Pravab

Help Nepal Network (HeNN) aims in providing support for rural areas of the country in health and education sector (Help Nepal Network, n.d. a).   HeNN initiated a project to establish one electronic library for every district of Nepal. This included computer facilities that would be used not only by the students and teachers but also the local communities. 15 of the e-libraries have already been deployed in different districts including some of the rural ones (Help Nepal Network, n.d. b). FOSS Nepal volunteers have been helping in the set up of this project (FOSS Nepal Community, n.d. c).    This project uses Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) in its implementation and uses F/LOSS. They all run on GNU/Linux operating system which has made it possible to achieve a reliable and secure network and has cut the cost to one forth compared to computer laboratory that doesn’t use F/LOSS. This model is very favourable for rural areas (Help Nepal Network, n.d. b). Pe...

Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya (MPP) started the work of NepaLinux in 2004 through the support of Pan Asia Networking (PAN). It is a localised Linux distribution. Till now, there have been 4 different version released. In each updates, the development team have been trying to make it less technical and been working on making the graphical user interface more friendly. In the pilot project, it was deployed in 3 schools (APC, 2007). The system was targeted for individual work station, ministry, government office and educational institute (Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, n.d. b). The objective of NepaLinux was to make computer accessible to larger population of the country who had been deprived because of the cost and language factor (APC, 2007). NepaLinux 1.0 was released in December 2005 and in October of 2006, NepaLinux 1.1 was released. NepaLinux version 2.0 was released in 2007 and came with two different localised desktop environment; KDE and GNOME giving users more choices. There we...

Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world where almost 80% of the population reside in rural areas (Asian Development Bank, 2009; The World Bank, 2010). People in this rural area do not enjoy much of the social services like for example education. They are suffering from poverty (Asian Development Bank, 2009). Only few people in this region understand English. Due to the language barrier and poverty, only few people in this region are enjoying the benefits offered by the information communication technology (Bal, n.d.).  Not long ago did Ministry of Education realise that there was potential of educational sector benefiting for the ICT. They realised it could improve the teaching and learning process and decided to implement ICT in educational sector through one laptop per child program and lab model and other programs (DoE, 2010).  -  NepaLinux - FOSS Nepal - Nirvikalpa - E-library - One Laptop per Child (OLPC) REFERENCES http://pravab.b...

ICT plays an important role in education sector as it helps increase the quality of the education provided and also facilitates the delivery of business objectives (MCEETYA, 2003) but education sector faces financial constraints along with sharing the resources for other things. Education sector has hence not been able to get the full benefit of ICT (Tong, 2004). Digitisation has already captured and transformed the educations industry.  To catch up with it, education sector requires an ICT infrastructure and to compete with the rest of the world they have to rely on proprietary software vendors. It becomes more expensive for the education sector to use proprietary software while they are already dealing with the financial constraints (Lakhan and Jhunjhunwala, 2008). With the introduction of F/LOSS though, the ICT cost can be highly reduced and higher quality of education can be provided (Tong, 2004).  F/LOSS is available free from the internet and is also available in CD...