Outcomes of the ONE (Open Network for Education) Projects

Initial successes have demonstrated willingness and an appetite on the part of education practitioners to consider open education as a transformative strategy in education. What remains, is for a consortium of key educational players in Mongolia to move forward toward policy advocacy and change through a countrywide initiative that demonstrates the potential and power of large-scale open development practices.

Open educational seeds have been widely scattered in Mongolia over the past five years. They are now beginning to blossom.

THE ONE ACADEMY

The ONE Academy, a component of ONE Mongolia program, supports collaborations and partnerships for the development of open education and knowledge, and provides free access to Open Educational Resources (OER) to maximize multi-stakeholder investments in open education and Build capacity among faculty, instructors and education practitioners to use and create open educational resources. ONE Academy focuses on quality education and lifelong learning for all, to enable every student to acquire skills and knowledge. This is especially important for rural populations.

Currently, over 160 Mongolian video lessons have been made openly available to students, teachers, parents and the public with covering subjects from higher, secondary and primary education to preschool and lifelong learning using a Creative Commons (CC) attribution share-alike license (CC-BY-SA).  http://www.one.mn

The 1000 video lessons of Khan Academy have been translated into Mongolian languages and professional teachers of the two largest Mongolian universities, the National University of Mongolia, and the Mongolian State University of Education are participating in this localization initiative.

In September 2014, ONE Foundation launched the Mongolian adaptation of the Khan Academy with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere, the most popular open educational platform in the world. http://mn.khanacademy.org

ONE Mongolia offers translated exercises, instructional videos covering a wide variety of academic topics, including math, history, biology and computer sciences, and a personalized learning dashboard that empower learners to study at their own pace in and outside of the classroom.

ONE Mongolia team conducted capacity building trainings that bring the e-learning technology into the classrooms, ultimately elevating the access to quality resources for teachers and administrators in primary, secondary and higher education.

ONE Mongolia team has been experimenting with Khan Academy in a dozen classes in secondary and high schools all across Mongolia and developing digital library of online lessons showcasing best practices for teaching and learning.

In 2016, our training subject on the concepts and practices for using OER and Khan Academy in the classroom to support effective teaching and learning has been incorporated into the professional development courses, conducted by the Institute of Teachers’ Professional Development of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science for primary and secondary school teachers.

ONE Foundation promotes innovative networking activities that add value to OER and Khan Academy programs and contribute new knowledge and best practice for OER use to the wider academic open educational community.

THE ONE SCHOOL

The ONE School, another component of ONE Mongolia, provides eLearning technology solutions for institutes, schools and training organizations.

ONE School provides classroom tools powered by Google Education to university and school campuses in Mongolia, without the costs and complexities that come with maintaining hardware and software. This free set of customizable tools enables teachers and students to work together from anywhere and learn, effectively supported by open educational resources. http://www.one.mn/google

Over the past five years, ONE School has been active in capacity building initiatives and trainings to introduce and demonstrate a range of open practices, including open education and Google APPs for Education for primary and secondary teachers in the country.

ONE School supports the design and implementation of educational infrastructure and build a technical platform for CC Mongolia and a digital library of CC-licensed resources in the Mongolian language and provide eLearning technology solutions for institutes, schools and training organizations.

THE ONE LANGUAGE

As a commencement of the ONE Language, newly published 8 volumes Mongolian language dictionary (MN Wiktionary), has been made openly available to the public with a Creative Commons (CC) licenses.

Designed as the lexical companion to Wikipedia, Mongolian Language Wiktionary (MN Wiktionary), a collaborative project to produce a free, modern and comprehensive dictionary, developed on the http://mn.wiktionary.org.

The MN Wiktionary is run by the ONE Foundation supported by Mongolian Government, and is written collaboratively by Mongolian language professionals and volunteers, allows anyone with access to create and edit entries. MN Wiktionary has developed the approximately 44,000 headwords and 199 000 entries. It grew rapidly in 2015 thanks to authors of dictionary of Mongolian law and finance in adding terminologies of law and business.

MN Wiktionary has grown beyond a standard dictionary and now includes a Mongolian traditional script, thesaurus, folklore, etymology and extensive appendices.  All areas of academics, professionals and public are participating openly in the development of Wiktionary, as a Mongolian Language community portal.

It is expected that memorandum of understanding (MoU) between MECS, ONE Foundation and National University of Mongolia will be signed in 2016.

Over 50 video lessons covering subjects in Mongolian traditional scripts have been made openly available to the public, using a Creative Commons (CC) attribution share-alike license (CC-BY-SA).

ONE Language focuses on enhancing awareness, capacity and participation of all stakeholders in English language training and enabling innovative English language training model in the public and private sectors using open educational resources. The English Language training initiative has an initial starting base in the research and collaboration.