Author: Christopher Neu

Already an established graphic designer with the TechChange team, Yohan Perera recently assumed the responsibilities of Creative Director, where he will oversee all animations, illustrations, videography, photography, and any other creative projects.

To learn a bit more about Yohan and what he’s hoping to accomplish in this new role, we sat down and asked a few questions:

Q: What has surprised you most since first joining TechChange in 2014? What are some of the challenges and opportunities that you remember most?

TechChange was a company that intrigued me solely because of its involvement in the development sector and commitment to bring social change through tech. The “start-up” culture was something very foreign to me but how the team at TechChange preserved it was commendable. Everyone respected each other and themselves leading the way to produce creative solutions for global issues through online courses, animations and beautiful graphic assets. Being placed in such an environment presented the opportunity to grow and explore ways to use creativity for development and positive social change. The biggest challenge to this day is figuring out visual representation to some of society’s most complex issues and creative solutions that have never been shown in a visual medium before.

Q: What’s the creative team like to work with on a day-to-day basis? How do you all keep the creativity flowing?

The creative team at TechChange is a family. We keep each other humble and make sure to get work done while we enjoy delicious meals that U St. has to offer. My personal opinion is that creativity comes through continuous exploration, we like to say out loud even the worst of ideas before settling on a direction. As a team we rely on each other to inspire and critique ideas, this helps weed out the bad ideas from the good ones.

Q: You’ve spoken about your passion for social change and your work with Global Unites. How has that influenced your work with TechChange?

My work with Global Unites opened my mind and heart to see the learned hatred and prejudice us as humans have towards each other. This is something common to many societies around the world. The radicalization of young people to commit despicable acts in the name of country, religion, caste, creed and tribe was something that I wanted to combat and be a part of the change. These experiences helped me understand the importance of the projects our clients are involved in. The time to take action to solve the issues in society is now, it makes me happy to see the work that I do being used to influence young people, community leaders and civil society at large, be it in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, North America or in remote parts of the world.

Q: You graduated as valedictorian of your class from Full Sail University. What would you go back and tell yourself during your studies?

I would tell myself not to worry about the future, the future will worry for itself. Take action now, be a part of the change now. Keep using your skills to change the lives of people for the better and help set the course of this world in a direction that’ll bring justice to the oppressed and marginalized, love to the unloved, and food for the hungry.

Q: Where do you see educational animations in the ongoing creative direction with TechChange? Could you talk a bit about the team?

I believe we’ve come up with an animation style and storyline that is unique to TechChange. Moving forward we are hoping to raise the bar on the storytelling aspect of the educational animations. Nine times out of ten we are talking about important topics that affect millions of people around the world, telling these stories and the solutions our clients provide in a manner that leads people to action will be the direction we would like to pursue.

Q: What are some of your initial ideas for continuing to advance TechChange’s creative leadership in the development space? Are there any areas you’re particularly excited about?

The development space is saturated with design that has been given little thought and effort. Good messaging should be followed with intentional design. I am excited to see how virtual reality, augmented reality, story-driven videos and animations will influence the development sector in the months to come. I’m confident that TechChange will continue to make motivated efforts to push the bar higher in both quality and storytelling moving forward.

Why do the newest online courses still feel like the same video lectures?

Six years ago, Moody’s declared the MOOC revolution in higher education officially started in Autumn 2011 after Sebastian Thrun released his Stanford class on Artificial Intelligence to over 180,000 students. Based on that assessment of MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses), Coursera, Udacity, and dozens of other businesses launched to provide free access to university content, soon attracting over 8 million students to register for their courses.

And three years ago, TechCrunch (among others), declared MOOC revolution over after noticing that only half of registered users had watched even one lecture, and only 4 percent stayed long enough to complete a course. Worse, researched showed that rather than disrupting an customer base of students seeking an alternative to college, the majority of MOOC students already had university degrees, while those without access to higher education in developing countries were underrepresented among the early adopters.

While some online education providers have adjusted their model, such as nanodegrees with Udacity, or celebrity lecturers with MasterClass, the fundamental approach hasn’t changed since the early days of Lynda.com and Khan Academy: Students watch a video and take a quiz.

This, we are told, is comparable to a university experience. And, for those who have sat through 200+ student lecture halls, it very well may recreate that experience on topics that they are curious about. But not only is this massive, passive consumption of information boring, but lectures are also far less effective than other, more active forms of learning. And since active learning can as much as a 6% improvement in students grades by including such activities as call and response, or student discussions, the question has to be asked:

Why are we spending so much time and effort moving an ineffective model of learning online?

The most obvious explanation is that these platforms are being built for scale by producing content and then distributing to the widest possible audience, and then learning from that experience what to produce next. This is a Netflix-style approach to education, which may indeed be sufficient for an online audience already educated and looking to satisfy curiosity or acquire new skills. But there is no evidence that we can leverage more entertaining content to produce a superior online learning experience to anything that can be achieved in person.

That’s because educators know to value something that programmers may not: Online education is not best understood as a method by which content is pushed to the largest possible audience through a scalable platform (we already have YouTube), but rather as a constant cycle of facilitated, active learning, which combines platform and content to best suit student needs through regular feedback. 

When I taught a course on Technology for Crisis Response at GWU last semester, it was not the short lecture sessions that the students remembered on course evaluations, but rather the interactive group projects on Text-It where groups had to quickly assemble SMS workflows in a simulated response. And universities already know this is a more effective method of instruction, which is why when they seek to reach mid-career professionals in graduate programs, they quickly discard any lecture-based approach to learning.

But….it’s not easy to take a MOOC-model and simply add forums, or Q&A sessions. Coursera learned that the hard way during the MOOC Mess of 2013, when their attempt to integrate Google Spreadsheets (which has a limit of 50 simultaneous editors) for a class of 41,000 students resulted in an unfixable disaster that led to the course being temporarily suspended. Oh, the Coursera course that was suspended? Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application.

There’s nothing wrong with trying a new approach (and failing) when it comes to better reaching students online. And online platforms should be commended for regular experimentation. But attempting to apply a facilitated approach to a Netflix-style platform is like putting racing stripes on a four-door sedan: It will look terrible and you won’t fool anyone.

And until there is acceptance that the method of online facilitation is at least as important as the scalability of the content, there will never be substantial improvements in the learning experience, only more entertaining videos nobody has time to watch.

 

Image: By Discott (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Can design thinking improve lives on topics that matter?

Last year, TechChange collaborated with Catapult Design to create a short animation to provide three tips for how to make the most out of socially-driven design. Catapult Design is a non-profit based in Denver, where an accomplished team of designers, engineers, and business strategists offer a comprehensive approach to product and service development for low income and underserved customers.

The video is embedded below, but these tips include: 1) Engage designers early where they add the most value; 2) Design is a process to define opportunities and constraints; 3) Every project can benefit from design thinking.

Heather Fleming, the CEO of Catapult Design will be showing the video at Skoll World Forum, and we wanted to learn a bit more about her work:

Q: Is socially driven design as relevant now as when we first created the video? Would you update it?

Absolutely. Just in the past few months we’ve witnessed the repercussions from communities who feel excluded from our nation’s progress as well as unheard by their local governance. This is what socially-minded design and designers do best — promote inclusive and participatory processes with constituents in order to arrive at solutions that take into account their needs and aspirations as well as the bigger picture. FastCo posted a fascinating article about the contributions of designers working with the federal government in the 1970s, helping a variety of agencies with visual consistency and communication that would ultimately save federal dollars. The outcomes of this work are still visible and relevant today, and yet these are just the programs that the new administration seeks to cut. For these reasons, I’d say that socially driven design is relevant now even more so than when we collaborated on this video 12 months ago.

Q: Let’s say somebody watches the video and wants to start incorporating socially driven design. What would you tell them?

There’s a variety of on-line resources such as webinars, classes and toolkits. Those are all good and fine, but like all new things, it takes practice and discipline to master a new skill and learn new behaviors. You wouldn’t expect to master Chopin at your first piano lesson, and the same goes for applying design to projects. The common way of learning the piano, learning a new sport, and so on, is to work with a teacher or coach. I’d say the same goes for building the discipline, mindset and creative support to execute a solid design-driven project.

Also, like the video says — design principles should be incorporated at the very beginning. Instead of speculating on how to fix problems for your customer or constituents, work with them to identify and deconstruct the problems. Go into a project with confidence that you’re addressing the right issue that will create the change you want to see.

Q: Are there any initiatives or projects that you’re working on that are relevant to the information in this video?

About the time that we were working on this video with Tech Change, we were also kicking off an initiative on the Navajo Nation affecting economic development. There is an alarmingly low number of locally-owned business on the Navajo Nation, and the government and its constituents lose out on approximately $200M in potential sales tax to border towns each year. We began working with Navajo entrepreneurs and local small business agencies to re-think how to communicate the process and the steps to starting a business on the Navajo Nation. By mapping out these issues, exploring root cause, and prototyping ways to address the problems, we were able to launch Build Navajo, a web-based map for Navajo entrepreneurs who want to start a business on the reservation. Build Navajo also collects information from users as to where they get stuck in the process, which we intend to quantify and use as an advocacy tool for reform on business registration and site leasing processes.

Those who know Catapult Design primarily associate us with product development and the creation of physical things. But the process we use applies to most “products”, whether that be a physical thing, a service, or an experience. As we promote in the video, design and designers are champions of a broad mindset, or way of thinking, that can be applied to a variety of sticky challenges.

Want to learn more about Catapult Design? Make sure to visit their website or follow @Catapult_Design on Twitter!

Please join us in welcoming Meronne, our new communications fellow here at TechChange!

Meronne is currently a student at the College of William & Mary, entering her senior year, and studying Computer Science, with a minor in Africana Studies. At W&M, she’s involved in Student Assembly, Undergraduate Admissions, and different diversity initiatives. She is super passionate about poverty alleviation and technology, and works extensively with the Wegene Ethiopian Foundation, here in D.C.

In her spare time, she Ioves reading, photography, and working on multiple film projects.

Welcome to the TechChange team, Meronne!

The most recent issue of “Building Peace,” a publication of the Alliance for Peacebuilding, on #PeaceTech doesn’t dwell on “what” is being built in technology for peace, but rather examining “how” the peacetech space is operating. And that’s a good thing. The authors in this issue approach the subject as a good engineer should: Disassemble, understand its components, make adjustments, and reassemble. The messy poking about that comes with such new territory is an indication of progress, not confusion.

“Peace technology” is perhaps best described in this issue “a fundamentally mediating technology–it acts as an intervening agent, augmenting our ability to engage positively with others” (p.14). The authors from the Stanford Peace Innovation Lab propose four subcomponents working in unison: Sensors, communications, computation, and actuators. Once unique and expensive, the average smartphone contains several of each of these subcomponents, thus speeding the process between a user observing harmful human engagement and coordinating an appropriate response.

But the unequal distribution of peacetech creates new challenges. Ann Mei Chang, the executive director of the Global Development Lab at USAID writes that: “Today, only 40 percent of the world’s population is online….those who do not have Internet access are disproportionately poor, rural, older, and female.” (27). The importance of these “missing voices” is highlighted by authors such as such as Olanike Olugboji in Nigeria with WISE, who has engaged over 3,000 women in activities including digital empowerment; as well as by Lawrence Oduma in addressing youth employment in rural Zimbabwe with the AFSC.

The infrastructure underpinning this rapid expansion is creating broader opportunities as well. In Afghanistan, Jes Kaliebe Petersen of Paywast describes how the rapid growth of phone subscribers and Internet users has created a “burgeoning tech ecosystem of software developers, startups, community organizations, and government support.” (25) These expanding networks are challenging existing hierarchies, according to Margot Wallström, where “the power of actors to effect change increasingly depends on the number of connections they have rather than the name of their institution.” (35)

But the information from these networks may be having an even greater effect outside of conflict zones. Wallström points out how “technology is now making information flow from places that previously were blank spots on the mental map of policymakers. We can no longer say ‘we did not know.’” (37) Caroline Donnelan points out that the full extent of casualties attributable to warfare by “remote control” through reliance on drones and private military and security companies (PMSCs) “ is often not factored into the equation, leading to the creation of “an effective recruitment tool for extremists, fueling rather than minimalizing radicalization.” (32) In contrast, Jessie Mooberry describes her experience with the Syria Airlift Project to deliver medicine, water, food, and water purification technology to “diminish the power of those terrorizing innocent populations.” (30)

The enthusiasm for technology solutions becomes more problematic at this point. Despite the good intentions of the authors, the reader cannot help but wonder: Do these actors have any idea what they are doing in a war zone?

Fortunately, the publication provides context as well as case studies. In the earlier definition of peacetech by the Stanford team, the authors call attention to the possibility of harm through omission, commission, or unintended consequence. (15) Ivan Sigal describes just such a case of unintended consequence in the arrest and prosecution of Zone 9, a group of Ethiopian bloggers and journalists dedicated to a more inclusive and democratic country. Sigal describes how the evidence against them (and reason for being charged with criminal intent), “was that they had received training in the use of digital security and encryption tools from the Tactical Technology Collective.” (41)

More caution is necessary when introducing technical solutions, which often come with their own agenda. Charles Martin-Shields [Disclosure: A colleague from USIP and TechChange] calls attention to the fact that “ICT’s are commercial products, and the ways people use them are as much a function of regulatory rules as of personal preferences.” (34) Locally driven approaches, such as those emerging from the burgeoning tech scene in Kenya, may have better results. Jen Welch continues this theme by describing successful digital games for peace, including one developed in Kenya as a response to election violence. (44)

The importance of context and regulatory environments applies to the Internet itself. Paul Mitchell and M-H. Carolyn Nguyen who claim that “while messy and chaotic–like democracy itself–the Internet’s multi-stakeholder governance model has resulted in astonishing achievements globally.” (40) Embracing this multi-stakeholder approach is central to Sheldon Himelfarb’s initiative behind the PeaceTech Lab, where “technologists and peacebuilders can work shoulder to shoulder every day” (13) [Disclosure: Himelfarb is a former colleague from USIP]. In doing so, it nicely ties together the need to bridge online possibilities with real-world human connections.

The articles in this issue that emphasized these real-world human connections were welcome additions. Soha Frem of the Common Space Initiative (CSI) describes the importance of creating a space for informal, yet structured, dialogue between Lebanon’s primary stakeholders.” (18) By thinking about office space, table design, and photographs in just one room, the hope is to begin to undo the segregation of Lebanon’s civil war, which is a catalyst for greater conflict. Miguel Lago and Courtney Crumpler of Meu Rio address global problems of climate change, energy usage, and poverty, by first focusing on the urban problems in Rio de Janeiro. It’s this drive towards coordinating offline action through such “Summer of Sanitation” initiatives, that helps citizens who lack human security find that  “working together for change can be uplifting and empowering.” (22)

In these respects, it becomes clear that peacetech is not about technology or peace at all, but rather about empowerment of local actors to create a better world for themselves peacefully. Perhaps my favorite example from my work with TechChange came from an interview with Prashan De Visser, the President and Founder of Global Unites. [Disclosure: I’m now on the Executive Board for the organization]. During a webinar for our course with the IREX exchange students with Global UGRAD-Pakistan, Prashan recounted his efforts with social media, fundraising from international donors, messaging for earned media, and connecting youth leaders in Sri Lanka with a global community.

I asked him how these tech tools helped him with helping post-war counter-radicalization efforts. His response was simple:

“The technology just helps us create a space to make real progress for reconciliation. it’s just a tool , an important one, but youth leaders on the ground intercepting youth from extremist voices is where the real effort is at. The difference at the end of the day is our commitment to go beyond social media and be in the lives of these youth, who are desperately in need of an alternate voice to radicalziation. Our online presence then becomes an extended expression of our work and commitment to broader community.”

 

We are proud to announce that TechChange now runs on 100% pollution-free electricity as a Arcadia Power Clean Energy Partner. With our partnership with Arcadia Power Clean Energy, TechChange now meets the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Green Power Partnership requirements, joining businesses like Whole Foods and Google who also run on clean energy.

As a registered Certified B Corps social enterprise, our focus as a company goes beyond just creating a market-driven, financially sustainable business, but also trying to make a positive impact on the world. Since 2012, being a ‘triple bottom line’ business that measures its success in terms of “people, planet, and profit” has been an important part of what guides our business that has reached over 2500 alumni in over 100 countries to date. Every day, we’re inspired by how our community is using technology and skills training to address some of the world’s biggest challenges such as mitigating climate change, containing emerging infectious diseases like Ebola, promoting peace in conflict zones around the world, rebuilding communities struck by natural disasters, and more.

Today, we’re excited to share how we’re doing our small part to impact the environment with our partnership with Arcadia Power. While most of us at TechChange walk or bike to work, we saw an opportunity to further reduce our carbon footprint by supporting local wind and solar projects through a national clean energy provider. In doing so, we are helping to reduce America’s dependence on fossil fuels and support renewable power and local green jobs.

As a fellow B Corps business, Arcadia Power couldn’t have been a better partner to help us make this transition. And we are happy to learn that the feeling is mutual.

“We’re excited to be partnering with a company that truly exemplifies the responsible practices we all want from businesses in our communities,” said Arcadia Power co-founder, Ryan Nesbitt. “As a fellow Certified B Corps, TechChange adheres to the highest social and environmental standards, and choosing clean energy is a great step in reducing their impact and doing their part to combat climate change.”

Have any ideas about how we could further reduce our carbon footprint? What are some of the ways your business is going green? Tweet us @TechChange or let us know in the comments.

About Arcadia Power
Arcadia Power is the first nationwide Clean Energy option. By partnering with wind and solar projects, Arcadia Power provides homes and businesses with 100% pollution-free energy via local utilities. Members support their values through their monthly energy bills, decreasing demand for fossil fuels and helping to grow American green jobs and power. Arcadia Power partners with sustainability-minded companies and organizations to combat climate change and secure a better future for our planet.

Applying technology solutions to the challenges of international development requires organizational change more than new gadgets. That’s why we were thrilled to launch our new Organizational Guide to ICT4D at the NetHope Fall 2014 Summit in Silicon Valley.

The Organizational Guide to ICT4D has been developed in partnership with NetHope, CRS, Microsoft, and HC3, with content shaped by the Principles for Digital Development, and design considerations by the PATH Toolkit for Public Health Managers. Our hope for the guide, which is under consideration for publication under a Creative Commons License, is that the nature and delivery of the publication will be as influential as the content itself.

But what decisions were made to create the new guide?

Lesson 1: Embrace Digital-First Media

Even though mobile-first design has been embraced for online presence, print-first design still reigns supreme for publications in international development. This is partially because the government has been driving industry adoption, but also because PDFs 1) deliver an exact representation of the original document, 2) provide a consistent user experience across platforms and printers, 3) are freely accessible, and 4) can be distributed to low-bandwidth environments.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to design a PDF primarily for offline use. Once you free your publication from the constraints of paper, you can more freely adopt richer colors free from printing requirements, additional external information via hyperlinks, regular updating for rapid iteration, and of course — clickable navigation to easily browse the document.

 Org Guide Screenshot

Lesson 2: Design for Social Distribution

But just because your PDF exists in a digital format, doesn’t mean it will actually be read. According to a May 2014 internal study by the World Bank (available in PDF), nearly one third of reports have never been downloaded. And of those downloaded, how many would you expect to be read in full by their target audience?

The nature of text-heavy, long reports discourages sharing what could be hailed as mission-critical information. But visual information alternatives can be easier to understand and share, especially when used with interactive aids to jump around the content. If you were travelling to a new city and brought a guide book, would you want dense text or an easily navigable companion?

 Org Guide Screenshot 2

Lesson 3: Help Others Repurpose Your Content

We were fortunate in designing this guide to do so in partnership with organizations committed to NetHope’s mission to act as a catalyst for collaboration for applying common technologies. As such, we wanted the document to be a space to share experiences and thoughts, not a one-way declaration of expertise. By including photos and quotes, we hoped to not just include voices from the field, but to provide a personal relevance and connection on technical content.

But what would we do if we weren’t updating fast enough, or covering in enough depth important topics to our community? How could they take what we had done and make it relevant to their daily tasks? Fortunately, with a Creative Commons licensing approach, we want to signal that the purpose of this document is to be shared, critiqued, dissected, repurposed, and reassembled.

Interested in learning more? We hope that you’ll download the guide and join the conversation.

 

Last month in DC a commercially-available quadcopter crashed into the White House and brought new public interest into the regulation of drones. Only a week before the incident, the Department of Homeland Security held a conference open to civilians but explicitly closed to the press to demonstrate, among other capabilities, a similar quadcopter strapped to 3 pounds of inert explosive.

DJI, the China-based manufacturer of the drone in use, released a mandatory firmware update to geofence a 15.5 mile radius around downtown Washington, DC, only to ask users to roll back their update due to “unanticipated flight behavior.” Even if the update worked, it would only have been applicable to Phantom 2 models, and not the Phantom 1 that was used in the White House incident. While these efforts are a start, security experts are skeptical that such techniques would deter a terrorist.

But last week while national security was struggling with what to do with drones in DC, the first-ever Drones for Good Challenge in Dubai sought to “find the best uses of drones to public services and improving people’s lives.” After reviewing over 800 submissions from 57 different countries, the $1 million prize was awarded to Swiss company Flyability, for creating a “collision-tolerant drone” designed to enter hostile environments such as a burning building filled with smoke without endangering aid workers.

But how do we incentivize more drones for good and fewer drones for terrorism?

The Federal Aviation Administration is still struggling to finalize drone regulations after being ordered to do so in 2012 by Congress. But the concern among hobbyists is that rushing the regulatory process could create burdensome rules that hamper innovation. One solution is “regulatory sandboxing”, where some initial constraints are relaxed while rules are still being made, keeping a focus on public safety. The hope is that reducing the hidden costs of burdensome regulations will spur innovation here in the US. For example, Amazon is testing their drone delivery services in Australia due to regulatory opposition in the U.S.

But reducing regulations isn’t enough. Organizations such as the UAViators: Humanitarian UAV Network seek to support a global network of UAV hobbyists to share information and promote community engagement. Expanding that network further will be an effort in education as much as drone delivery. Digital Democracy, for example, helped a community in Guyana build a drone to map deforestation. But those efforts were coupled with the drones becoming something more. According to Digital Democracy’s Gregor MacLennan:

We didn’t want to just fly into Guyana and fly a drone over the local villages. Our interest was whether this technology could be something that can be used and controlled by the communities themselves, and become a tool of empowerment for helping them have more of a say in their own future. We wanted the Wapichana to be able to repair it themselves, fly it themselves, and process the images to use for their own means.

In blurring the boundaries between new technology, STEM education, and sustainable development, the language and endeavors of drones for development are aligning with another frontier in development: 3D printing. And no surprise, it’s already possible to dream of printing your own drone and drone parts. Voxel8, a company founded and run by several Harvard and MIT professors, just released a developer kit for 3D electronic-device printer shipping in late 2015.

As the frontiers of development become the present of implementation, regulation and education will continue to determine the boundaries of what is possible.

Based on the explosive growth of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) this year, it might appear that the future of online education consists of passively clicking through videos and quizzes. This model, while highly scalable, is prone to collapse with personalized interaction and are generally taken by employed males in the US (rarely finishing a class). Even the founders of Khan Academy and Coursera admit that MOOCs can’t replace classrooms and have difficulty teaching non-cognitive skills (teamwork, ethics, etc.)

Why not? What does it take to create a classroom experience? A typical example might involve a teacher designing a detailed syllabus, arranging class layout and chairs for discussion, distributing engaging reading material before class, providing personalized feedback in real-time to students, coordinating group projects, and grading homework. When that classroom becomes “massive” and is extended to 10,000+ students, then the teacher has to focus on the most scalable portion of the course: Content.

The MOOC as a teaching tool was never meant to replace the classroom; it was meant to replace the lecture with better course materials. And that’s part of the genius for organizations like Coursera and Khan Academy for flipping real-world classrooms. By using prerecorded video content of the one-size-fits-all lecture, tech-savvy teachers can employ technology to humanize the classroom, focusing class time on personal engagement instead of information transfer. Some professors are going even further, using video conferencing tools like Skype to reach out to bring prominent figures such as the Dalai Lama into the university classroom.

But if MOOCs represent just another form of digital course content that tech-savvy educators can use to engage students, then the real question is: What happens when the classroom itself is moved online?

The simple answer is that teachers will lose a great deal of in-person information richness they need to do their jobs, at least in the short term. While different platforms will optimize for alternative methods of content delivery and interactive facilitation (think real-time video lectures versus forum discussions), it’s unlikely that any will be as powerful as an in-person discussion guided by an experienced and knowledgeable educator. Can you imagine any online interaction reflecting the interactive nature of a small classroom?


Credit: Dead Poet’s Society (1989). 

But what comes next could also be an improvement. In the same way that the Google Classroom project opened to the public this week to help teachers manage student learning in and out of the classroom, so too can educators apply new tools to the needs of online students. As standards improve with the roll out of the Experience API, student data can even be used to create better content — much like how Netflix is able to create shows around viewer preferences and BuzzFeed invests in engineering to better deliver viral content.

This process puts a great deal of strain on educators to incorporate technology into their lesson plans. And there is little reason why some of the leading subject-matter minds and hands-on facilitators should be forced to learn to program and animate. But as the field starts to reconsider online education as a service, new opportunities open up for educators to choose their content, shape their classroom, and pick their students from anywhere in the world.

But until we stop trying to substitute “lecture” for “teacher,” we can’t have a real conversation about building the tech solutions educators need to do their jobs.

Online learning for international development is heating up. As educational technology companies raised half a billion dollars in Q1 of 2014, USAID is already exploring how to incorporate new technology with proven development methodology. New attempts to bridge these worlds have given rise to the Global Development Lab, a new entity within USAID seeks to apply science, technology, innovation, and partnerships to extend development impact.

Unfortunately, the government has a shaky record when it comes to management of technology procurement, most recently evidenced during the HealthCare.gov rollout. However, there are hopes that the high visibility of such failures are creating an appetite for real improvement in tech management. One such example is RFP-EZ initiative, which seeks to provide easier access to small technology companies to the Federal Government’s nearly $77 billion information technology supply chain so that  “government agencies get to work with innovative small firms with solutions that can help make government agencies more efficient and streamlined.”

Video 1: Short animation intro to the World Wide Web 25th anniversary.

But is easier tech procurement the answer when there isn’t a clear path forward? Even universities — the far smaller institutions on the front lines of the ongoing MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) disruption — aren’t ready to embrace online learning, often lacking appropriate teaching methodology, ability to produce multimedia content, or even a clear business model. Not that the situation is any better among edtech firms, where even the leading MOOC provider, Coursera, is barely two years old and still experiencing growing pains in refining a model that combines scalable content with interactive courses.

Enamored with potentially scalable returns of technology, USAID is promoting a cutting-edge approach for development practitioners accustomed to delivering in-person workshops in low-bandwidth environments. But this hope that development organizations can become more tech-savvy if given the opportunity and incentives for process change is running into real barriers of cost for popular, if unproven methodologies.

Video 2: Short animated illustration laying out challenges in ICT4D

But how can technology lower the barrier to entry for development organizations entering the edtech space, as well as minimize the costs of changing strategy to fit new tech options at a later date? The bespoke learning management systems currently being acquired by development organizations may prove costly — not just in terms of technical expertise to maintain, but in terms of limiting options for later pivots.

Worse, the long funding cycles may exacerbate the challenges of fitting the hype-bust failure cycle of Silicon Valley with the conservative, incremental change of Washington, DC. As Charles Kenny cautions in Foreign Policy:

“When working with new technologies and approaches, we should expect lots of failures. Tech entrepreneurs are used to a culture of failure…But the advantage of the system in which they operate is the market test. As a rule, the bad ideas go bankrupt…

But by moving the model to development, we’ve taken tech entrepreneurs’ high tolerance for failure and penchant for hyping harebrained schemes to an arena where the market test is considerably diluted. Ideas get funding from Kickstarter and philanthropies on the basis of their appeal to donors and philanthropists in the West rather than consumers in Africa.”

One solution could be to replace long-tail technology procurement with simpler service plans. As the world of Everything-As-A-Service eats the private sector, perhaps we can finally start to decouple the ability to write software from the urgency to solve pressing problems for people all over the world.

*Featured image: Rajiv Shah at Global Development Launch. Source: USAID
** Made a few edits on 8/13/14 @ 2:20pm to correct a few typos and rephrase some of the more poorly written sentences.