Author: Christopher Neu

What a year 2013 has been! Last year we did our first State of TechChange 2012 and figured it was time to look back on a year of learning.

More than ever, we are grateful to the growing global TechChange community that has more than doubled since last year to over 3000 participants in more than 100 countries. Thanks to your support, we’re continuing to provide innovative online learning solutions for international development.

Here’s a few highlights we’d like to share:

Press and Public Appearances

poptech nick

Online Courses and Platform Upgrades

techgirls

Offline Education and Fun Stuff

  • Taught classes at George Washington University, Georgetown University, and more.
  • Traveled abroad to convene workshops for the Amani Institute in Kenya, THNK in Amsterdam, and TOL in Prague. 
  • Hosted the TechGirls for #JobShadow Day. Thanks to the State Department for introducing us to Nagham and Sondos!
  • Brought our logo to life. Finally, right? Looks and sounds cool too. Learn about how you can optimize your logo for video.
  • Donated a bunch of iPhones to help empower global health practitioners in developing countries via Hope Phones (check em out).

Hope to see you in 2014!

On Wednesday, Nov. 20, we were proud to help facilitate the online engagement for a Wilson Center event on New Visions for Citizen Science. It was a perfect follow-up to the last time we visited for the Connecting Grassroots to Government for Disaster Management as well as the launch of an exciting new report we’re already circulating around the office.

For an organization such as ours, an event exploring technology to support public participation in scientific research was not only interesting, but directly relevant to our learning community. Which is why we were excited to not only be able to attend in person and share the livestream, but also to have the opportunity to ask questions from our classes during the event itself!

Our two courses currently in session (Mobile Phones for Public Health and Mapping for International Development) were able to tune in and ask multiple questions of the panel (check in the Q&A for what we asked) and get responses. Because the event organizers reached out to us in advance and emphasized including the online community as well as those in the room (which is our preference for live events), we were able to add the event to our curriculum and use it as an interactive learning experience for our students.

For that, we’d like to express our gratitude to the Wilson Center for not only convening an excellent conversation about citizens participating in scientific inquiry, but for using technology to expand that conversation to citizens around the world who can learn from these case studies.

Curious about what you missed? Check out our photo gallery and the video archive of the event below (or check it out on the Wilson Center website)

 

 

 

On Friday, Nov. 1, TechChange was honored to participate in a panel at the latest Tech@State  conference on education technology, as well as sponsor the informal reception afterwards to celebrate ten years of e-diplomacy. We wanted to share a few thoughts below of the day to continue the conversation online!

 

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Nick Martin (far right) on the Tech@State panel on “Using MOOCs in a Global Context”

1) There is a gap between a classroom and MOOC

Throughout the panel on “Using MOOCs in a Global Context”, the distinction between online education and MOOCs came up repeatedly. MOOCs are a form of online education, but not the only form. And that’s problematic because educators are feeling like they are stuck with a binary choice. However, there are alternatives that we’ve been exploring that allow highly interactive small-group forums. Taylor Corbett (@data4d) of OpenEMIS gave a short ignite talk during the session, and part of us wondered what it would be like if you could instantly go back and watch the talk afterwards or click around content while he spoke, or ask him questions directly in a conversational manner — just as students were able to do in our Mobiles for International Development course when Taylor spoke there only a few weeks ago.

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John Maeda, President of the Rhode Island School of Design, giving his keynote address

2) Instructional design will be as important as educational content

A recurring theme throughout the day was the increasing significance of design. John Maeda nailed it during a talk that included elements of his previous TED Talk on How Art, Technology, and Design Inform Creative Leaders. We’ve written previously on how content will be vital for online education, similar to what’s happening with Netflix for online video, but what came across was that design will be at a premium for not just what gets included, but how. This is literally a matter of life and death, as Maeda pointed out that Florence Nightingale saved lives of soldiers not with nursing, but with statistics and a clever visualization that influenced decision makers to look at thousands of soldiers dying needlessly in hospitals. We’ve tried to think critically about design in our own work — getting the most information into as few seconds of student experience as possible, such as our logo animation redesign.

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TC105: M4D course alumni hanging out at the e-Diplomacy happy hour at 1776 DC

3) You can’t network over a beer in online education

One of our course facilitators, Graham Lampa (@grahamlampa) brought up an excellent point in our MOOC panel, which is that the informal qualities of education and in-person experiences can be as valuable as the formal knowledge transfer. Until you can virtually “grab a beer” with someone, online education will not be able to replace the informal qualities. However, there are ways to leverage both! We sponsored the happy hour at 1776, where they had tweets from the day on #edip10 and #techatstate displayed on large monitors (courtesy of Zoomph), so that the walls were removed between offline and online content.

Moreover, we had a great time seeing everybody from our classes who we had the pleasure of meeting in person, including our Alumni Beth Ceryak (@bethceryak), Matt, and more!

Did you attend the 2013 Tech@State conference and come away with any other conclusions? Feel free to post your comment below and/or share your thoughts using the hashtags, #techatstate and #edip10.

Remember when map making used to be simple? Neither do we, which is why we’re teaching a new course on Mapping for International Development. This increasingly complex intersection between open/closed data, online/offline tools, and practitioner communities all relevant to digital mapping could use a handy primer.

Last week, MapBox closed a $10 million Series A from Foundry Group as part of a move seen to rival Google Maps with an open-source mapping solution. While the results of this investment remain to be seen, there are echoes in this conversation from the intense debate last year around the World Bank’s initial decision to use Google Map Maker instead of OpenStreetMap, which raised concerns from organizations such as Global Integrity about why the bank would choose a closed data solution over an open one. Ultimately, the World Bank reversed its decision and went with OpenStreetMap, which provides simple, complete access to its database under an open license.

And it’s not just about the maps themselves, but what is being done with them. The Global Slavery Index by Walk Free chose to visualize slavery numbers by country. Team Rubicon partnered with Palantir to repurpose maps used to track IEDs to help rebuild homes needing repair after Hurricane Sandy. Democracy International and New Rights Group visualized voter data in Tunisia to present stakeholders with better information for the electoral process. And InterAction produced an NGO Aid Map to improve coordination of NGO activities.

Image from the Atlantic on Morningside Analytics visualization

Photo Credit: The Atlantic

But data visualization and mapping isn’t just restricted to geodata. Since information and individuals are only a click away online, work being done by Morningside Analytics to map the “cyber-social geography” of the internet — analyzing who is talking to whom and what they’re talking about — is just as valuable, if not more so.

So far, we’ve had a great response for the course on Mapping for International Development, which is nice to know we’re not alone in our enthusiasm. We’re excited to welcome participants so far from about a dozen countries including Australia, Cameroon, Canada, Ecuador, Jordan, Kosovo, Mexico, the Netherlands, the Philippines, USA, and UK. Participants in this course represent organizations such as the World Bank, UN Foundation, UNICEF Innovations Lab Kosovo, Gallup, InterAction, Telecentre Foundation, Canada Foundation for Innovation, Australian National University, IFES, School of Oriental and African Studies, Centre for Development Innovation, Generations for Peace Institute, ACT/JEVS Human Services, CIMM, Stability: International Journal of Conflict and Development, and many more.

There’s still time to join, so if you’re interested in registering for our four-week online class on Mapping for International Development, register here. We hope you’ll join us!

Yesterday, Facebook and six phone companies announced the launch of internet.org to bring affordable Internet access to the five billion people without it. Reactions from our network have ranged from outright enthusiasm to skepticism about Zuckerberg’s selfish gift.

Rather than exploring the impact of this project on the future of public-private partnerships, how this effort will compete with Google’s project loon, or how universal online access will transform education, we wanted to ask the truly important question:

Who visualized JFK’s 1963 American University Speech better?

The commencement address, titled “A Strategy of Peace,” is regarded as one of the President’s finest and addresses key themes of transforming aspirations into realities. Take a look below, but be sure to check out the original speech.

What do you think?

 

Internet.org: Every one of us. #ConnectTheWorld 

 

USAID: Marking 50 years of Progress

Last Thursday, TechChange was proud to participate in the TechGirls program by inviting two young women from the Middle East to shadow our team during a work day. While we’ve always been committed to tech capacity building in the Middle East, it had been almost two years since we conducted a series of trainings in the West Bank, and we couldn’t pass up a chance to invite future colleagues into our home and share our enthusiasm. According to the State Department, the TechGirls program:

“[P]rovides girls from the Middle East and North Africa with the knowledge and resources to pursue higher education and careers in technology. This program builds on the U.S. global commitment to advance the rights of women and girls around the world.”

Nagham joined us from Nablus, Palestine. She is 16 and started using the computer at the age of 5; and she would like to study IT or Science. Nagham expects to improve her programming and game design skills. Sondos is from Zarqa, Jordan. She is 16 years old and has taken classes in robotics, Visual Basic, Oracle, Invention, Photoshop and HTML and SQL programming. Sondos is especially interested in pursuing technological interests that will aid the field of medicine.

With that in mind, we set up a variety of hands-on workstations that included:

Hands-On Coding and Electronics: Combining Art, Problem-solving, and Circuitry

Screenshot of our office temperature as measured by Arduino sensor.

Python-powered office temperature website

Since both TechGirls were interested in both programming and hardware, we started off with our in-house code ninja, Michael Holachek. Michael is 18, an avid robotics enthusiast, and will be attending MIT in the Fall to study Electrical Engineering. Michael started off with a short discussion about the connection between art and electronics (including a TED talk on painting circuits), introduced some basic programming in C and Python, and then demoed a few cool circuits on the Arduino and Raspberry Pi. They then worked together to make a TechChange mood lamp that played the TechChange theme song and display the office temperature on a website. At the end of the session, Sondos and Nagham came up with several ideas for applying these new skills to new problems, including attaching a room thermometer to an Arduino board to trigger an alert if the room became too hot for a baby.

Making Graphic Elements: Generating and Animating TechGirls Avatars

With their new Arduino boards built, both Nagham and Sondos sat down with Pablo Leon and Rachel Roth to try illustrating themselves and then animating their avatars in After Effects. Rachel provided a sketch of our guests and then we loaded them on our custom tablets for illustration. Trying their hands with our stylus, they learned about creating layers, sorting into folders, using filters, etc.

Illustrated avatars of TechGirls

New avatars illustrated by TechGirls!

After they finished creating avatars, Alon Askarov demonstrated how to use the Puppet tool to teach them how create short animations. Given that we were limited by time and that TechChange animations take time (see our blog post on this), these were kept to minimal facial expressions, but we still had fun doing it!

A brief animated loop of Sondos

Animated Sondos

Designing a Four-Week Course: A Tour of mHealth

Since Sondos was interested in public health projects, we tried to show off what we’d been working on for our mHealth and maternal health initiatives. We opened up the most recent course that we had built with the UN Foundation on Mobile Phones for Public Health,but rather than the speakers or content, what seemed to be the most interesting was the 161 participants in the course from all around the world. We agree: It is pretty cool.

Student map from our mHealth class

Student map from our mHealth class

But on top of the novelty, we also chatted about how we believed connecting these students was a core part of online learning — not just transferring knowledge on technology, but building a community of practice. After all, technology is the easy part when it comes to mHealth.

Building Interactive Learning Experiences in Articulate

TechGirls Articulate screenshot

But a platform isn’t enough for online learning. Catherine Shen discussed how to structure content for educational purposes. This meant walking through the current courses being designed for State Department, USAID, and the World Bank. Catherine used a current course from OTI Lebanon on advocacy for the TechGirls to see the mechanics of course design at work.

The TechGirls then created a short interactive presentation on their TechChange day, integrating their animated avatar with a survey that the girls used to tell us about their experience. Using a Likert scale, the girls gave their impressions of their shadow day.

The results were clear: Both of our participants strongly agreed that the job shadow day was fun and inspiring, in addition to being informative and interactive.

It was for us as well. Thanks to the TechGirls team for joining us!

Funny group picture of TechChange and TechGirls

Thanks TechGirls!

This post was written with contributions from the entire TechChange team. Thanks specifically to Catherine Shen and Michael Holachek for contributions in the sections above.

As you can probably tell, we’re all very excited here at TechChange. Former TechChanger, long-time Ushahidi guru, and eternal Zen Archer Rob Baker has been selected as part of the second round of the Presidential Innovation Fellows program. Yes, Rob will be contributing to Open Data Initiatives at USAID  where he will develop innovative solutions in areas of national significance.

For those who are unfamiliar with the program, the White House website has details:

“The Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program pairs top innovators from the private sector, non-profits, and academia with top innovators in government to collaborate during focused 6-13 month “tours of duty” to develop solutions that can save lives, save taxpayer money, and fuel job creation. Each team of innovators is supported by a broader community of interested citizens throughout the country.”

But don’t just take it from the White House. Have a listen to last year’s fellows about what their experience meant:

While we’re pretty stoked about open data in general (and even teach it as part of our course on Open Government) and this development in particular, the timing couldn’t be more perfect for our first-ever upcoming course on intrapreneurship. Intrapreneurship is defined as entrepreneurial behavior from within a large, established institution. But the truly interesting part of this program is that it shows an angle that institutions should consider: institutionalizing a process for insourcing innovative talent and new ideas. While most of our posts have thus far focused on the role of individuals in pushing their organizations forward, the truth is that forward-thinking organizations are looking just as hard for entrepreneurs to help rethink their business. After all, if ideas like this can deliver solid results for an institution as large as the federal government, then your organization is hard-pressed to find an excuse.

And so from the bottom of our hearts and the top our nerd attic, we’re sending our best to Rob and all of the incoming fellows! We know you’ll crush it.

Rob Baker Speaking at DUPictured: Rob Baker speaking at DU

 

If you’re interested in contributing to PIF projects, you can learn about current and future rounds of the PIF program at whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows, contribute code on GitHub, or visit Data.gov to help turn openly available government data into new products, services, and jobs. 

Big data is already giving us better TV shows. Could it also help build a better education system?

This week our team went to 1776 Reboot: Education Meetup, where we heard from leading experts from Coursera talk about the future of online MOOCs, as well as entrepreneurs from TechStars about applying an accelerator approach to learning. But one of the real stars of the night was Richard Culatta of the Department of Education, who declared that we now have more data about what kids watch on Netflix than how they learn in school.

So what?

When Netflix rolled out House of Cards as all 13 episodes developed on metrics learned over the years from their watchers, Kevin Spacey stated in a Business Insider article:

“It’s a real opportunity for the film and television industry to learn the lesson the music industry didn’t learn. Give the audience what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, at a reasonable price, and they’ll buy it.”

In our last post, Four Reasons Why Universities Aren’t Ready to Move Online, we looked at how universities need to invest more heavily in producing compelling online content — not just videotaping professors lecturing. The dirty secret behind online all of the education platforms that are generating the creative chaos around online education is that they are not providing an online education at all, but rather educational content in a structured format. If that’s the case, what can online education learn from the current revolution in content distribution?

In criticizing current approaches to online learning, we often refer to the “Netflix” approach to online education — passive consumption of videos instead of interactive back-and-forth learning. But there’s no doubt that there is a market for passive consumption of educational videos, ranging from the current gold standard of Lynda.com to simply looking up a how-to screencast on YouTube.

  • Piecemeal Content (Amazon). Amazon is a retail company, that wants to also sell digital content. Think of this as purchasing and streaming an episode of Ken Burns Civil War. But are customers willing to buy educational content when there has been hesitation to do so for TV (hence the existence of PBS).

  • Free Prosumer (YouTube). YouTube is a Google product that wants to build general user data. The problem here for users is discovery and quality control — it’s hard to find quality, and it’s hard to find programs of study as opposed to small snippets of knowledge.

  • Freemium Model (Hulu). Hulu is an ad-supported subscription video service, that wants to build interest in existing broadcast content. It’s also perhaps the closest to the existing Coursera and EdX model. While the education is free, they are looking at “freemium” educational models where they can charge for certificates of completion or credit.

  • Premium Distribution Model (HBO). This could be TED talks right now, although those are free — TED controls the vertical by organizing the conferences, filming the speakers, and then distributing on their own platform. The content is often superb, but–like HBO–is restricted in it’s theme and format. HBO is a cable company that happens to be online.

  • Content Buffet + Original Content (Netflix).  Netflix provides on-demand Internet video streaming. Most interestingly, they then used big data from how their users watch other media to figure out how best to deliver its own content.  There’s not a perfect comparison yet, but there are some indicators of what’s to come.

Khan Academy started off with simple YouTube videos of basic skills.  Since then, they have aggregated them into groups with clear skill progression and then allows students to practice with post video problems, which give them an enormous amount of feedback on how well students are learning.  This data not only helps students learn through application of knowledge to problems with instant response, but easily enables Khan to present additional problems to support or remediate weak areas.  And all that data can show Khan how to make an even better experience by combining it with theories on effective learning.

Big Data companies like Hortonworks are trumpeting data-driven education, while new startups like Clever and learnsprout are helping developers get in touch with new sources of data on achievement and teaching.  Even government is getting in on the game.  Led by the Department of Education’s Richard Culatta and the administration’s general open data philosophy, every metric available is being drafted to the use of improving education across the country.  But the metric gathering potential of online learning is even greater.

Brace yourselves: We may be about to see some of the best educational content of all time built on metrics that traditional educators could only dream about. And moreover, since this isn’t just about producing content one time for one show, but for topics that will require constant updating and modification for improvements.

What will your courses look like when your professors are actually producing quality content and A/B testing the heck out of it? When they improve not semester to semester, but week to week?

This post was co-authored with Mike Brown.

Co-authored by Mike Brown.

The future of higher education may be online, but the present is still a mess.

The New Yorker recently published a thorough exploration of MOOCs and higher education. Coincidentally, this piece came out as the same week that my alma mater announced it had failed to fill about a third of its incoming freshman class. Whether a temporary enrollment misfire or permanent disruption of the education system, both the struggles of terrestrial universities and the potential for an online future raise important concerns about how higher education will survive.

Although perhaps not the author’s intention, the article revealed five key differences between traditional teaching institutions moving traditional courses online and courses designed to be online from the very beginning:

No experience in producing online content. The main video editor for Nagy’s course is a graduate assistant who recently defended her dissertation in Greek history, not a Web editor by vocation. Good educational content requires audio, video, graphics, and subject matter to work in unison. Universities are buying platforms like marble mansions and filling them with cardboard content.  But live teaching is hard, which is why good lecturers are hard to come by.  The same applies to other modes of delivery, and with MOOCs, the potential efficacy lost from skimping on the experience will scale with the course, growing linearly, while the cost of getting it right from the beginning is fixed, getting cheaper per person as number of students scale.

No clear teaching or evaluation model. This is still the “let a thousand flowers bloom” stage of online learning, but that has to end eventually. While it was good to see the back-and-forth on the socratic method, without methods of evaluating work, it seems premature to congratulate education on cracking this nut. Multiple-choice quizzes to test reading comprehension will never replace essays, and machines are a long way off from being able to grade 31,000 essays accurately.  But besides peer grading, which is successfully used by Coursera and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization’s “Around the Globe and Around the Clock: The Science and Technology of the CTBT,” we don’t have better ways of evaluating student progress in depth, as well as breadth.  New models and tools are needed for these subjects.

No clear business model.  It initially seemed unnecessary to take a trip and cameraman to Greece as part of the budget for this course, but if students are willing pay for that authentic experience, then why not?  It may well be that including such edutainment content as shots from the real places, much like the history channel used to do, will benefit students greatly;  what’s most important is that they track how it changes how students engage, and perform further experiments to validate these theories.

No access to social networks.  Perhaps the most telling part of the article was the admonition of universities not just as delivering elite education, but connecting elites with one another into lifelong networks. Emphasis on admonition.  Not only is more data available to mine when students interact in social network type settings, but students and teachers benefit from the collaborative and iterative experience inherent in group-based contemporaneous learning.

Traditional universities are, in the words of the article, standing in front of an avalanche. They are understandably attached to their current model, which they have developed over centuries, but it leaves them vulnerable to the scale-free model of online learning. The prospect of a global audience and substantial cost savings from online coursework is attractive. However, they are poorly positioned to benefit from either without revolutionizing their entire approach.  Universities, in this new age, are facing the classic Shumpeterian forces of creative destruction.  Much like the railroads, which once dominated transport, innovation is placing pressure on their model, and if they remain attached to a model displaced by innovation, they will be destroyed by it.

Are there more ways that universities are failing to keep up with the times?  Are products of e-learning startups falling too far from the educational tree?  Join the conversation in the comments.

The following is a guest post by Christian Douglass, a TechChange alumni from TC104: Digital Organizing and Open Government. 

What makes the Open Government Partnership – seemingly another multilateral good governance initiative — worth watching?

It’s not because it’s grown from eight to fifty-eight countries in under two years. That’s fast, and fifty-eight is a respectable number – it demonstrates momentum – but plenty of multilaterals, like the Community of Democracies, reach that number early on.

The Open Government Partnership (OGP) is President Obama’s international expression of his pledge to make his administration the most transparent in U.S. History: In November 2012, after a trip to all-the-reform-rage country of Burma, President Obama secured a commitment from the once international pariah to work towards OGP eligibility by 2016. Time will tell if the cadre of former generals will meet that tall order, but they have showed a willingness to try. The international community, including the U.S., is bending over backwards to help.

President Obama also made the OGP a top-line message in a recent Oval office visit by four African heads of state. As a carrot for being democratically elected governments, Cape Verde, Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Senegal were invited to the U.S. in March. Those that were OGP eligible, such as Cape Verde and Malawi, committed to join. Sierra Leone pledged to work towards eligibility. A rule of thumb: If the President mentions anything twice, the bureaucracy takes notice. As a result of the visit, don’t expect OGP to be taken out of talking points until the next election cycle.

But there are two really good reasons to watch the OGP:

First, the role of civil society. One of three co-chairs is a CSO, as well has half of the 18-member steering committee. Additionally, countries are required to form, track, and review commitments in conjunction with civil society during the action plan lifecycle. Governments have to develop commitments in conjunction with local civil society stakeholders, as well consult with the OGP steering committee before finalizing their commitments. This is no panacea, but it represents a very significant opportunity for civil society.

Secondly, the OGP is action –not talk – driven: the first eight country self-assessment reports on action plans are being publically published in the next several months. An independent third-party will review the progress of the action plans and publish their findings by October. Thus, 2013 is a big year for the OGP. If it is too maintain momentum and solidify legitimacy, the independent assessment process has to produce credible reports of each country’s accomplishments for public review.

And here is why the OGP might be different: Countries develop their open governance projects, as long as they fall within the parameters of the OGP five “grand challenges” that focus on the four OGP principles: Transparency, Citizen Participation, Accountability, and Technological Innovation.

For example, as a part of their OGP commitment, Mongolia recently announced they have instituted electronic balloting, removing another opportunity for voting officials to influence the outcome – which can slowly build trust in governing institutions. Brazil recently instituted “clean slate” laws: No official may have a criminal record. This may sound baseline and intuitive, but after the law was passed it was revealed that many officials had records.

Each country designs and owns which handful of projects they launch. In this way, the good governance accomplishments of OGP partner countries might be like the tenure of former Secretary of State Clinton.

Secretary Clinton did not choose one big “legacy” accomplishment, like advancing Middle East peace. Instead, like a good venture capitalist, the State Department, under her guidance, seeded projects around the globe as diverse as promoting better cook stoves in Asia to battling human trafficking in India. She had her theme of “economic statecraft,” but what that meant in each country was context specific.

The Open Government Partnership, if it is to be deemed successful, may be measured in that same way: A thousand local good governance developments all adding up to something big and continuous. In that way, it is very much an initiative for the Internet Age, where a thousand voices in Egypt can start something that can’t be bottled up.