By Danielle Logue & Melissa Edwards
Rangan Srikhanta was a 21-year-old student at the
University of Technology Sydney (UTS), in Australia, when he first
learned about the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative. It
was late 2005, and Nicholas Negroponte, then the director of the
Media Lab at MIT, and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan had just
announced the launch of the program. OLPC, as they described it,
was a partnership among private companies, NGOs, and governments
to produce the world’s least expensive laptop and to distribute
that device to children all around the world. Srikhanta was
intrigued by OLPC’s vision of bringing those sectors together to
solve social problems. He was equally impressed by the low-cost
laptop that OLPC proposed to create. The device, which came to be
called the XO, would cost just $100 apiece to manufacture. “I was
fascinated by the technology—the software, the low power usage,
the sunlight-readable screen, being able to drop the machine [without
breaking it],” he says. After reading about OLPC, Srikhanta
couldn’t sleep. Keen to learn more about the initiative, he decided to
call the OLPC office in the United States. “When you’re in Australia
and up late at night, it’s a really good time to call Boston,” he says.
Srikhanta and his family arrived in the Sydney area in 1984,
when he was just two months old, after fleeing war-torn Sri Lanka.
He grew up west of the city, and he excelled at school. “My parents
were busy putting food on the table and providing a stable
family environment,” he recalls. But they also encouraged him
to read newspapers, to think globally, and to give back to his community.
After attending UTS, where he earned a combined degree
in business and information technology, Srikhanta took a job as
an auditor at a global accounting firm. But even as he launched a
professional career, he found time to serve as volunteer treasurer
of the UN Association in Australia. He never forgot a question
that his parents had urged him to keep in mind: “What do you
want to be remembered for?”
That phone call to Boston
in 2005 was the first step in
what became a long journey
for Srikhanta. Grabbing the
chance to join his interest in
business and technology with
his interest in social change,
he began to work on various
OLPC-sponsored projects. In
January 2008, he and others
founded OLPC Australia
(OLPCA). Later that year, he
left his job at the accounting
firm. “If you ever want to find
your passion, become an
auditor,” he jokes.
Since then, OLPCA has
come a long way. It now operates with the equivalent of 13 full-time
staff members, and thus far it has distributed more than
7,000 XOs in more than 130 remote communities across Australia.
In 2012, the organization received an $11.7 million grant from the
Australian federal government to distribute 50,000 laptops by
June 2014. (Unless otherwise indicated, all currency figures refer
to Australian dollars.)
The contract is part of a nationwide effort to close the so-called
digital divide within Australia. Although Australia is an
advanced industrial nation, that divide—the one that separates
people who can access digital technology from people who cannot—runs deep in certain regions of the country. Today, according
to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, about 4.5 million
Australians do not have home Internet access. The situation is
worse among particular social groups. According to one study,
indigenous households in central Australia are 76 percent less
likely to have Internet access than non-indigenous metropolitan
households.1 To address that problem, the Australian government
has begun to roll out the National Broadband Network (NBN), a
multi-billion-dollar infrastructure program to improve access to
the Internet, particularly in rural communities. Yet, while the
NBN may expand Internet access, many children in those communities
still lack the ability to engage with the Internet in meaningful
ways. OLPCA estimates that 40 percent of the 2.4 million
children in Australia are at risk of falling into that category.
In their push to reach those children, Srikhanta and his team
have built upon the OLPC vision that captured his imagination
back in 2005. Yet OLPCA has also broken away from the standard
approach of its parent organization. The One Laptop per Child
model—as its name implies—aims to place a computing device
in the hands of every child who wouldn’t otherwise have one. In
short, it’s a saturation model, and its focus is on the free distribution
of XO machines. And in several high-profile cases, it has met
with failure. In May 2012, Srikhanta and his colleagues launched
a new model that embeds XO technology into a school-based ecosystem.
Signaling an awareness of the limits of the “one laptop”
idea, they call this model One Education.
Falling Short
Success marked some of OLPC’s earliest efforts. Negroponte,
the founding visionary of the One Laptop per Child movement,
served as a high-profile evangelist who
worked tirelessly to convince government
officials that he could save the poor children
of their countries by using XO technology
to transform education. With
access to XO devices, he argued, children would be able to educate
themselves and one another. The first XOs rolled off a production
line in 2007. In November of that year, OLPC established
its Give One Get One campaign, in which US and Canadian consumers
could buy an XO machine for $399 and OLPC would send
another machine on their behalf to a child in a developing country.
More than 83,000 people participated in the first Give One Get
One campaign. “OLPC’s challenge in getting the XO into production
was huge,” Srikhanta says. “We have to thank Negroponte
for his brashness and his focus on bringing down the cost of the
devices—for showing that there was a market for low-cost devices.
That was a monumental task.”
But the task of putting XO laptops into the hands of poor kids,
and then into productive use, was considerably more challenging.
One of the earliest and largest OLPC deployments took place in
Peru, where officials and volunteers distributed about 290,000
XO laptops between 2007 and 2009. According to the Inter-American Development Bank, a series of difficulties beset
the program—including a lack of electricity, a lack of Internet
access, and a limited supply of technical and pedagogical support.
What’s more, the use of XO devices in Peruvian schools failed to
result in significant improvements in national test scores.2 Five
years after the start of the deployment, the Peruvian education
official who now runs the program admitted that its approach
had been seriously flawed. “In essence, what we did was deliver
the computers without preparing the teachers,” he said.3
Another closely followed program occurred in Birmingham,
Ala., a high-poverty community that became the site of the largest
deployment of XO laptops in the United States. From 2008
to 2010, the Birmingham school district distributed 15,000 XO
computers to students in grades 1 through 5. A review of that
program indicated that it suffered from the same kinds of problems
that have afflicted OLPC programs in Peru and elsewhere.
Teachers received only two hours of training, they were unable
to connect the XO devices to printers or projectors (which meant
that they could not share students’ work), and neither they nor
their students had the ability to repair the machines. As a result,
many of the XOs lay broken and unused.4
In recent years, Negroponte has admitted that the original
scope and ambition of the OLPC project were too far-reaching in
some respects. “A great deal of OLPC was, especially at the beginning,
naive and unrealistic,” he wrote in an online comment in
late 2012. All the same, the poor track
record of XO deployment has not undermined
Negroponte’s commitment to the
original OLPC ideal. His comment continued:
“I look back at those [early stumbles]
as features not bugs. 2.5 million laptops
later we did learn some things, in parallel
with many of those kids (not all) benefitting. One of those things
was the degree of self-learning and child-to-child teaching, when
allowed to happen.”5 Srikhanta, over in Australia, would derive a
different set of lessons from the early history of OLPC.
Learning from Mistakes
In setting up OLPCA, Srikhanta drew on the support of influential
figures within the OLPC movement. Charles Kane, then the CEO
of OLPC, became a supportive member of the OLPCA board.
Barry Vercoe, one of the founders of the MIT Media Lab (and,
incidentally, a native of New Zealand), came out to Australia to
serve as codirector of OLPCA. With help from Vercoe and others,
Srikhanta was able to convince the parent organization that
Australia was worth including in the OLPC initiative. After all,
the main goal of OLPC was to assist developing countries. “Barry
really became our broker in putting a case forward for seeding the
project in Australia,” says Srikhanta.
For their initial deployment of XO laptops, Srikhanta and
Vercoe selected target areas that would closely replicate Third
World locations. One such area was Elcho Island, a remote town
in the Northern Territory (NT). The NT, located in north-central
Australia, is home to one of the largest populations of Aboriginal
people in the country, and Elcho Island is more than 300 miles
from Darwin, the territorial capital. “We caught a flight to Darwin,
then a plane to Elcho Island,” Srikhanta recalls. “The school was
very well resourced. But once you stepped out of that school, life
got a lot tougher.” The challenges that OLPCA faced in a remote
community like Elcho Island were significant: On average, teachers
in such areas last nine months; principals last two years.
Children in these communities rarely attend school more than
three days a week. Aboriginal children, moreover, are 50 percent
less likely than other Australian children to stay in school to the
highest completion level. In many of these communities, English
is rarely spoken, and often it’s spoken only at school.
Srikhanta and his team saturated Elcho Island with 250 XOs
during two visits in mid-2009. Although they provided basic
training to help teachers understand how to use the devices in the
classroom, they didn’t take into account another problem. “Even
during this short period of a few months, teachers had moved, or
they simply didn’t have enough time to comprehend how the
technology could enhance their practice,” Srikhanta recalls.
“When we went back in July, a lot of those teachers weren’t there.
It was a bit of a shock for us. It was like [the movie] Groundhog
Day. I began to wonder: Are we going to do this every year?”
The lesson, as he saw it, was clear: The practice of flying to
remote villages and towns was not sustainable. It was expensive
(the average cost of distributing a laptop rose to $695) and
extremely time consuming. It was also not very effective.
Srikhanta and his colleagues realized that the “saturation in one
day” model lacked the kind of “stickiness” that would encourage
meaningful engagement with the XO devices. “When you force
the adoption of technology, when the technology is so easy to
disseminate, you can forget about the human aspect. We forgot
about the teacher turnover aspect,” Srikhanta says. Compounding
that problem were technical challenges that he and his team
couldn’t overcome at that point. “That’s when the program died,”
he says. “That forced us to innovate and pushed us to expand the
reach of the program to engage more stakeholders.”
Recruiting “Champions”
After the second visit to Elcho Island, Srikhanta asked the school
principal there to tell him what OLPCA should do differently.
“You should charge people for what you do,” the principal said.
That reply surprised Srikhanta, yet it also triggered an idea that
fundamentally challenged the OLPC distribution model. “That’s
when we started changing our approach,” Srikhanta says.
From 2009 to 2012, through a process of trial and error,
OLPCA developed a new model that focuses on scarcity rather
than saturation. Srikhanta began to think in terms of creating a
“pull” model that would differ from the OLPC movement’s existing “push” model. He and his team decided that they had to introduce
barriers to access—to create reasons for educators to invest
time and money in XO technology. Instead of freely distributing
XOs to schools identified as being at high risk, why not charge a
small fee for each device? Taking that step would help identify
settings where the devices would be welcome. In a related move,
Srikhanta decided to shift the focus of distribution from the
school to the classroom. OLPCA could more easily distribute
XOs on a large scale, he theorized, if it gave up trying to secure
adoption within an entire school and instead targeted individual
teachers who were already receptive to the technology.
Today, rather than pushing the technology into the hands of
uninterested teachers and students, OLPCA works to build a support
system around early adopters. At the center of that system
is One Education, a comprehensive training and reward program
for educators and students. Under the program, teachers must
become XO-certified before OLPCA will distribute XO laptops
to their classrooms. Srikhanta and his team have come to realize
that engaged teachers—teachers who have made an investment
in learning XO technology—are crucial to the success of OLPCA.
Late adopters and non-adopters constitute a weakness in the
OLPC model, since they don’t have an intrinsic motivation to use
the technology in a meaningful way. “Some teachers are reluctant
at first, because they are scared of it,” says Richard Barrie, a principal
at a school in the Australian state of Queensland. “The older
you get, the more you are afraid. It is the fear of failure: They don’t
want to be seen as failing against this little machine.” By reaching
out to teachers who embrace the XO device without fear, the
OLPCA team aims to build a network of XO “champions.”
Barrie, who heads a school located
in the remote town of Doomadgee, is an
exemplary champion of the OLPCA cause.
“The XO is taking away digital barriers.
It’s leveling the playing field,” he says.
Srikhanta met Barrie in 2010 at a gathering
for educators in Brisbane, the capital
of Queensland. Barrie connected with
Srikhanta right away. (“He has a good
heart, he has a bloody good brain, and he
has a good motivation for supporting kids
in Australia and all over the world,” Barrie
says of Srikhanta.) He also connected with
the OLPCA model. As an educator who
labors in the harsh Australian outback, he
applauds the goal of “righting disadvantage
and providing opportunities for kids
to engage with the global economy,”
he explains. Since that meeting with
Srikhanta, Barrie has become chief learning
officer of OLPCA, and his primary-level
school (where he continues to serve
as principal) has become an official One
Education Lab—a place where the organization
can test ideas and get rapid feedback
on how well they work.
Providing an Education
Since 2012, OLPCA has moved from
merely supplying XO laptops to embedding
XO technology in the daily life of local
schools. “What we have is a robust school professional development
program in which every kid also gets a device,” Srikhanta
explains. “And schools are getting this for as little as $100.”
The XO certification course is a 15-hour-long online program
that teachers can take at a pace that suits them. Some teachers
complete the course in two weeks; others need up to three
months to finish it. Over time, the average completion period for
the course has dropped; today, teachers generally take less than
30 days to finish it. OLPCA certification requires a considerable
amount of coursework, especially in comparison with the standard
OLPC program (which has no formal training component).
Yet many teachers speak highly of the experience. One teacher,
Lisa Foster from Dirranbandi State School, stated in an online
comment: “I loved the course. 20hrs seemed like forever before
we started—but time flew as we had fun exploring and learning!”
One Education training not only enables teachers to learn how
the device functions, but also provides them with ideas on how
to integrate the technology into classroom learning. “Empowered
teachers are more inclined to take full advantage of the XOs,”
Srikhanta notes.
To maintain their professional qualifications, Australian
teachers must take a certain number of hours of compulsory
development training each year, and the XO course has become
an attractive option for completing that requirement. The
Queensland Department of Education, for example, has worked
with OLPCA to build XO training into the curriculum for its
Certificate in Information Communication Technology.
Once teachers complete certification, they receive the full
One Education package, which includes an XO, a charging rack,
a repair kit, and access to an array of online programs. The cost
of the program is $400 per device. Schools that fall into a lower
category under the Index of Community Socio-Educational
Advantage (a national school benchmark classification) receive
the program at a subsidized rate of $100 per child.
Another aspect of the OLPCA model is the certification of
students as XO Champions and XO
Mechanics. An XO Mechanic certificate
indicates that a student can change batteries,
run hardware tests, reinstall a laptop’s
operating system, and replace a keyboard
or a screen. But kids who go through certification
training gain more than just a set
of technical skills. Trish Noy, a teacher, noted on an OLPCA feedback
form: “We are very excited about how our students have progressed
through this course, and how confident they have become.
The leadership qualities that have emerged has been very pleasing
and all ‘experts’ will be helping to run our help desk next term
during lunch.”
For educators who work in remote communities, the XO
Mechanics program is an especially attractive feature of the
OLPCA model. “If you buy another machine, you have no backup
service. For us, being so remote, downtime is a real problem. You
have to send the machine back to Cairns and then wait for it to be
fixed and returned. That can take a while,” Barrie says. (The distance
from Cairns to his school in Doomadgee is more than 600
miles.) “With the XOs, there is little downtime for us. If they
break down, they can be fixed on the spot by the kids.”
Building an Ecosystem
At multiple levels, OLPCA has integrated itself into the Australian
education system. It is working within and through communities
to understand how XO technology can support improved educational
outcomes. “We’re providing professional development for
teachers, we’re turning students into repair technicians, and we’re
working with and inside departments of education,” Srikhanta
says. The connections that OLPCA has created between education
officials, principals, teachers, and students have enabled
the XO to become the preferred classroom technology in many
parts of Australia.
Consider the results of an early study of XO deployment
that covered nine schools where teachers regularly used XOs in
classroom learning activities. According to the study, which was
conducted in 2012, teachers in five of those schools reported
having access to iPads as well—yet, unlike the XOs, none of
those iPads were dedicated classroom equipment. In that study,
researchers also found that more than half of the 20 teachers in
their sample used classroom-based XOs more than once per day,
and that students independently used the devices one to four
times per week.6
In remote areas like Doomadgee, the OLPCA ecosystem
extends beyond the individual classroom. Barrie tells the story
of a teacher who was trained as an XO expert in Doomadgee and
later moved to South West Cairns. But through the Internet,
and the use of XO machines, she still provides support to kids
in Doomadgee. In addition, those kids can now interact and
exchange ideas with their counterparts in South West Cairns.
“We are proposing a new kind of school, an expanded school that
grows beyond the walls of the classroom, encompassing varying
generations, languages, and cultures,” Srikhanta says. This community-based approach involves teachers, community elders,
and others who contribute to the remote learning experience,
and it enables OLPCA to engage Aboriginal communities in the
NT and in Queensland.
In the Northern Territory, the use of XO technology has
spread organically through libraries and local community centers.
Jennifer McFarland runs CAYLUS (Central Australian Youth Link
Up Service), a program that serves the Papanya community of NT.
She and her colleagues have observed that people in Papanya
often lack reliable access to the Internet in their homes. To fill
that gap, CAYLUS set up two computer rooms at its facility (one
for women and girls only, and one for both sexes) and stocked the
rooms with a variety of devices, including XOs. McFarland notes
that use of the XO machines has been especially high among
younger primary-school children who come to the facility with
their mothers. “Many of the children have two or three indigenous
languages, with English as their third or fourth language,”
McFarland says. “They pick up the XO, and they learn to recognize
English words, because those words are connected to outcomes
[on the device]. That increases their English literacy.”
"Lighting Fires"
OLPCA is a registered charity with Deductible Gift Recipient
status in Australia. (In other words, donors can claim a tax
deduction for gifts to the organization.) In its early years, the
organization was able to obtain ample funding from high-profile
corporations such as Commonwealth Bank of Australia and
Telstra Corporation. Today, though, Srikhanta views OLPCA
as a social enterprise, and his aim is to generate blended income
streams. As a business proposition, the One Education model
would seem to suffer from a critical weakness: OLPCA is essentially
saying, “Before you can purchase our product, you must
complete our training.” That barrier to purchase, however,
ensures that buyers are self-selected, knowledgeable about the
product, and highly motivated to use it in a way that embeds the
product in their local education program.
In effect, OLPCA has redefined the entry requirements for
established technology vendors that want to participate in the
primary-school market. It can compete
against for-profit providers such as Apple
and Dell on several important dimensions:
the price of the hardware, the speed of
distribution, the provision of user training
and professional development, and the cost of repairs and
after-purchase support. For users in remote communities, the
training and support service that OLPCA provides and the do-it-yourself
nature of the XO machines are crucial benefits. “We
have trumped our potential competitors,” says Srikhanta. “Apple
and other providers may have strong procurement networks in
the state education departments. But schools aren’t just buying
devices from us; they’re buying the training, and the device then
comes with it.”
Meanwhile, the success of the OLPCA model is starting to gain
global attention, and people in other countries have expressed an
interest in replicating it. “We have just started ‘lighting fires’ in
Thailand and New Zealand,” says Srikhanta. “But at the moment,
we are focused on bedding down our systems and processes to
ensure the smooth diffusion of the model globally. The idea is
that people can go to our website, pay a price, and begin to roll
out the program locally.” As part of that effort, Srikhanta is building
a global platform where teachers can share materials and
resources across state and national borders.
Wherever it operates, OLPCA pursues a strategy that integrates
several elements: XO distribution, teacher training, curriculum
development, XO technician training, and the recruitment
of student and teacher champions. It’s a grassroots strategy that
enables users to incorporate the technology into the learning process.
And that approach shapes how the organization is working
to distribute 50,000 XOs under the government grant that it
received in 2012. (As large as that project is for OLPCA, Srikhanta
considers it to be only a pilot program. “Those 50,000 laptops are
reaching only 5 percent of the children who are eligible for support
from the government,” he says.)
The guiding principles of OLPCA are no different from those
of the parent OLPC organization. Like Negroponte and others,
Srikhanta supports a vision in which access to 21st-century educational
technology becomes ubiquitous. Yet for Srikhanta, the best
way to reach that goal is by creating a supportive ecosystem from
the bottom up. It can’t be done from the top down by policy makers
who decide which schools and which classrooms will get new
laptops. “Technology take-up by children, teachers, principals, and
the community needs to be organic and nonlinear to be successful,”
he says. “This is an education project, not a laptop project.”