Blog | TechChange | The Institute for Technology and Social Change

When building a community online, language should be a key consideration. While it’s true that our francophone users would be able to reasonably navigate an English-language platform, their opportunities for community may be restricted to our forums, minimizing connections with other areas of the platform and, more importantly, with course content. At the same time, anglophone users wouldn’t be able to meaningfully connect with their francophone colleagues in the forums without the kind of translation capability our Translation Manager feature is working to create.

TechChange, in partnership with Chemonics and the USAID HRH2030 program, recently launched a platform and course on Capacity Building for Malaria. Alongside advancements in our newly piloted Translation Manager, the Capacity Building for Malaria platform is the first of its kind in offering a fully integrated, bilingual experience for its user base, which is around 75% francophone, and 25% anglophone.

Given that a strong cohort of both French and English speakers were set to use the platform, the Instructional Design team opted to include both languages on the platform, with the French translation of course content appearing first to represent the larger cohort of francophone users from primarily West Africa.

It isn’t enough to offer resources on the platform in both English and French — in order to create a user experience that speaks to both our anglophone and francophone users, integration across the back end and front end is entirely necessary. As studies have shown, we connect with and retain information with greatest ease when it is presented in our primary language — when it comes to online learning, therefore, nothing should prevent this from being a priority. Narration, both in online courses and in video content, and subtitles are equally important considerations when constructing content in multiple languages.

TechChange’s recent partnership with Family Care International (FCI) resulted in two separate animations, one produced in English, the other in French, to reflect the dominant languages of target audience members, who were primarily from Kenya and Burkina Faso. Check out that project here, and stay tuned to learn more about TechChange’s advances in language integration.

Does investment and entrepreneurship have a role to play in international development?

Lawmakers are currently exploring creating a new U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (IDFC) to invest in and draw private capital to international development projects in exchange for equity. But the idea of unlocking finance to promote growth in developing countries is not a new idea.

USAID Development Credit Authority (DCA) targets emerging markets where small businesses cannot access the loans they need to grow and offers risk-sharing agreements to mobilize local private capital to fill the financing gap. Through DCA, more than 500 guarantees between financial institutions and USAID have made up to $4.8 billion in private financing available for more than 245,000 entrepreneurs around the world.

When we started working with DCA in 2017, we wanted to communicate this global impact in simple terms to broader audiences. So we settled on three strategies based on the questions we wanted to answer.

First, we wanted to connect the community not just with DCA’s mission, but with individual entrepreneur stories and how they and their communities were affected by access to loans guaranteed by DCA. The resulting 2-minute animation on Mobilizing Local Wealth for Entrepreneurs Around the World tried to tell the story of individuals in different countries, contexts, and industries through kinetic text and light character animation. The negative-to-positive shift in music is accompanied by a color palette change to represent an unlocking of the full potential of development dollars for entrepreneurship. As with many of our animations, this tried to answer the “why” question for the relevance and importance.

Second, we wanted to create an informative annual poster for the 2016 DCA Impact Brief that would hang in every USAID mission to answer “what” had been accomplished in the previous year using attractive infographics, “where” the impact had taken place along with highlights, and a reminder of “who” was benefiting from the investments. While not everyone will click a link and watch a video, a poster hanging in a hallway is a printed physical prompt to engage with information. Click on the image above to check out the full poster online!

And lastly, we wanted to create a series of explainer videos using a combination of whiteboard-style animations, motion graphics, and 3-D effects. While the first animation sought to connect viewers to the entrepreneurs who were improving their communities, these videos attempted to explain concepts using representative animations and statistics. The animation was intended to connect viewers with information, rather than with other people.

These are just a few examples of of how we’ve tried to communicate impact. If you’ve seen great examples, share them with us at @techchange on Twitter!

Panels are a generally terrible formats for online webcasts, but solo presenters often lose the spontaneity of expert interaction. Can a new format help produce better conversations and better insights?

Today, TechChange Founder Nick Martin participated in the IFC Sustainability Exchange 2018, where he was interviewed by Kavya Kopparapu, and then turned to interview Reg Manhas of Kosmos Energy. This 15-minute rolling conversations continued between a dozen experts on topics ranging from energy, healthcare, politics, and more, with each expert linking the conversation to the next. The full archive is available online, but represented an interesting an interesting new application of online conversation format.

“The Long Conversation” format was adapted in this instance from The Smithsonian, where 25 leaders from the arts and sciences in a relay of two-person dialogues. But the unscripted back-and-forth of experts-interviewing-experts has also been used by organizations such as The Long Now Foundation, in 2010 which combined the 6-hour 19-minute presentation with data visualization performance by Sosolimited and a live performance of composer Jem Finer’s Longplayer.

What was most interesting about this format is how well it fits in with online-first pedagogy, where the shift away from broadcast-based technodeterminism of Ted Talks is moving towards more participatory approaches. Thus far, the main method for altering presentation formats has been to engage audience participation in solo presenters (including ignite talks) and panels via polling or questions. These are steps forward, but still represent the “sage-on-a-stage” approach to learning.

What is interesting about the Long Conversation format is the approach that each presenter has something to share, but also something to learn from another presenter. Through curation of speaker selection, each speaker provides a link between ideas to flesh out their own understanding, which acts as an intermediary for the audience’s own learning. Through this manner, each binary “hop” happens through paired learning, which can then flesh out increasingly complex themes such as sustainability.

There’s no one way to create an online learning experience. But concepts such as the Long Conversation may make a more natural fit than panels and ignite talks for the evolution of online discussion formats.

According to new research, learners who passively observe experts feel confident that they’re prepared to try a task themselves. Unfortunately, they often show no measurable improvement when they attempt the task itself. And most of online learning content is currently built on exactly this observational method using instructional videos.

Whether it’s sitting through mandatory HR training DVDs or spending free time on watching MasterClass to learn basketball from Stephen Curry, the model is almost exactly the same as what you’d find in the world of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). But while mandatory compliance and higher production values may improve on dismally low MOOC completion rates (one edX study found only 5.5% of learners who enroll in a course receive a certificate), the learner may not be better off for having completed the course.

Engaging content, whether its recorded experts or instructional animations, is still vital to the online learning process by capturing and retaining learner attention. But investments in production value are best understood as a starting point rather than as a the desired end result of building an effective course. A more useful method for evaluating online learning is through the lenses of the traditional four levels of interactivity and their intended purpose:

Level 1: Passive – The learner acts merely as a receiver of information. The learner may read text on the screen as well as view graphics, illustrations and charts. The learner may interact simply by using navigational buttons to move forward or back through the program.

Level 2: Limited Interaction – The learner makes simple responses to instructional cues. As in Level I, there may be multiple choice exercises, pop-ups, rollovers or simple animations. Level II adds a component of scenario-based multiple choice and column matching related to the text and graphic presentation.

Level 3: Complex Interaction – The learner makes multiple, varied responses to cues. In addition to the types of responses in Level II, complex interactions may require text entry boxes and manipulation of graphic objects to test the assessment of the information presented.

Level 4: Real-time Interaction / Simulation – Real-time interaction creates a training session that involves a life-like set of complex cues and responses in this last level. The learner is engaged in a simulation that exactly mirrors the work situation.

Most online learning solutions are best understood as Level 1: Essentially a slide-based presentation with the potential inclusion of multimedia. Level 2 enables students more control over their training and to do more than watch, read, and navigate through interactive exercises and scenario-based learning. But once learners start engaging with Level 3 and above, their course experience begins to shift from a passive presentation of static content to a participative experience with a dynamic course environment. Level 4 includes all elements of 1, 2, and 3 at higher levels of sophistication, as well as simulated or real-time simulation.

Not every course demands Level 4 interactivity. Cost and time implications should be measured against the nature of the content, intended target audience, and available Learning Management System (LMS). But as LMS solutions are gradually upgraded from their outdated SCORM standards, learners will soon come to expect their content to be effective as well as engaging.

Fortunately, research also indicates that instructors can still incorporate this passive content into higher levels of interactivity. One technique is to mix watching and practicing, as learners benefit from watching after they’ve already practiced a skill. Another is to combine reading and thinking exercises along with passive content, as those are less likely to cause learners to overestimate their abilities while still providing valuable information.

Much like the class textbook and engaging lecturers, engaging content is still the foundation of an online classroom. But educators don’t need to stop there.

Would you like to learn more? Consider signing up for our four-week course on Online Learning for International Development!

We’re proud to announce that registration is now open for WeRobotics Online Training Academy!

WeRobotics has just launched its inaugural course on Drones in Humanitarian Action: From Coordination to Deployments. Building on the first-ever trainings on humanitarian drones by the Humanitarian UAV Network (UAViators) between 2015-2016, the training team brings over 40 years of experience in humanitarian aid, complex emergencies, and humanitarian technologies.

One of these leading experts, Dr. Patrick Meier, has over 15 years of experience in humanitarian technology, including spearheading the coordination of drones in the aftermath of Category 5 Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu and the 8.0 Earthquake in Nepal. He has also authored the the book, Digital Humanitarians, which has been praised by experts from the UN, Red Cross, World Bank, USAID, DfID, Harvard, MIT, Oxford and more.

We asked Dr. Meier to share more information about his vision for the course and the academy:

What student profile would you say this course is designed for?

The great thing about this course is that it is highly instructive for humanitarians, drone pilots and individuals who are new to both drones and humanitarian action. Why? Because of the different modules that we’ve put together and the different topics covered in each module. What’s exciting for us is precisely the fact that we’re bringing different student profiles (communities) together for this course. The exchange of ideas between these communities in response to the modules will be highly beneficial to all.

Why would you move a successful in-person training online?

We realized that a significant component of the professional hands-on training we’ve been giving to dozens of humanitarian organizations across many countries over the years can be provided online. What’s more, moving this training online means we can reach more participants more quickly in more countries. Ultimately, the point of our trainings is to ensure that emerging robotics technologies are used safely, responsibly and effectively in a wide range of humanitarian efforts. So the more participants we can train, the more positive impact drones can have during major disasters.

What does success look like for the first course of WeRobotics Online Training Academy?

Engagement and long term collaboration. We see this course as key to engaging a broader community of individuals and to developing a meaningful, long term relationship with everyone who participates in the training. As such, success for us will be determined by how engaged participants remain with the broader WeRobotics community and how closely they continue to collaborate with us and our Flying Labs in the years to come.

What other courses are you thinking about making in the future?

We’re excited to add a series of new courses in the future, including a course specifically on the use of drones for cargo delivery in terms of health and humanitarian applications.

Want to learn more or register? Check out WeRobotics Online Training Academy!

*photo courtesy of WeRobotics

TechChange partnered with Family Care International (FCI) to produce a short animation to make the case for national budgets that reflect the people’s needs and priorities. This animation was intended to build on our first animation with the Mobilizing Advocates from Civil Society (MACS) project, which dealt with “The Power of Civil Society” and critical roles in holding governments accountable.

The MACS project in Burkina Faso and Kenya between 2012 and 2015 was intended to bring together civil society organizations working in reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health (RMNCH) and to strengthen their capacity to advocate for health policies that meets the needs of women and children. Since the dominant languages in Kenya and Burkina Faso are English and French respectively, it was vital for the animation to be in both languages.

This animation was intended to encourage taxpayers to understand their rights to the highest standards of health and the commitments of their governments to their well being. As people pay taxes so the government can provide these essential services, and a budget reveals the government’s real priorities, citizens have a right to understand how the government is spending their money so that they can hold the government accountable.

If you’d like to learn more, please check out this video in English:

Or feel free to watch in French!

With over 9,000 attendees and 1,000 speakers, re:publica 18 is one of the largest conferences about digital culture in the world. The conference has a diversity of attendees such as artists, activists, scientists, hackers, entrepreneurs, NGOs, journalists, social media and marketing experts, and many others. The re:publica 2018 theme is POP, touching on opening up societal discussion to all and make net culture and politics tangible to anyone.

TechChange was invited to participate in the “Tech for Good” track supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). The goal of this track is to bring together inspiring and innovative inputs that highlight the potential of digital technologies to solve global problems.

Meronne Teklu, an instructional designer at TechChange, participated on the “Building a new life, one e-lesson at a time: refugees and online education” panel along with Maren Kröger (UNHCR), Henner Kirchner (GIZ Jordan office), and Mohammad Moataz Ghannam (Kiron Higher Open Education). Main points of focus included how new technologies and policy approaches to making e-learning tools available to refugees, and the ethical and political issues that come with using e-learning platforms in vulnerable communities.

re:publica 2018 was truly a transformative experience – from exploring the beautiful city of Berlin, to meeting inspiring panelists and attendees, to having rich dialogue on how the public and private sectors can collaborate in making impactful programs, it was truly an enriching opportunity. Thank you to BMZ for sponsoring the panel, and Charles Martin-Shields from the German Development Institute (GDI) for organizing!

*Photo provided by re:publica flickr.

When our team partnered with the Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL) to build the animation for the Principles for Digital Development we didn’t just want to explain these nine living guidelines for digital development practitioners, we also wanted to expand the Principles animation into the visual vocabulary of GIFs by creating simple, looping GIFs that could easily be plugged into social media, websites, or any other needs. In particular, we were wowed by how @DIAL_community was able to bring their posts to life and wanted to make sure other organizations could do so.

Instead of starting from scratch, programs look for ways to #adapt and #enhance existing products, resources, and approaches. Reuse and Improve means assessing what resources are available and modifying existing tools https://t.co/lLkL00fckA #digitalprinciples pic.twitter.com/PC2Hj3FHK8

— Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL) (@DIAL_community) March 28, 2018

In addition to making the GIFs below available, we also wanted to someday have them appear in GIF keyboards on Facebook, as well as be easily usable for Instagram and other social media formats. So we uploaded all the GIFs to Giphy in the TechChange Channel, where anyone can update the tags and quickly export / share the GIF for whatever their use case.

Full size GIFs (and link to the Giphy source) below!

Design with the User (https://gph.is/2KmNoQ2)

Understand the Existing Ecosystem (https://gph.is/2Kkm4Sg)

Design for Scale (https://gph.is/2Jy9DRT)

Build for Sustainability (https://gph.is/2HAcpcz)

Be Data Driven (https://gph.is/2KmMLpE)

Use Open Standards, Open Data, Open Source, and Open Innovation (https://gph.is/2FnbvKB)

Reuse and Improve (https://gph.is/2I4djuN)

Address Privacy & Security (https://gph.is/2r4xpx0)

Be Collaborative (https://gph.is/2r4xErU)

Building a global classroom that feels personal and intimate isn’t an easy job for any online facilitator. Which is why the TechChange platform comes equipped with data and dashboards to help data-driven decisions on course execution. But we also wanted to provide that information back to students, who are just as vital in improving the learning environment. And at the center of both concepts is the TechChange Live Student Map.

When the average TechChange class has 93 students from 22 countries, it can be tough to keep track of where students. But part of our goal is to not only connect students online, but also in person and in their career networks to continue learning long after the course ends. That’s why students who volunteer their city locations are able to see which other students have volunteered their city location, as well as their student @handle, social media presence, and other details in their profile.

But how does it work?

First we start with a generic base layer from Mapbox. And when a user submits their location in their profile we send their location only to a service that maps locations to latitude and longitude coordinates, which is needed to plot their city location. We then take that location data and build a dataset of the locations of each participant.

On top of the map layer we draw an additional layer placing map markers on each user’s location. We quickly realized that multiple people specifying the same city would be a challenge as map markers are independent of each other, so essentially the map markers for anyone in Washington, DC would be drawn on top of each other and the last person drawn on the map would win.

In order to solve this problem, we used a clustering algorithm to group map markers within a certain distance of each other. This clustering takes into account zoom level. At the furthest out zoom, all users on the east coast may be grouped together. As you zoom in, users in the same city may be grouped, etc.

And so, finally, when when you click on a group of users, all the users in that cluster are revealed so that each one can be clicked on individually. When you visit the platform, we open up a persistent link to our servers that we can use a proxy for users being actively online. We use this connection to identify users that are currently online and update the map markers accordingly (switching from red “offline” markers to green “online” markers).

We’ll keep adding more information as we build out our mapping and visualization tools, but if you’d like to learn more about mapping data, check out our online course on data visualization and analysis.

In 2014, The World Bank revealed that one-third of their PDF reports had never been downloaded, and another 40 percent had been downloaded fewer than 100 times. Recognizing that government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and ICT4D as a whole are addicted to the PDF format, TechChange sought to create a digital-first, interactive PDF that would be designed for how these reports are actually read, rather than how the authors typically intend. The result was the Organizational Guide to ICT4D, which was released later that year as the cornerstone of the 2014 ICT4D Conference.

As the community prepares to convene once more at the 10th Conference on ICT4D coming up on May 8-10 in Lusaka, Zambia, we wanted to share lessons learned over the last four years, starting with the Sustainable Development Goals Playbook, which was released at the 2015 ICT4D Conference (note: we also created that conference’s launch video).

Lesson 1: Simplify Navigation

The color-coded, right navigation bar in our interactive reports was created to free users from scrolling through pages of nondescript text. Instead, learners could quickly tab through relevant sections to get to their desired information and then jump around as needed. But adding the text to the navigation (image below) created two problems: Cluttered text and redundant headings.

After observing users engaging with the PDF, we realized that users were not reading the tabs (top right red box) at all, but rather quickly navigating back to the Table of Contents (“bottom left red box) and then navigating to the desired section or page from there. Not only was removing the text simplifying navigation and improving readability, but it came at zero expense to user navigation, provided that the color and icons served to identify the current section and topic.

Lesson 2: Design a Series

Although we had iterated on our design between ICT4D Conferences, the reality is that we had designed each as a one-off, even though the style guide was kept relatively unchanged over the two years. In contrast, designing for a conference report series, such as during the Global Off-Grid Solar Forum and Expo, we were able to produce three reports for a major conference in Hong Kong, from 22-24 January 2018.

Working closely with The World Bank, IFC Lighting Global, and DevDesign, we created a consistent, modern identity (hello, gradients) where each report would have a unique identity consistent with event and partner branding, but also look attractive when presented in unison. We also produced a short flyer (below) so that participants were aware of the other reports and could easily decide if they wanted to read more. If you’d like to take a look for yourself, all three reports are available online!.

Lesson 3: Design Once, Use Everywhere

There are finally a few decent PDF readers out there for mobile, but the reality is that the same strengths of a PDF in keeping a consistent experience run directly counter to a positive mobile reading experience. As such, we’ve found that the style guide, text, graphic assets, and themes can quickly be repurposed once they’ve been developed for a PDF. One example is our work with Making Cents International, where we were able to provide all original assets in the PDF to a third-party web designer, who then created a mobile-friendly site for content delivery. That way, information is not only locked in a PDF, but also incorporated into a coherent online identity with additional insights about visitors and users.

Curious to learn more? Go ahead and check out the Demand-Driven Training for Youth Employment Toolkit online and compare it to our original PDF toolkit (pictured below).

Lesson 4: Embrace Constraints

Lastly, we’ve re-learned that reports don’t have to be interactive to be engaging. PDFs can be made beautiful for embracing their constraints as well as expanding the possibilities. For example, we’re very proud of our design for the GSMA Landscape Report: Mobile Money, Humanitarian Cash Transfers, and Displaced Population, (below) which was created in a tightly controlled branding and styling format that precluded any interactive components.

When we were able to remove the navigation bar, we were able to continue applying many of these lessons learned back to our traditional report style. This helped us focus on upgrading infographics, charts, tables, and the core components of a readable and informative report.

Even after seven years of designing partner PDFs, we’re still learning how to make important information more engaging. If you would like to share any of your lessons learned or examples of stellar reports, please do share with us on Twitter @techchange. And if you’d like to learn step-by-step how to make your own interactive PDFs, please do consider enrolling in our next Online Learning for International Development course.

Because when it comes to international development, some information is too important to be boring and unread.