Social learning in the time of social distancing
We built an online learning community that has grown to 400 members in just two months under the most grueling circumstances in Ethiopia. This post captures some notes from the field.
The context: Uncertainties brought about by a pandemic (not to mention an ever-escalating violent conflict).
As COVID-19 began to spread worldwide, Ethiopian government reacted swiftly by enforcing a State of Emergency with lockdowns and school and office closures. Very similar to organizations worldwide, this situation left many organizations in Ethiopia in a state of abrupt confusion and paralysis without any immediate backup plans to continue their planned programs and activities.
Against this backdrop, our team was approached by the leadership of an international NGO to help them plan and launch a training program in Ethiopia. Their leadership, however, wanted to be more innovative and proactive in designing their training sessions than just opting for Zoom webinars. Even in those early days, we had an inkling of what would later become infamously known as “zoom fatigue”.
Luckily for our team, we had already implemented many online training programs in Ethiopia for audience groups as diverse as parents struggling with schooling at-home to startup founders coping with COVID curveballs. This current opportunity was a challenge for our team to bring in a lot of the learnings from these prior experiences to build a much more refined online training model — one that leverages the power of collaborative and social learning.
Design considerations
“all successful training programs are essentially attitude and behaviour change initiatives.”
Our key belief at Accelerated Learning is that all successful training programs are essentially attitude and behaviour change initiatives. Ergo, we have to unpack and understand the various motivations and needs of our participants. Given, this was a bilateral donor program — the range of stakeholders was very broad and included members from government agencies, private sector factories, industry associations, sectoral experts and technical training specialists and local and international staff from the development partners. So our first consideration and design challenge was:
The second consideration revolved around internet usage and digital literacy. Internet penetration and adoption of smartphones in Ethiopia is almost in the single digits. Moreover, internet usage has been traditionally driven by “entertainment needs” rather than for “productive uses”. Apps like Telegram, Facebook and Youtube are way more popular than even email and Zoom. Productivity and collaboration tools like Dropbox, Calendar apps, to-do apps are not even worth mentioning in this list. So our next design challenge was:
Our third most important consideration was to avoid zoom fatigue and loss of interest in online learning. We studied various reasons why people do not complete online courses. Despite Coursera’s recent IPO, data shows that online course completion rate over the years has been less than 10%. The main obstacle that was prominent in our research was that online learning was completely dependent on continued self-motivation of participants, mostly in isolation. We wanted to address this issue by building effective learning communities.
Furthermore, the training program itself was designed for Textile Factory managers and decision makers to promote efficient resource usage and sustainable production. As such, this objective needed a collective effort and coordination to lift the standard of the entire industry in Ethiopia. Therefore, our next design challenge was:
Program Design
To address the above mentioned constraints and many others, we implemented a series of instructional design choices to craft a program that would thrive within this tough environment.
- Telegram We opted for using Telegram, a familiar and widely used app to minimize the learning curve that would come with new technology solutions.
- Structured learning guides, rules, schedules and reminders were designed to ensure etiquette and respectful participation.
- Multi-modal touchpoints Content was delivered in bite-sized videos and flashcards that could be accessed any time without a specified schedule on a self-study model. We also designed live discussion sessions with technical experts every Saturday where participants could share ideas, get clarifications and develop a personal relationship with the trainers as well.
- Approachable and appealing content design to translate complicated technical content into actionable insights.
- Gamification to promote engagement as well as recognize individual contributions
- Feedback Continuously listening to evolving needs in an open and transparent forum.
Impact
Most training participants in Ethiopia have been trained over the years by various development programs to expect allowances, out-of-town retreats and per diems. However, for this voluntary online training program, the participants not only had to allocate time within busy schedules to attend this program, but also had to pay out of pocket for data and internet usage. Despite this obviously material constraint, we have seen the learning group grow from an initial 50 participants to over 400 members within two months.
Starting with a few participants from a few textile factories, the learning group has now organically expanded to include participants from across the entire textile sector in Ethiopia including from some buyers like H&M.
Gradually, various members of the community found their voice and started asking questions, sharing experiences, answering questions from other participants and engaging closely with each other and the trainers.
Most of the participants have rated this program as one of the best they have attended and the learning community wants the group to continue beyond the project duration.
This might very well be the emergence of a self-organized intelligent community.
