Teaching material for Cuba -- El Paquete Educativo?

Locations of deploying organizations and installations of the offline Khan Academy.

The Khan Academy is arguably the most important source of online learning on the Internet. Over 39 million teachers and learners have used their collection of 57 innovative, highly modular courses for students from grade school to university.

The Open Courseware site of the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hosts teaching material that has been used in over 2,300 classes during the last 15 years. The material has been provided by professors in 31 departments (not all technical) and is viewed by over 1.5 million unique visitors per month.

Online access to these sites is impossible for the vast majority of Cubans, but there are offline versions of both.

These could be used by individuals for self-study or installed on local area networks in schools, universities, Youth Computer Clubs, etc. and accessed offline. The site software and teaching content could be distributed on portable drives. An Internet connection would be needed for periodic updates -- MIT recommends a connection speed of at least 1 Mbit/second. Updates could be distributed on portable drives to users without connectivity.

I've summarized this proposal in a few sentences, but regular, nationwide distribution would require organization and support. Could a Cuban University, the Youth Clubs or the Ministry of Education create El Paquete Educativo?

Cuba could become more than a consumer of educational material. For a start, El Paquete Educativo could be distributed to Spanish-speaking people in other nations. More important, Cuba could be a source of Spanish-language educational content. This is a time of global innovation in online education and the institutions surrounding it. Exposure to software like MIT's Open Courseware or the Khan Academy would inspire Cuban developers and educators.

I have posted short descriptions of the Khan Academy and MIT's Open Courseware Project online. If you have good Internet connectivity, you can also visit their sites -- MIT Open Courseware, the Khan Academy in Englsih and the Khan Academy in Spanish.

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Update 3/29/2016

You can see a Spanish translation of this post at:
http://huxley.cubava.cu/2016/03/18/material-de-ensenanza-para-cuba-el-paquete-educativo/

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Update 5/3/2018

Teaching material or other content can also be bundled with low-cost server hardware. In this example, a handheld $30 server creates a WiFi LAN and serves medical information in South Asia. The same hardware could be used to deliver other content, like Wikipedia in Spanish.

Guest post on learning about computers in Cuba

This 1991 note, in which Fidel Castro writes that he feels envy, hangs in a frame on the wall of the Youth Computer Club (YCC) headquarters in the one-time Sears building in Havana. Fidel dedicated the headquarters and supported the Youth Computer Clubs, where kids could play games, take classes and send domestic email. The YCCs are now in 611 locations around the island and have produced over 2.25 million course graduates (adults and kids).

Alberto, who was one of the kids at the YCC in Havana, recently left a comment on the About post for this blog. Since it gives us a picture of a young person's access to computing a decade ago, I asked if I could copy it as a post and he said "yes." Here it is:

"I lived in Old Havana until 2001 – at the time, I was starting High School and recall that during my last year there my school managed to get their hands on a handful of desktop computers. Of course, internet connectivity was unheard of, but people were highly fascinated with the prospects of technology.

Access to those computers was extremely restricted, even though one couldn’t do much with them (or knew what to do with them). The room they were in seemed more like a small fortress than a computer lab – doors were locked from the outside with heavy chains and windows blocked with metal bars (despite being on the third floor of the building). Fascinating times.

Through a family friend I managed to land a basic “computer science” class at a center in Old Havana – the name of the institution escapes me, but I clearly recall it was one of those rare buildings with blasting air conditioning. That aspect alone was worth the 15-blocks walk from my apartment to the center. The class tried to teach the very basic functionalities of Windows – right & left clicks, creating a new folder, word documents, etc. I can’t say I learned much.

I did have a friend whose father was a college professor who had some engagement with Etecsa. They somehow managed to get a personal computer into their house, with dialup internet access and everything. It was indeed a very well kept secret. Sadly, most of the time was spent trying to reconnect to the internet as the connection was extremely unreliable. He went on to study computer science in Havana and today works in the field there. From what he tells me, his job is now a large waste of resources. As he describes it, “they pretend to pay me and I pretend to do work.”

On my side, it wasn’t until I arrived to the states that I truly learned to use a computer. Two years after my arrival (while still learning English), I was doing web development and running a local site centered around education and social gatherings. Two years later, I went off to the University of Chicago for Economics and continued to work on web ventures while there. To date I’ve worked on many web projects, mostly in the entertainment space and other more serious ones: hello.webicator.com (current project, under development). This service may be of interest to readers of this blog, LP.

Today I work with a group of economists at a bank in New York, but follow the topic of internet penetration closely, not only in Cuba, but in Latin America as a whole. Data from the World Bank suggest that Latam is today where the US was at the end of the 1990s in terms of internet penetration. However, the pace of growth appears to be greater than it was in the US, which makes sense intuitively given that the technology already exists – now it only needs to become cheaper and for countries to obtain the infrastructure to sustain it.

Cuba is sadly a very different story since politics plays such a large role. I suspect that the spread of internet, when it comes, could potentially lead to a shift in mentality – with a greater sense of awareness about life outside of Cuba, will arguably emerge a greater desire for change. When the day comes, I am sure tighter content filters will be implemented, but individuals will always find ways to circumvent them, as they do in China. Indeed a very sensitive topic."

If you are or were a student in Cuba, was Alberto's experience similar to yours?

Online education -- an application for the ALBA-1 undersea cable

When the Internet was getting started in Cuba, there was a high level debate on whether to welcome or fear it. They faced the dictator's dilemma -- whether economic and cultural value of the Internet justified the political risk. Finance Minister Carlos Lage, said "yes" and Raúl Castro said "no." Raúl won.

In arguing for the Internet, Lage spoke of its economic value, comparing the cost of a telex to that of an email. He was correct, but the cost to the economy may not have been as important as the cost to the education system.

This point was brought home a year ago by Greg Sowa, a medical student from the US, who is studying in Cuba. Sowa described Cuban student access in a blog post:

Most students use their limited internet access at the school (forty minutes a week for each student, depending if you can talk your way in for some extra time) for communication. We furiously upload email attachments of letters home while copying and pasting messages from our inbox into microsoft word documents to read later, off the clock.

Compare that to a US medical student who has near-instant access to over 21 million citations for biomedical literature from PubMed, Web sites of professional societies, the National Institutes of Health, professional social networking, Google and Google Scholar, etc.

The ALBA-1 cable could help close this gap.

We have been discussing the cable lately, and it appears that it is not yet providing Internet connectivity to Cubans, but it is being tested and used used to operate the Venezuelan ID system. Writers like Yoani Sanchez attribute the lack of cable connectivity to political fear, and they may be correct, but, even if the government wanted wide-spread access, the domestic infrastructure to support it is not in place and Cuba cannot afford it. The cable may be operating, but there is little modern "middle mile" and "last mile" infrastructure.

Since Cuba cannot afford general high-speed connectivity, they must use the cable selectively, and higher education would be a good place to begin. Students like Greg Sowa would obviously benefit, but so would faculty. Furthermore, education could be a source of revenue.

INFOMED, 2006

The online education market is taking off, and universities, non-profits, private companies and venture capitalists are vying for a place in that new, global marketplace.

There is considerable diversity among the offerings and the student goals, but, the majority of current offerings are in English, leaving an opportunity for Spanish language material. Cuba could be in a good position to satisfy that need. For example, Cuba has considerable medical expertise. If they upgraded the Infomed network and connected it to the cable, they could offer medical education in Spanish and tailored to the needs of Latin America and the Caribbean.

My own university provides an example of the sort of thing that could be done. We offer a state-wide nursing program online. The program is successful and has been running for several years. Cuba could be in a postion to do something similar (perhaps even in collaboration with our nursing program).

Computer science is another promising area. The most visible and largest online classes to date have been in computer science. Elite schools like Stanford, MIT and the Indian Institutes of Technology are going online. Cuba has a specialized University of Informatics Science (UCI). Could UCI not do the same?

Cuba cannot afford to connect everyone on the island, and would not want to if they could. This sort of focus -- where Cuban expertise is applied toward a postive social goal that also generates revenue -- may be a way to bootstrap Cuba's entry into the Internet era.

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Update 11/7/2013

Writing in The Havana Times, Alfredo Fernandez, a Cuban who is now in Ecuador, asks "why are there no Cuban academic videos on the Internet?" (http://bit.ly/1bcXvgb)

He goes on to say:

After a simple study based on everyday observations, I am quite surprised that, in the six months I have been searching for materials on YouTube – about subjects as broad-ranging as literature, philosophy, journalism, film and many others – I have not once come upon a single Cuban video.