Prof Yousuf Islam and SoftEd are working with the Open University of Bangladesh to pilot MORE style distance-learning in an English language course starting in February 2008. Prof Islam was the first person to demonstrate the video + SMS responses in 2004 and has been working on the SMS aggregation technology since then.

UnaMesa is working to support and learn from this pilot project. For details see the following:

• notes from discussions with Prof. Islam: Meeting notes
• Bangladesh Virtual Classroom

Based on those results, we hope to create another pilot series of courses focused on health care topics. These courses will be developed for health-care providers in under-served regions to provide them high quality and up-to-date instruction. We hope to conduct these pilots in association with BRAC and their pool of 4000 village caregivers in Bangladesh. Funding and timing for these prototypes is under discussion. We are actively seeking grants that will help to test this interactive model on a larger scale, and will help us increase its efficiency, cost effectiveness and scalability.

The knowledge and experience gained will allow our partners to scale the program in Bangladesh in the future, while UnaMesa will endeavour to provide the infrastructure and technologies developed as a free or low cost solution for global use. Towards this end we will then purse global partnerships with the WHO, UNICEF and other multinational NGOs.