Month: March 2019

On March 29, 2019, TechChange and FHI360 will be celebrating the Digital Development Awards with another ICT4Drinks! Click here to register for this event and read below to learn more about the awards!

In 2018, USAID launched the second annual Digital Development Awards (the “Digis”). Recognizing USAID projects that harness the power of digital tools and data-driven decision making, the Digis highlight the important role digital technologies play in accelerating the achievement of development goals. After receiving more than 140 applications from programs around the world, USAID is proud to announce the five 2018 Digi winners:

  • Digital Inclusion in the Peruvian Amazon, USAID Peru – expands internet connectivity to rural areas while promoting digital skills training and opportunities to rural communities.
  • Feed the Future Tanzania Land Tenure Assistance, USAID Tanzania – uses GPS and government data to register and provide official certification of ownership to farmers, leading to increased access to inputs and financing for smallholder farmers, increased community trust in the registration system, and a reduction in land disputes.
  • FlaveDor and the Moldova Competitiveness Project, USAID Moldova – protects and strengthens the Moldovan wine industry by using technologies such as drones, remote sensing, and data analysis.
  • Jamii Africa and SHOPS Plus, USAID Tanzania – expands access to affordable health care and insurance to low-income Tanzanians through a cashless, paperless mobile platform.
  • WeMUNIZE and the Maternal and Child Survival Program, USAID Nigeria – increases early childhood immunizations in Northern Nigeria by using robocalls and SMS to influence, remind and persuade mothers, caregivers and their relatives to take children to health facilities. odessa.natashaescort.com

The winning projects operate in countries across the globe and focus on diverse development goals and sectors. They demonstrate the life-changing power digital tools and data offer when strategically designed and implemented using digital development best practices like the Principles for Digital Development.  They follow in the trail-blazing path of the inaugural group of Digi winners last year, whose details can be found here.

As part of their award, the 2018 Digi winners will be recognized at a special ICT4Drinks reception in Washington D.C. on Friday, March 29. You can learn more about the reception here or learn more about the Digis inspiring work here. Be sure to also follow @USAID_Digital on Twitter for additional updates on the 2018 Digi Award winners, in-depth profiles on the Digi winners, and join the conversation at #2018Digis!

As I look back on the nine wonderful months I have spent at TechChange, first as an Instructional Design fellow, then as a Junior Instructional Designer, and finally as a fully-fledged Instructional Designer, I am struck overwhelmingly by one word—or rather, one feeling: community. Everything that we do at TechChange is about community, whether it be building it through our monthly ICT4D-themed happy hours, supporting its presence among and between our very own staff, or helping it digitalize by migrating it onto our human-centered learning platform. There’s just something powerful about logging onto a webinar and seeing 80 other people watching it too, answering real-time polls, and asking questions that get answered live by a guest expert.

Community has been paramount in every project I’ve ever worked on at TechChange. Highlights include:

  • The Open Source Business Models course that I built for UNICEF Innovation, which aims to expand the open source community in developing markets

  • The Emerging Technology module that I built for N Square, which draws from a wide-ranging cohort of quantum computing and nanotechnology experts

  • All the video work I’ve done for courses at TechChange, which are viewed by learner communities hundreds-strong.

     

This week, I collected my materials from all my past projects, cleaned up my desk, and said my goodbyes to my coworkers and clients. In doing so, I was reminded that this all-important concept of community is why we do what we do. The sense of belonging that has been built at this company will remain with me wherever I go. I look forward to staying involved with the wider TechChange community, comprised of thousands of former students and employees, that exists in over 200 countries and territories, but that has its heart right here in Washington, D.C. As the cherry blossoms grow, and as tourists pour in from all over the world to catch a glimpse of April’s peak bloom, I think of how lucky we are to have this yearly reminder that community is both global and hyperlocal, full of strangers and full of family… about new beginnings and about holding onto cherished memories.

 

P.S. I would be remiss if I did not include, as one of my aforementioned cherished memories, this book which the Instructional Design team created and got printed as a parting gift. Thank you, and thanks to the whole team! I’ll miss you all.

What happens when “mobile learning” is no longer inferior to just “learning”?

As ICT4D professionals return home from MWC Barcelona (along with over 107,000 other attendees) abuzz with stories of 5G (such as the very, very cool Sprint 5G Maps with Mapbox), that enthusiasm is not yet shared by industry executives.

A new study by Accenture of 2,000 technology and business executives in 10 countries show that few believe predictions on dramatically improved speeds of 5G networks, and half don’t expect the technology to do much that it can’t already do. But with early tests suggesting that 5G networks will be as much as 100 times faster than existing mobile technology, ICT4D leaders should be doing more to prepare their industry and organization for the full potential.

Nowhere is this more badly needed than in elearning. Most of our current ICT4D solutions for sharing knowledge and building capacity rely on expensive annual-convening events (*cough* MWC Barcelona) or overly simplistic push-content built on outdated, passive elearning approaches (watch a video, take a quiz, repeat). Where there is competition in elearning, it’s around which solution contains the most pre-loaded, low-quality videos to be distributed on tablets or smartphones in low-bandwidth environments. The digital divide in convening and capacity building is clear — fancy conferences for headquarters, and low-quality videos for field staff.

 

 

And look, I get it. But if we’re going to think through a mobile-first approach to elearning, then what happens when mobile distribution is no longer the inferior, one-way video learning we keep being sold on? paperhelp org coupon What happens when 5G networks leapfrog broadband and suddenly these devices are valuable not just for consuming elearning, but for co-creating learning experiences?

Most likely, you’ll have a revolution in elearning, as all models that rely entirely on consuming content (looking at you, LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, MasterClass, edX….Ok, almost everyone really) are annihilated by the sudden emergence of a universe of facilitators and educators in countries where we currently “push” elearning experiences.

Think AirBnB for hotels, or Uber for taxis, or the countless other examples of expanding a consumption approach to a sharing economy.

And it can’t happen soon enough.

Lights, camera, action! — if only it were that easy.  

Video production is an incredibly important facet of many online courses. Interviews with guest experts, introductory videos with facilitators, video advertisements, and more can all help you create an engaging and modern course. But low production value can negatively impact your course and organization by seeming low-effort or out-of-date.

Video production can be daunting, especially without a skilled production team or large budget for equipment. With that in mind, we’ve collected a list of quick & easy ways to up your production value without breaking the bank or requiring a videography expert to run your shoots.

Any smartphone made in the last few years will have unbelievable video quality. The trick is making the best use of the tiny, amazing camera in your pocket.

1. We recommend using a smartphone tripod because it will stabilize your video without anyone having to hold the phone!

2. Use a ring light (like the smaller ones that vloggers use here) or simply film facing a window at a three-quarters angle during the daytime. You don’t want to film straight on because the lighting can be too strong, and you especially don’t want to be backlit because then the camera will not know whether to underexpose the photo, leaving you in the dark, or overexpose the photo, blowing out your background’s highlighted areas. Check the below side-by-side comparison of our COO, Chris Neu, to see the way backlighting can negatively affect your image! (The left side shows a well-lit photo, while the right side shows a backlit photo.)

3. Find a quiet room with not too much echo. Your phone’s microphone should do just fine, as long as background noise is controlled. Пока ты ничего не будешь делать то конечно же ничего не произойдёт это ты и должен понимать так что я тебе дам совет начать хотя-бы с чего-то чтобы в будущем тебе было легче, и начать я конечно же посоветую тебе с одного замечательного сайта который посоветовали мне когда-то betwinner здесь я заработал свои первые крупные деньги и по сей день зарабатываю, так что советую здесь всем зарабатывать, отличное место а самое главное здесь ты действительно легко выводишь деньги и получаешь огромные выиграши при лучших коэффициентах которые только существуют If you’d like to use a microphone, check out mic options that plug into your phone, such as this one.

4. Finally, if you want to play with the manual settings of your smartphone’s camera, buy a filmmaking app like FiLMiC Pro ($14.99 on the iOS App Store and Google Play Store). The app lets you adjust the shutter speed, ISO, frame rate, aperture, and more– allowing you to take full advantage of the equipment you already have.

Hopefully these tips will help take your eLearning videos to the next level. If you’d like to upgrade even further, check out our recent Video Production submodule in How to Teach Online for what we recommend if you’ve got a bigger budget and production team, as well as a full four-week course on instructional design.

And that’s a wrap!

Quick question! Which of the following pictures was a real participant in the TC301: Artificial Intelligence for International Development course….and which ones were generated by face-generating AI on thispersondoesnotexist.com?

Did you guess correctly? Well if you guessed the top right, that’s Priyanka Pathak the Facilitator for the upcoming course on April 1. If you didn’t, then you’ve been fooled by AI, with natural-looking results that managed to stay safely out of the uncanny valley. Not an easy thing to do for faces, which humans are pretty good at recognizing slight differences (there’s a reason they are often on money, after all).

How does it work? According to the BBC, the website generates a new lifelike image each time the page is refreshed, using technology developed by Nvidia, which developed a pair of adversarial AI programs to create and then critique the images, in 2017, which has now been made open source.

According to Fast Company:

“Nvidia’s StyleGAN was designed around something called “style transfer.” It doesn’t copy and paste elements of different photos to create a new one. That’s too imperfect and would never look good, according to the scientists who worked on the project. Instead, StyleGAN analyzes three basic things in every photo–which they call styles– and then merges them into something completely new.

The styles are called “coarse,” “middle,” and “fine.” Coarse deals with parameters like the cat’s face, its pose, and the type of hair. The middle is the facial features themselves, like the eyes, mouth, and nose shape. And finally, the fine styles are things like the color of the hair. The scientists describe in their paper how StyleGAN uses this combination of technologies to effectively eliminate noise that is irrelevant for the new synthetic face–for instance, distinguishing a bow on a cat’s head and discarding it as superfluous.”

Still confused? Check out this short video. Play the best website friv games.

 

But there’s more to AI and Machine Learning (ML) than generating faces. For example, USAID is exploring making AI work for international development with the hopes that navigating emerging ML/AI landscape in developing countries will contribute to fair, equitable, and empowering future.

If you’d like to learn more about how AI like this can be used for more than comparing faces, we hope that you’ll join our community (of real learners) in our next course on TC301: AI for International Development, which starts on April 1, 2019.