 360 and VR projects exploring the boundaries of the new medium. These projects covered a broad spectrum of subjects and audiences, ranging from harrowing experiences like Fire Rescue – which tells the story of a Christmas Day blaze from which firefighters saved the lives of six children – and the journey of a single mother Trafficked from Nicaragua to Mexico to The Turning Forest (a folkish fairy-tale experience for Google Daydream) and a series of companion 360-degree videos that put viewers next to the documentary crews filming the Planet Earth II series and offered highlights of the Rio Olympics.

“Our VR experiments this year have enabled us to look at the role the BBC should play at this early stage, raising important questions over how storytelling, pacing, direction, subtitling, sound and picture quality are all affected,” says Zillah Watson, executive producer, BBC R&D.

But We Wait is a first for the British broadcaster which saw the BBC Connected Studio collaborate with legendary Bristol-based animation studio Aardman Digital – the makers of Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep – to produce a dramatization of the dangerous journey Syrian migrants take from Turkey to Greece on smuggler’s boats.

Like many content producers, the BBC is keen to explore the potential of VR as a Storytelling Medium, and the Syrian war and its resulting refugee crisis is a poignant subject that certainly lends itself well to powerful – if often uncomfortable – levels of immersion. Award-winning films such as Chris Milk’s Clouds Over Sidra and HOME/AAMIR –  produced in partnership with the National Theatre’s recently launched Immersive Storytelling Studio in London – are other examples of this.

Our VR experiments this year have enabled us to look at the role the BBC should play at this early stage
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We Wait – which is based on real migrant accounts gathered by BBC News – begins on a beach in Turkey and takes the viewer on board a boat crossing the Mediterranean. As the name hints, the objective here is to recreate the sense of anticipation and suspense those displaced people feel as they attempt to reach Europe.

“By putting the viewer at the heart of the story, we’re offering an immersive experience that would be impossible to reproduce through traditional reporting,” they stated in their release today.

Watson believes that VR could be a very interesting tool for telling news stories in the future beyond the confines of traditional reporting, something that people like Nonny de La Penna have also been exploring as a way to trigger empathy in audiences. Like de la Pena, Watson comes from a journalism background, working on TV, radio and web as well as documentary filmmaking before moving to BBC’s R&D department.

“We Wait has enabled us to explore how VR can deepen audiences’ understanding of a topic in a way they wouldn’t otherwise be able to experience, and with the film now going live on the Oculus store for the Rift it opens it up to a wider audience as we continue to develop the potential this emerging medium has to inform, educate and entertain.”

We Wait is now available globally and for free on the Oculus store.

The dangerous journey Syrian migrants embark on has been dramatized in @BBC‘s ‘We Wait’. via @alicebonasio #VR https://t.co/9Vd2PZrHUz pic.twitter.com/9HL9qGfTUL

— Upload (@UploadVR) December 14, 2016

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Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Journey from War-Torn Syria Told in VR appeared first on Tech Trends.