The Darakht-e Danesh Library: Taking Action for Afghan Educators through an Open Access Repository

Afghan teachers contend with a daunting lack of resources. The Darakht-e Danesh Library (DDL) is an initiative of Canadian Women for Women of Afghanistan and was created in 2014 to respond to the needs of Afghan teachers for high quality, easily accessible, and openly licensed teaching and learning material in Dari and Pashto (the official languages of Afghanistan). This paper will present the DDL and offer insights to the open access repository movement through the experiences of the recruitment of authors for materials and other volunteers, quality control of contributions, and promotion and marketing of the resource to the target audience: Afghan educators. Currently, the DDL contains over 2,000 Open Educational Resources (OER), many created expressly for the library, on a wide variety of subjects. Quality control includes reviews by volunteer teaching professionals for educational relevance, subject matter experts for content accuracy, and Pashto and Dari language specialists for quality of translation. Each resource is catalogued using a modified DCMI/LRMI educational metadata schema. All resources in the library are in the public domain or have open terms of use or licenses. Much of the work is done by volunteers, resulting in cost efficiencies that help keep the project sustainable. The DDL recruits volunteers both from within Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora, using social media, outreach events in Afghanistan, and visiting schools. Promotion of the DDL relies on word of mouth and active outreach, including demos, billboards, printed flyers, and media appearances. Although the efforts required are substantial, a recent impact study found that the OER in the DDL positively impacted teachers’ knowledge and helped them in lesson preparation. However there remains the challenge of raising awareness of the DDL and convincing users to adopt it. The experiences of the DDL offer insights to success of open access repositories.