Project Description
UnaMesa’s M.O.R.E. (Mobile Research and Education) initiative focuses on the creative use of mobile technologies to provide underserved sectors healthcare and educational resources. M.O.R.E. Health makes healthcare instruction and health records accessible via the phone, internet, and TV. M.O.R.E. Education provides technological solutions that allow students to receive and respond to instruction using televisions, radios, internet kiosks, and phones.
The tools used in the M.O.R.E. project include the SharedRecords web service and TiddlyWiki student notebook which have been successfully used in several educational and healthcare contexts. Also, the M.O.R.E. pilot builds upon mobile phone based teaching techniques first developed by Professor Islam first at BRAC University, which has a long record of improving the quality and accessibility of educational and healthcare materials. Ultimately, the M.O.R.E. project will extend and customize these services and databases of best practices to other underserved regions and populations.

Status (Oct 2008)

• Virtual Interactive Classroom -- innovative approach to distance-learning that combines broadcast video and real-time SMS messaging to create great learning experiences - VIC pilot course in progress -- see the preliminary report
• MORE v1 TiddlyWiki + database Implementation. Demo's available below.
• Currently evaluating options to create scalable infrastructure for widespread deployments

Milestones

1. MORE Prototype
2. MORE v1
3. Pilot

Partners

• SoftEd : a group that came out of BRAC University's Computer Science Department whose research focus is on low-cost interactive distance education. The idea is for Unamesa to provide the technology infrastructure to make the distance learning model sustainable. Unamesa will work on a pilot project with BRAC starting March 2008 to demonstrate the model and collect feedback from people who work on the ground.
• Dimagi: Dimagi is collaborating with BRAC University on the mobile phone education project. Unamesa will provide an infrastructure for collecting responses which can be used both for the Dimagi mobile phone education project and Unamesa MORE project.
• Digital Study Hall

Other Resources

• Case Studies and Briefs