OLE Nepal has started an ambitious project to create content relevant to Young Adult (YA) in Nepali literature. Over the span of two years we spent collecting and archiving work of Nepali literature, we realized that there was a real dearth of literary materials for YAs between the ages of eleven and eighteen. After a number of discussions on this topic, E-Pustakalaya’s Advisory Panel met on November 30, 2010 at OLE Nepal office to plan the content creation process to meet the literary needs of teenagers in Nepal.

E-Pustakalaya Advisory Panel meeting to discuss Young Adult literature workshop

From L to R: Bishwambhar Chanchal, Vinaya Kasajoo, Geeta Keshary, Churamani Bandhu, Rambabu Subedi and (not seen Dhruva Ghimire)

The panel decided that we need to better understand the social and psychological issues relevant to Nepali youth before starting the content creation process. OLE Nepal will be organizing a day-long seminar on December 22, 2010 at the Russian Culture Centre to discuss the areas that should be addressed by this project. With our target audience narrowed down to students who have just finished their School Leaving Certificate exams (grade 10), we hope that the literary that will eventually be produced will address key social issues regarding this challenging period in a teen’s life.

The seminar will be attended by authors, illustrators, teachers, authors and students. Two papers, one on the importance of YA literature in Nepal and another one on current styles and popular techniques used in YA literature around the world, will be presented by Prof. Churamani Bandu and Mr. Vinaya Kasajoo respectively. After the paper presentations, participating teachers and students will discuss their real life problems while dealing with or being an adolescent. We believe this preliminary seminar will provide the necessary literary spark and base to aspiring authors present at the seminar. They will then be able to bring these ideas with them to the writer’s workshops conducted at a future date.

SchoolTool is a suite of free administrative software for schools. Since it can be installed easily and used with no licensing fees, SchoolTool can be used by schools for a single purpose, by individual teachers or small teams within schools, or as a whole-school comprehensive student information system, encompassing demographics, gradebooks, attendance, calendars and reporting. (Source: http://schooltool.org/)

In our continual effort of improving our systems and providing tools to support digital education, we were presented with a new requirement — providing schools a software based tool for classroom management and grading. After evaluating a few available tools, we encountered SchoolTool which was the foremost candidate meeting most of our criteria:

• Web based
• Different user levels: admins, teachers, students
• Student information system
• Calendars
• Attendance
• Grading
• Localizable
• Open Source

Though being the right candidate, SchoolTool had a few of the shortcomings for us — the tools is readily available (as a set of installable package) for Ubuntu only and had a lot of dependencies. As our plan to integrate the tool in the NEXS (School Server software based on Fedora Linux) infrastructure, a lot of packaging work had to be done, which included:

• Developing a hierarchy of dependent packages for schooltool and its plugins.
• Finding source tarballs for each packages.
• Writing RPM spec files for each package and build binary RPMs against the spec.
• Testing the setup.

It was daunting to perform all of the tasks manually, so we followed a semi-automatic approach — a script based automation and manual intervention where necessary. But writing spec files for building RPM packages for each dependency had to be manual, meanwhile a difficult task as well. Hopefully, we need not have to author spec files for around 80 dependencies; thanks to Robin ‘Cheese’ Lee for writing a few of them. Nevertheless the rest of them had to be authored, built against and tested; and it took us a good time performing these tasks iteratively until we arrived a stable stage. Now we are ready to pilot SchoolTool (localized in Nepali) in a few of the OLPC deployed schools.

We have built binary RPM packages for Fedora 13 and Fedora 9, for both 32 and 64 bit architectures. Additionally to encourage developers to test their own builds and to contribute in porting the tool to Fedora based distributions, we have made the packaging sources available under non-restrictive license. If you would like to test my builds, the RPM repository is hosted at http://ftp.schooltool.org/rpms/. Also there are ready to use repo files for Fedora’s yum package manager. To set up the repository:

• Download the respective repo file you need for your machine — fedora_9.schooltool.repo for Fedora 9, and fedora_13.schooltool.repo for Fedora 13.
• Copy the repo file to /etc/yum.repo.d/ directory.

The packaging sources (spec files and patches) are available at my git repository at http://gitorious.org/schooltool-rpm/schooltool-rpm/. We would like to see more people testing our builds and our specs and reporting back bugs. HAPPY TESTING!!

OLE Nepal’s team of network engineers have been putting a lot of effort into connecting all 26 program schools in six districts to a school intranet. Amongst many advantages of such a network are the facility to monitor and update school servers remotely from OLE Nepal office and the ability to establish free and direct communication link between the schools and OLE Nepal.

Since most part of the country does not have any communication link to the outside world, we have had to design and install network connections from scratch. In most of the hilly regions, wireless technology is the preferred medium due to its low initial cost of installation and ease of maintenance. Furthermore, using hilltops we can eliminate the need for building tall towers to get a clear line of sight between two network nodes. We have used mostly Mikrotik devices for long range wireless connections, and we had been quite satisfied by its performance. However, recently we were a bit concerned when few devices suddenly started malfunctioning in Makwanpur, Dadeldhura, and Kapilvastu districts. Our investigation revealed that the devices were damaged by lightning strikes.

We then set out to protect the devices against lightning strikes. First, we placed spike suppressors at all the schools and relay points. Spike suppressor is typically used in between the main power supply and the UPS System. When there is an voltage spike, the circuit automatically breaks and saves the electronic equipment from being damaged. We also implemented a multi-level earthing system at the relay points so that the exposed conductive surfaces are at the same electrical potential as the surface of the earth.

Makwanpur: Ram Singh, OLE Nepal Engineer, preparing to fix Copper plate for Earthing.

Deciding the location for the tower

Tikkari Relay (Argakhanchi): Relay point used to connect three schools in adjoining Kapilvastu district. The Lightning arrester stays 40 feet above the ground on the tower

Tower expert Krishna Ji joining 10 ft. long pieces together

Teachers from Pancha School pay a visit after tower had been erected and earthing done.

Why Earthing?
One of the major tasks of earthing is to ensure safety of persons during fault condition. Earthing creates the path of least impedance from system components to the earth so that any surge that occurs is dissipated quickly. It allows the lightning strike energy to be safely dissipated thereby minimizing the danger caused by the lightning. Earthing is the key to safety, i.e. protection of personnel, equipment and facilities. Another advantage of earthing in communication tower is to reduce electromagnetic interference.

Weather experts report that lightening strikes the earth 100 times each second around the world. The region most prone to the lightning are those where moist and unstable air masses move. Since communication antenna/towers are placed at the top of the hills or at the highest point, they are more susceptible to lightning strikes.

In the past we were having problem with many antenna specially in remote hilly region with motherboards getting burned out. The reason behind this was insufficient protection circuitry. In order to avoid this problem repeating itself and to protect expensive antenna from lightning, we decided to provide earthing. And we started it from Manakamana Danda [hill] in Makawanpur.

PROCEDURE FOLLOWED WHILE INSTALLING COPPER PLATE EARTHING AT MANAKAMANA DANDA.
1. Excavated the earth of 1.00 Mtr in diameter and 3.00 Mtr depth. Digging the earth in circle made digging job easier.
2. From 3.00 mtr depth, excavated earth of 90 cm x 30 cm x 90 cm depth.
3. Water was sprinkled in the bottom and surround wall to make it wet.
4. Bottom layer of the pit was filled with charcoal and salt upto 15 cm height from bottom.
5. Whole length of earthing cable was placed inside the PVC pipe to protect cable from mechanical damage.
6. Earthing cable with the cable shoe was fitted tightly to the copper plate [60 cm x 60 cm x 3 mm] electrode by nuts, bolts and spring washer. Connection was checked to make sure that it is strong and stable.
7. We took a PVC pipe  of 40 mm diameter, 3 m length and made a continuous hole of 12 mm diameter in zig zag manner at a spacing of 15 cm from bottom of pipe to 2 meter height. GI pipe would work great. This pipe was fitted vertically into earth fit. This pipe was to be used for proper watering of the earthing.
8. Copper plate was placed inside the pit on top of the charcoal and salt layer with its face vertical.
9. After putting copper plate electrode in place, pit was filled with charcoal and salt[120 kg each] in alternative layer, each with thickness of 15 cm till it completely buried the copper plate.
10. Earthing cable with PVC cover was laid properly and the pit refilled with soil.
11. The pit was sprinkled with water to make it wet while refilling.
12. A plastic bucket with a covering was used for watering the pit which helps in recharging the earthing. The best option for watering system would be brick/cement masonry of size not less than 30 cm x 30 cm x 30 cm, with cast iron cover having locking system. We didn’t have materials in hand so we adopted for plastic bucket with cover. The arrangement for the watering system is shown in the diagram below.
13. A lightning rod was mounted on the top of the antenna tower. The free end of the earthing cable was clamped tightly to the lightning rod by nuts, bolts and spring washer.
14.Finally earthing cable was laid under ground and tied tightly against the pole with cable tie.

OLE Nepal prepared a preliminary “per child cost” of the One Laptop Per Child project based on the pilot project carried out in the last academic year (April 2009 – March 2010) in 26 schools in six districts of Nepal. The project was implemented in partnership with Nepal Government’s Department of Education (DoE)’s and funded by the Danish Government’s Local Grant Authority, UN World Food Programme’s Nepal Country Programme. The laptops were donated by the Swift Banking group through the OLPC Foundation.

The following are the key assumptions and considerations taken while computing the cost:

• The XO laptops’ lifespan is 5 years, as stated by the manufacturers

• The repair and maintenance cost for equipment is 2.5% of the purchase cost

• The content development cost for certain subject and grades can also be considered negative cost as they are already prepared during the pilot phase.

Per unit cost to implement the project comes to be Rs. 27,628 (US $ 368)¹ during the project/pilot phase considering 26 schools in six districts and around 2100 students and teachers. At present, if the XO laptops are assumed to have life span of five years, and everything else associated with the pilot/project is assumed to remain constant, then per child cost per year for next 5 years (for a child who uses the XO from grade 2 to grade 6) can be calculated as Rs. 5,500 (US $ 77). Per unit cost or per child cost can come down significantly if the number of students are increased as some of the costs associated with the project such as content development remain constant no matter how many students are targeted. Furthermore, the content development cost for certain subject and grades can also be considered negative cost as they are already prepared during the pilot phase and can be used for further expansions. The cost associated with the project is given in detail in the attached sheet.

The costs taken into consideration to derive per child cost based on 26 pilot schools are:

1. Cost of Laptops

2. School infrastructure

3. Teacher Training

4. Deployment cost (at project launch)

5. Running costs during pilot year

6. Content development cost

7. Project development cost

8. Network cost

Laptops: OLPC XO laptops are priced at US $200 and another US$ 25 is factored in as shipping and handling cost. Although the laptops for each child will cost US $ 225 at present day cost (OLPC insists the price will come down by up to 25% as the volume of orders increases), and assuming that the laptops lifespan is 5 years, the child will have the laptop from grade two till grade six. Hence when the current cost of laptop is spread over 5 years, then cost per child cost for the laptops comes to US $ 45 per year. Further, as the overall price of the computers are declining and other computers similar to XO laptops are also emerging fast it will be safe to assume that better and cheaper laptops will be available in the market.

School infrastructure: The initial setup at 26 schools required Rs.4,599,934, which included networking and power equipment installations. Hence, the per school cost comes to Rs.176,000. This amount can be largely taken as one time cost and for a period of over 5 years 2.5% or Rs. 4,400 should be considered as repair and maintenance cost for the equipments installed in each school. Details of type of equipment required at school level are given in attached sheet.

Teacher training: Rs. 2,089,000 were incurred in teacher training from each school. This cost also includes training package preparation, master trainer development from DoE and NCED systems, training for OLPC focal persons from the districts and 113 teachers from 26 schools in six districts. Teacher training costs can also be considered as one time cost with refresher training given to teachers every other year. Cost associated to train a school teacher to be able to integrate ICT based education in daily teaching and learning will be around Rs. 18,500 per teacher.

Deployment cost: Deployment cost at program launch for all 26 schools was Rs. 1,112,975, roughly about Rs. 43,000 per school. The costs factored in are for travel and other related costs associated with deployment plus laptop transport and network setup for each school. This cost can also be considered as one time cost for each school if laptops for grade 2 -6 are deployed at the same time. This cost will also decrease significantly as the number of schools increases per district.

Running costs during pilot year (Rs.958,593): Running costs such as electricity, internet fees and monitoring and supervision costs are associated in this category. Running cost for all 26 schools is estimated to be Rs. 958,600 or Rs. 36,800 per school per year.

Content development cost (Rs. 5,902,000): The cost for content development for grades 2 & 3 (Nepali, English and Mathematics) and 6 (English and Mathematics) was Rs. 5,902,000. This cost is only associated with human resources cost. This can be considered onetime cost and constant for any number of children, with additional budget required to develop additional activities in additional grades and subjects. This also assumes a small budget each year for updating and changes required in the existing activities.

Project development cost (Rs. 4,901,000): Project development cost mentioned here is a one year cost of the project management cost associated with the OLPC project. Besides human resource to manage the cost no other costs are associated with this segment. This cost is strictly associated with implementing partner and may not be necessary if the project is implemented by the government.

Network Cost: Similar to content development and Project Development cost, Network cost also reflects the human resource cost to staff the network team with engineers to develop architecture and install wireless networks for schools.

Budget Summary is given in the table below:

The E-Pustakalaya team met with the E-Pustakalaya Advisory Panel for the second time on July 12, 2010.

Some very interesting ideas transpired. On the issue of copyright, E-Pustakalaya was advised to allow exclusive licenses according to the wishes of authors and publishers apart from the general creative commons license E-Pustakalaya uses for materials already available in the public domain. It was also decided that the E-Pustakalaya web page would have a section that features information on Authors/Publishers and their works, which will further promote their contributions to the digital library.

Also given the dearth of adolescent/young adult literature in Nepali, OLE Nepal will be one of the first organisations to hold a writers’ workshop targeted specifically towards the creation of such literature. The workshop will include introductions by child psychologists, teachers and parents, to help suggest themes and issues relevant to young adults today. This will be followed by a multi-day workshop headed by the E-Pustakalaya Advisory Panel members. The resulting works, if up to mark, will be published electronically on E-Pustakalaya.

The Advisory Panel members also presented their must have book lists for E-Pustakalaya. The library team was also advised to contact the Curriculum Development Centre (CDC) who have produced a must have children’s literature list of their own consisting of some 50 titles. OLE Nepal is working on adding these works to the library.

Finally, OLE Nepal is moving ahead with plans to make audio books for its E-Pustakalaya. This is a niche that E-Pustakalaya being a digital library can easily fill and make available on a large scale. They will be useful for students at our programme schools as well as to Nepali parents around the world who are constantly looking for materials in Nepali so their children growing up abroad can still read, write and understand Nepali. The first audio books will be made with poems by Ram Babu Subedi and stories by Dhruva Ghimire, both prominent writers in the world of Nepali literature.

OLE Nepal’s newsletter for May-Jun is now available. The newsletter intends to keep its readers uptodate on the organisation and its activities.

The full newsletter can be accessed at:

http://www.olenepal.org/ole_newsletter/OLENepalMayJun_10.pdf

If you wish to subscribe to the newsletter, please email newsletter@olenepal.org.

A two-day curriculum review workshop was held with officials from the Government of Nepal’s Curriculum Development Centre (CDC) at the International Club, Sanepa on June 11 and 12. The agenda for the workshop was to a) follow-up from an earlier discussion in February over creating detailed courses for the various subjects in each of the primary grades and b) review all new E-Paath software created by OLE Nepal.

The year-long courses that are being envisioned would act as guides to teachers on how to integrate the various different media available to them (E-Paath, textbooks and other interactive methods) to effectively impart knowledge to their wards. A sample (for Grade 3 English) has been partially completed and was shown to the CDC officials for feedback. In general, they were very satisfied with the structure and the efforts that had been made into making it easy to use, with symbols being used to make it effective but space-efficient. They felt using the same structure for Math and Nepali classes would also be effective.

The officials present then reviewed E-Paath activities within their own subject of specialty over a day and a half together with OLE Nepal’s curriculum development team. Feedback received was positive and our curriculum developers and software programmers will now take their feedback into consideration and make appropriate changes.