MIB Technology
The quirky name reflects the fact that MIB began as a retail and repair IT outfit in Durban 17 years ago. Founder Vivian Naidoo got involved with education after building “maths labs” for rural schools. Now based in Bramley, JHB, MIB Technologies is best known for its work at Boksburg’s Sunward Park – South Africa’s first government school to throw away textbooks in favour of laptops – upon which Lesufi is basing his vision for the future.
When pupils and teachers at Sunward connect to the school network, what they see is MIB’s portal. Content from lots of different providers including the BBC, Wikipedia, Siyavula and Via Afrika is accessible and linked by subject matter as well as provider, so that teachers can build up lesson plans that include YouTube videos as well as CAPS-aligned digital textbooks.
CAPS stands for National Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement – the standardised curriculum in all government schools.
In the 18 months MIB has been involved with Sunward, the core portal has been redesigned eight times, constantly iterated to make it more relevant to the school’s needs.
MIB currently operates in 70 schools – mostly private – including primary and secondary, and according to project and operations director Neeraj Ojageer has over 3TB of books and learning materials on the servers at Sunward.
For classroom organisation like lesson plans and note sharing, MIB relies on the open source learning platform Moodle, although Ojageer says that the firm has also developed an in-house ePUB reader which can annotate academic textbooks. It also produces Train Your Brain, a series of exercises for learners (see the video above).
“The challenge has been to keep it an offline solution, when most academic publishers want an online DRM component,” says Ojageer, “Based on that, we’ve developed our own DRM servers so you don’t have to go online to authenticate.”
In most schools, says Ojageer, MIB will provide training through the “site champion solution”. This means bringing in someone from the local community, training them up, and paying for them to remain in a school to provide support – a familiar model in several schools we’ve seen.
MIB also operates in Uganda, and Ojageer says that he’s surprised at how little needs to be customised on the backend to make the system work internationally.
“The emphasis is specifically about sourcing local content,” Ojageer says.
