Online Academy

Through the Online Academy, telecentre.org facilitates a collaborative access to existing free training courses and promotes open licensed resources to specialized groups and local communities for development.

The objective behind this platform is to empower trainers or/and trainees with free resources, offer them a structured collaborative space to share their training but also to promote and value the “open” training materials, which are freely and openly accessible for trainers and self-learners to use and re-use for non commercial purposes such as teaching, learning and research.


The choice of technology was a topic of discussion at both the Delhi and Barcelona meetings. At the Global Knowledge III conference, the Academy organised a workshop where it was concluded that the Academy needed to develop a Learning Management System (LMS) that could handle the multiplicities and complexities involved in delivering learning programs to millions of learners in different continents. The curriculum would be delivered in their local languages, giving the learners ample scope to learn at their own pace. In addition, because Internet connectivity is unreliable in Africa and Asia, the learning experience needed to be offline as well.

Quite a few national academies, especially those in Latin America and in the Philippines, follow free and open source tools such as Moodle, Ilias, and others. The Academy needed to make a rational decision, keeping the learner and his/her interest in mind.

A consultant, Amandeep Grewal, was appointed to review the available tools, particularly the ones used by telecentre.org national academies, and to provide telecentre.org with an informed view on the matter. The terms of reference for the consultant included, surveying existing telecentre.org Academies to understand if and how they required technology support for their work, surveying and studying the various LMS in use and available in the market for open and distance learning work, preparing a scorecard matrix of the LMS based on the needs of telecentre.org national academies, and recommending the best-fit specification and product as the technology platform for telecentre.org Academy.

The above consultancy exercise helped telecentre.org to determine a set of three solutions for furtherconsideration. The recommendations were based on the following criteria:

  • The LMS should cater to learners using a variety of languages, including Hindi, Bahasha Malaya, Spanish,French, Tamil, Sinhala, Portuguese, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada, Urdu, Arabic, and Malayalam.

Tim Dubel of Microsoft Corporation, helped to identify a partner who also happens to be the learning channel partner of Microsoft. Agilix, based in Utah, USA with considerable experience and comparable business advantage in the field with over half a million learners already participating in its LMS-enabled distance learning programs, was chosen as the partner to develop telecentre.org's LMS.

Agilix has been chosen to customize its LMS to form the online learning system for the Academy and to provide support to the Academy. At present, engineers at Agilix are involved in identifying, designing and customizing a product called BrainHoney to address the needs of the Academy. Their work will help to identify and develop telecentre.org's online learning management system and also train the staff responsible for 24x7 service to the learners. The staff which will be a part of the Secretariat will ensure that the system works well round the clock.

The learning platform, when implemented, will help telecentre managers access training content online and offline through any portable media without depending on the Internet, while participating in the learning program. The system will work for multiple language and geographical groups with a robust professional development path by using customized learning content authored by the academy. The system will also use the learning content acquired and authored by national Academies.

Agilix Labs, Inc., the technology partner of telecentre.org Academy, was founded in 2001 with more than 800 publishers, including 8 out of the world's top 10 as its customers. The Brain Honey online system, being customized for the telecentre.org Academy, presently supports more than 16 million registered users, searching millions of records. Within the past 18 months, the Brain Honey community learning system recorded over half a million enrolments. The objective behind this platform is to empower trainers or/and trainees with free resources, offer them a structured collaborative space to share their training but also to promote and value the “open” training materials, which are freely and openly accessible for trainers and self-learners to use and re-use for non commercial purposes such as teaching, learning and research.