challenge
Sharing Web Content in Disconnected or Rural Environments
challenge
Sharing Web Content in Disconnected or Rural Environments
The web has tremendous potential to enable education for users in emerging markets and rural communities. With an increasing amount of free or open-use educational content becoming available online (Khan Academy, Wikipedia for Schools, etc.), schools in developing regions can bring vast quantities of human knowledge directly into the classroom. However, the web is built with the assumption of fast, free, and always-on connectivity. This presents a substantial challenge to schools in developing regions, which often have slow or intermittent Internet connectivity, such as a flaky dialup connection. While modern web standards make it possible to develop sites that can be used offline (e.g., using ServiceWorkers to persist content in the browser), this approach does not scale to the vast quantity of legacy web content.