For exactly 20 hours, we sadly experienced downtime at Sharebility Uganda. The system at sharebility.mukalele.net was not accessible because the bandwidth originally allocated to the system was exceeded due to high a volume of downloads.
Increasing cost of maintaining Sharebility
Of recent, we have been experiencing a high volume of traffic for downloading files from sharebility. On average, over totaling to over 300 Mbs are downloaded daily, that is why the bandwidth was depleted.
Sharebility is becoming more expensive to host because of the increasing resource needs (including hosting server disk storage space and data transfer bandwidth ). Because of this, I have introduced some income generation features such as google adverts for sustainability of the system.
Savior on the Block
Our system partners, Jubilee Web Host, have given us an unbelievable offer in the spirit of sharebility. The have now offered us five (5) times as much space and bandwidth at no cost! We now have 5GB disk space and 50GB bandwidth to pool, store and share our digital educational resources.
Other New Developments
We have also integrated email notifications automatically sent out to users when they register or upload resources to sharebility. Search engine optimization has also been extensively done and most of the traffic coming to sharebility originates from Google search.
Why Uganda should continue embracing Sharebility
Educational resource sharing is emerging as a viable means to improve the quality of education. By pooling resources and taking advantage of each others expertise, learning providers can build adequate capacity, reduce redundancy in infrastructure and reduce costs.
The design of a distributed heterogeneous educational resource sharing platform can realize the inter-connection, inter-communication and sharing, reduce the cost of educational resources and speed up the process of access to resources for teaching and learning.
Consequently, the time and cost that would have been incurred by an institution is sharable amongst the partners through a give-and-take commitment. This is the reason why several countries have adopted the norm of being part of educational networks and associations.
Sharebility is a system that is designed to enhance the traditional educational approaches since it can overcome many of the challenges involved in reaching underserved teachers and students in Uganda. Lets embrace the spirit of Sharebility by promoting the culture of sharing and receiving open digital educational resources to promote education in Uganda.
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