Background to the project

In early 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, a team of teachers and technologists got together to build an online learning platform so that children could keep learning from home during lockdown. That platform became Oak National Academy and supported millions of the UK's children to learn from home during this challenging period.

One of the challenges we faced, now that children were viewing lessons on their home internet connections, was that there was unequal access to the lessons we were providing. Some children were on low speed internet connections, some were not online at all, and others were only able to access the internet on a mobile 3G or 4G connection.

The service we designed was based around relatively low-bandwidth video content, but even so, the costs would have been prohibitive for a mobile phone user on a pay-as-you-go contract to use the service for long periods. A typical lesson was around 250mb of video download.

We worked with our video delivery provider (Mux) and the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to zero-rate all of the data transfer for visitors to the site. This meant that children accessing the website on a mobile phone were not charged for the service.

We've constructed this guide to gather what we learnt so that other non-profit services could prepare their websites for a similar process.

Contributors

This documentation was produced by Stef Lewandowski with input and oversight from John Roberts.

Source code

The source code to this documentation website is available on Github.