Education technology, or EdTech, has become a central topic in discussions about improving education globally. The COVID-19 pandemic forced education systems worldwide to adopt technology, regardless of their prior stance on it. This global crisis accelerated the mainstreaming of EdTech, making it an essential component of educational reform discussions, especially around achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4).
However, delivering quality learning through EdTech is a complex and collective endeavor, requiring alignment across various actors: governments with their policies, developers with their innovations, teachers with their expertise, and learners with diverse needs.
Despite its potential, the integration of education technology into classrooms often feels disjointed.
Many platforms and products are introduced as standalone solutions, each with its own scope, sequence, and progression, without sufficient consideration for how they align with existing programs or classroom realities. In developing countries, where teachers operate under significant constraints, this fragmented approach adds an additional burden.
Already stretched thin, these educators are left to navigate the complexities of implementing multiple programs within the limited hours of a school day, often with insufficient support or resources.
While there is no doubt that EdTech is a powerful tool for educators, integrating it into teaching practice is often far from straightforward. Consider a classroom with 60 learners and only five devices, or a rural school where internet access is limited to a single computer. In such cases, the challenges go beyond simply equipping teachers with the skills to use new tools or introducing additional platforms.
The real problem spans multiple dimensions — logistics, infrastructure, alignment with teaching practices, and equitable access for all learners.
These hurdles, compounded by the global digital divide, highlight the pressing need for more thoughtful, inclusive, and scalable solutions. This is where technologies specifically designed for use offline first, and not as an afterthought or ‘nice to have’ emerged as a game-changer.
The digital divide; offline EdTech as a meaningful solution
The rapid growth of EdTech brings with it both opportunities and inequities. As advanced tools and platforms become more accessible to some, the digital divide continues to widen. According to the International Telecommunications Union, over 33% of the world’s population still lacks access to the Internet, and in many regions, even electricity is unreliable. As it goes without saying, the learners who struggle to have access to these resources are also the ones who have the lowest learning outcomes.
Those without these basic infrastructures find themselves increasingly excluded from the promises of digital learning, and the gap between the haves and have-nots only deepens.
For EdTech ech to be meaningful, it must account for this divide. While many edtech products rely on the internet, offline technologies, such as Kolibri by Learning Equality, provide an example of how to address these gaps. Specifically designed to operate in low-resource environments, Kolibri offers a practical and impactful way to bridge these gaps, ensuring that learners and teachers are not left behind in the digital transformation of education.
Kolibri aggregates open educational resources (OERs) across a wide variety of grades, subjects, and languages, enabling access to quality learning, across many resource-constrained environments, from refugee camps to rural schools, proving that well-designed offline technologies can bridge systemic gaps and empower marginalised learners.
Kolibri stands out not only because it is entirely free of cost, but also because it is purposefully designed to serve diverse users — learners, teachers, coaches, and administrators across formal and non-formal contexts. Its greatest strengths lie in its ability to function offline, its adaptability to different contexts, its ability to sync, collect and aggregate data offline, and its flexibility to cater to varying grade levels.
Tools like Kolibri underscore the need for more such solutions in the edtech space that are designed to address real-world challenges, create meaningful learning opportunities, and ensure that no learner is left behind.
Kolibri’s reach and impact: Some examples
Since Kolibri’s primary model is a do-it-yourself approach — allowing anyone, anywhere in the world, to download, install, and use it independently — it has reached over 220 countries and territories. This global reach is a testament to its flexibility and adaptability to diverse contexts.
Beyond this independent usage, Learning Equality also partners with organisations in specific settings to address particular learning needs. This article includes two powerful examples that highlight how offline technologies like Kolibri can transform teaching and learning.
In Kenya, where about 60% of the population lacks internet access, Kolibri supports innovative teaching and learning methods such as project-based learning. Teachers
integrate Kolibri’s curriculum-aligned content into their instruction, using it as supplementary material to deepen learners’ understanding. For instance, in Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, students explored agricultural practices through Kolibri’s resources and then applied their knowledge in real-world contexts. They cultivated crops in the school premises, and eventually sold the produce.
This process brought learning to life — moving beyond the classroom to connect knowledge with meaningful, practical applications, and fostering skills like entrepreneurship and problem-solving.
A second example comes from a refugee settlement in Palabek, northern Uganda. Here, Kolibri was used as part of a project-based learning approach to strengthen foundational skills in literacy and numeracy. The results were striking: learners not only improved their academic foundational skills but many were also reintegrated into formal schooling after having been out of school.
This underscores the potential of thoughtfully designed offline technologies to create pathways for learning and bridge the gaps for marginalized groups.
Additionally, Kolibri’s flexibility allows for adaptations beyond its original design. In Assam, India, the Akshar Foundation, an organisation that focuses on developing model schools for implementing National Education Policy 2020, used the Kolibri codebase to create a tailored tool reflecting their vision for holistic learning experiences.
This highlights the broader potential for open source technologies designed for use offline to be customised and contextualised, enabling them to serve unique educational needs effectively.
These examples illustrate how offline technologies like Kolibri, when carefully designed and used as supplementary tools, can foster meaningful learning experiences, empower educators, and ultimately make education more equitable, inclusive and impactful, even in the most resource-constrained environments.
Conclusion: Call to action
As technology grows and penetrates deeper into society, especially now with the rapid development and adoption of Artifical Intelligence (AI), the digital divide continues to widen. Those with access to resources benefit from increasingly advanced tools, while those without access fall further behind. This gap, if left unaddressed, will only make it harder to bridge inequities.
While policies and reforms advocate for integrating technology into education, these conversations are often limited to pilot projects or infrastructure-focused solutions, such as establishing computer labs or purchasing tabs, without clarity on how they’ll be used to support the teaching and learning process.
These approaches, though important, fail to address the deeper issues faced by teachers and learners, especially in under-resourced contexts.
For education technology to truly make an impact, it must begin with a thoughtful design process that prioritises the realities and needs of the most marginalised. A product may be
innovative and feature-rich, but if it doesn’t solve the immediate problems teachers and learners face — or if it’s too complex to understand, set up, or use — it risks being ineffective. Many EdTech products require cumbersome setup processes that demand significant effort from educators, adding to the barriers they already face.
To truly address these challenges, education technology must prioritise simplicity and accessibility, enabling tools to effectively bridge the gap for learners in resource-constrained environments where connectivity and infrastructure are limited.
Technology is indeed a powerful tool for learning, but its true power lies in its ability to serve the underserved. Only when we design equitably, with the most marginalised in mind — focusing on tools that are simple, accessible, and impactful — can technology become a genuine catalyst for meaningful change in education.
This can only be achieved when offline platforms are consciously integrated into education strategies, ensuring that no learner is left behind, regardless of their circumstances.
(Revanth Voothaluru works as a Global Implementations Project Manager at Learning Equality which is an EdTech nonprofit organisation focused on building equity in education)
