Kalahari LMS

The Kalahari Learning Management System (LMS) allows students in areas where internet connections are expensive or unavailable to access digital learning resources over their personal devices (e.g. phone) or school supplied computers and tablets.

A demo of the system can be found at lms.kalahariexperience.org

The Problem

Many students especially in rural areas are put at a significant disadvantage in learning the skills needed to study further at university or seek employment due to limited or expensive internet access.

The LMS aims to mitigate these disadvantages by providing free, local access to popular digital learning resources without relying on internet infrastructure

How it works

The system itself is made up of two key pieces of hardware:

• A small computer acting as a Server
  This stores all the content for the students to access from their devices. Some are PDFs like past exam papers, some educational videos like those from the amazing Crash Course YouTube channel, and some local downloads of full websites like Wikipedia.
  In addition to storage, it also has software on called a web server which allows users to access all of these resources from their web browser (e.g. Google Chrome)

• A WiFi router (or more specifically, a Wireless Access Point)
  This allows users to connect to the above described Server to access the resources by connecting to an open WiFi network.

To access the resources, students first get in range of one of the available LMS devices (which are currently deployed at a number of schools and community centres in the Kalahari Education Experience Project project area). They then connect to an open WiFi network called Kalahari LMS and visit the LMS’ webpage using its URL. It is important to note that they can only access the LMS’ webpage and local resources but not the entire internet because they are only accessing the content stored on the Server. They can access all of the available resources when in range of the LMS device, and select a few to download to their personal devices for self study at home

Next Steps

• Improve the user experience of accessing downloaded resources for use when out of range of the LMS device

  • This is being worked on by developing a progressive web app based on Kiwix JS PWA

• Design a robust enclosure to ensure the hardware of the LMS can survive harsh environmental conditions

• Transition our hardware to be based on the Raspberry Pi 5 for future deployments

Development and Specifications

Info can be found on the project’s GitHub page

Contact Us

For any questions please use the contact form to get in touch