DatourX is a startup and Dn1G stands for, The Number One Giant. But let us tell you a heartbreaking story first. I am 19. I passed my 12th grade examination amid the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic and waited for almost a year to get admitted to a university. Why? Because I live in a developing country and our government is still struggling to open the schools! And the worst part of the story is, I am not admitted to any university yet as I am about to sit for the entrance examination next month (probably). This problem has a global picture. Millions of students are joining their educational institutes on the internet. Also millions of students are not joining their educational institutes even on the internet. Either those institutes do not have capabilities to run online schooling or the student is failing to adapt with the new online educational environment. An average person can only enjoy digital educational resources if it is interactive, easy to use and more importantly, FREE. This is where online education gets more complicated. There are many awesome paid courses on the internet and most of them are not inclusive as they are beyond the reach of the average person. There are also many free courses and awesome resources. Organizations like free code camp and others are fighting to ease this inequality. But the problem is, most of us don’t know how to find those quality educational resources. I am disconnected from institutional education for a long long time. But that did not stop my Free digital learning. And speaking from my experience I know how highly important it is for everyone to get an opportunity in free quality education. Now let’s come to our solution: DatourX Dn1G. An idea is not great or awesome if you can not write it down in one page. The Blueprint of our entire project idea is so simple and effective that we don’t even need one page to explain it. In one line: DatourX Dn1G will be the #1 cyberplace for students and learners around the globe. Interested to know how? We will make a webapp where all free quality education resources will be listed and updated for easy inclusive access by anyone. All of us know that there are tons of free educational contents, tools and information distributed on the web, but they are not easy to find. Our team will find those resources for everyone. Provide a summary and links in our blogs written in different languages for different communities. We will run a virtual community on Reddit and Facebook for general Q&A and feedback sessions. In a nutshell, welcome to the revolution. We will lead the sustainable quality education development goal in the near future!
Right now, we don’t have our own website and app. Unfortunately, we need monetary investments to start things on our own (which we can not afford at this moment). But we are optimistic that this is a small issue as we have the heart and courage to move on until dawn appears. This weekend we started our medium blog, where we are writing articles on free educational resources. Currently we have five members in our team and four of us are storytellers by passion and profession. We have a web developer in our team too. I hope you can see that we will be using the freely available resources like medium, twitter, YouTube and reddit to operate for a short period of time. Actually, the best part of our project is, we are solving a critical problem which can potentially impact millions of people but we don’t require expensive cutting edge technologies to do this. All we need is everyone’s cooperation, advice and best wishes to go on. And thanks to everyone, we have started publishing helpful articles in our medium blog since the webfest. Our Blog: https://medium.com/@datourx/
Everyone is supporting our initiative and encouraging us. But there is this one issue, we can’t ignore. There are also many people who are left out from our solution. Because they can not afford an internet supported appropriate device or live in a situation (like war, humanitarian or refugee crisis) where education is not the first priority. As Nelson Mandela said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”; we believe if continued, our project will open many doors in the future where we would be able to work for these ill fated left out individuals too. Here goes an additional post on this issue from our blog https://medium.com/@datourx/the-light-of-hope-why-does-datourx-dn1g-matter-e971aa24513c
We met awesome individuals in the Webfest, who were super supportive during the event. Again writing this final submission is also an achievement for us, as we cleared our weekend goals and made it here. We will not boast about our writing skills (coming from a country where English is the 2nd language) but we are proud to say that, we uploaded the majority of targeted articles from our list and will upload more in the next 24 hours.
We learned so many things as a team. But the number one lesson is: connectivity is everything! We asked the mentors and organizers to answer a simple question. Do you know of an interesting useful free educational resource that needs more attention? Trust me, we were amazed to hear the replies. We are currently writing an article featuring those resources. For example, I never knew about https://scoollab.web.cern.ch/, which is a very brilliant learning platform created by CERN. I feel that this needs more attention and we will do our best to share this website with everyone after the webfest ends. Just imagine what will be the results if we ask ten thousand people to share their knowledge on the available free educational resources. This will definitely gather everything we require for our project.