Provisioning of Educational Content to Rural Schools in PNG using RACHEL

Provisioning of Educational Content to Rural Schools in PNG using RACHEL

By Picky Airi

A key statement under access to education in the Papua New Guinea Vision 2050 is that more improvement is required in terms of quality, efficiency and equity (Government of Papua New Guinea, 2009). The government made a commitment towards achieving the Global 2030 goals of education whereby it should provide relevant and quality education to every child (National Department of Education, 2016). This was in accordance with the Medium-Term Development Plan III 2018-2022, which identifies education as a priority for development and further to that, ICT was identified as an enabler to underpin many improvements in education.

This paper discusses the use of offline open educational resources as an alternative for provisioning of educational content in particular to rural schools in PNG. The Remote Area Hotspot for Education and Learning service is presented as a case study for such provisioning. The paper describes the opportunities and challenges of adopting RACHEL using a recent project as an example. The paper then proposes a follow-up survey on this project to establish empirical data to support the adoption of this technology for PNG schools. 

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