Khan Academy goes 'live' for non-internet users

BANGALORE, INDIA: Khan Academy needs no introduction, and for those who need one, it is 'a nonprofit organization that was born of one man's idea to help a family member succeed in school and has now become a huge force for free online education."

In its bid to provide 'free world-class education for anyone anywhere,' especially to the 65 per cent of the global population who do not have access to internet, the academy has introduced a news service called, Khan Academy (KA) Lite. KA Lite is a lightweight web app for serving core Khan Academy content (videos and exercises) without needing internet connectivity, from a local server.

"The prototype "Khanberry Pi" was developed in August. KA Lite is designed to enable P2P adhoc syncing of database records between devices, or between devices and a central server, towards the goal of eventual consistency within a syncing zone, making devices and facilities effectively interchangeable from the point of view of the end-user (with user accounts and progress data kept in sync)," reads a write-up on the academy's website.

The service was initially developed on laptops but was later found out that the server can run on low cost Raspberry Pi.

"The development team has taken care to ensure that the KA Lite server can be downloaded and run on devices as inexpensive as the $35 Raspberry Pi. This means that administrators download the server only one time, and then users can download the content by connecting to the server, as opposed to having to access the internet itself," as per a write-up on the website.

"After developing everything on laptops, it was exciting to discover that the server ran smoothly on the Raspberry Pi, out of the box. With the addition of a USB Wifi adapter running in Access Point mode, and a low-current 5V power supply, this could make for a very inexpensive wireless server solution, which could be placed in a classroom where students connect to it using cheap tablets such as the Aakash, which is now available to students in India for ~$20," it adds.

All server-side code is in pure Python, with no non-Python dependencies, which means all required libraries (e.g. Django, requests, rsa) can be bundled up into a cross-platform package, it adds.