A spotlight on Open Education: A nation-wide school without walls

November 9, 2020

At Moodle, we believe education should be recognised as a fundamental human right and everyone deserves to have easy access to comprehensive, quality education.

Our mission is to bring quality education everywhere; to innovate within the Edtech space with our technology and collaborate with our global partner network.

We’ve partnered with Tamarind Tree, a school based in India for the local indigenous children, covering kindergarten all the way up to Grade 10, that has been operating on open hardware, open software, and open content largely driven by Moodle LMS.

The advantage of using Moodle

Tamarind Tree Founder Michelle Chawla, believes that a large part of the reason why their organisation was attracted to Moodle was due to its open source nature. When it comes to tools such as Moodle, Big Blue Button, and H5P, the knowledge and the codes are free. This means educators can reuse, remix, and adapt these tools as they see fit for their curriculum.

The fluid nature of open source technology is especially crucial as Tamarind Tree runs a completely open education model encompassing around 125 learners. Courses are customised for its learners, teachers are trained to build their own content, and then these are released for mass use in the public domain. Sometimes, these materials are even used in Indian public schools. Its organisations like Tamarind Tree that give back to the community, are vital for education.

Learning in the time of a global pandemic

In a country hard hit by Covid-19, it’s natural that education in the country would also take a hit. However, Tamarind Tree has already been using virtual classroom platforms and building a comprehensive e-library even before the pandemic began.

During lockdown, they decided to launch their own Moodle platform, My Big Campus; offering all of Tamarind Tree’s primary and elementary courses open and free, to any child, in any part of India. Plus, anyone passionate about teaching was encouraged to join their newly initiated volunteer program.

The road to equity

As an advocate for openly accessible online education, Tamarind Tree is committed to delivering learning outputs to children and convincing stakeholders in the tech industry to adopt their platform and demonstrate how it can play a role in human development, eventually permanently changing education for the better.

Learn more about Tamarind Tree’s involvement in the global movement for open education.

What is open source?

Open source enables educational institutions, organisations and individuals to use our software in the ways that work best for them.

We believe in open source, because you can completely make it your own. It empowers the users to build what they need.