Build communities around a program: leveraging technology to magnify a service

Sometimes we forget where the power of technology lies : as a support and complement to human interventions.

Today Priyanka [names have been modified], a trainer from 321 Education Foundation, is visiting Mrs. Fatima in her school to observe her class, and have a coaching conversation. The last time they met in-person was before the holidays, two months ago. Priyanka was wondering how much of the teaching practices Mrs. Fatima has learned over the course of last year’s teacher empowerment program would she observe being used in the classroom.

What she experienced amazed her — not only Mrs. Fatima used many of the practices, but during the conversation she could easily reflect on her practice and her choices.

When Priyanka congratulated Mrs. Fatima for actively engaging her students in the lesson using some innovative methods, she said : “Ma’am, I remember to try them and am excited to do it because we talk about it online, on the group!”.

Leverage technology to enhance a service, not to drive the service

Most of us at 321 Education Foundation love technology : to find and use the best software to collect, store and analyse data, to create the best experiences for our educators when registering with us, to communicate internally, across teams, across cities — “I’m slacking you this document.” or “Call or Zoom? Zoom of course!” or to engage with our partners. We talk, share, debate about technology almost every day.

But we are clear about using technology with our users to enhance our programs, not as the driver of a program.

The amount of touch points with users is crucial in any program aiming to bring long term changes — in behaviors, systems, attitudes, environments. Educators enrolled in 321 Education Foundation’s program, called Ignite!, meet in-person with their trainers about 20 times a year — a number that can ensure scalability, sustainability and impact.

Additionally, we were thinking : How to multiply the effects of these in-person touch points? How to leverage the power of peer support, the power of a community of practice?

This is why we decided to build online teacher communities, to strengthen our interventions.

Develop online communities of modern educators

Each educator who is part of the Ignite! Program is a member of a WhatsApp group with all their school colleagues. Every week, the educators receive a message sent by a moderator, their 321 trainer. The purpose of the messages varies — share inspirational stories which celebrates teachers and the prestige of teaching, revise the 321 Teacher Curriculum content, encourage collaboration, solve common classroom problems as a group, etc.

We want educators to be lifelong learners. Only then will they be able to make children fall in love with learning. We also want to encourage educators to leverage modern tools to help them do their jobs efficiently and effectively. The tools aim to increase collaboration and augment educators ability to meet the needs of their students.

Hence deliberately designing online communities help us drive two of our four mission statements : Magnify the learner in every educator and Magnify the tools for the modern educator.

As I said, we are very deliberate about how we are leveraging technology and how we are designing our online teacher communities.

Below is the first element we like to push ourselves to focus on while designing services or features of a service.

#1. Build on existing user’s habits

Our creation approach is about being user-centered, following and borrowing from a vast range of methodologies : human-centered design approach from ideo.org, Design Thinking, vastly learning from Stanford d.school’s courses and resources or Jobs-to-be-done approach. Also,

“As designers, we like to see the world as it is, and find a path forward to what it could be.” (source)

That is what we kept in mind while figuring out which platform to use to engage educators online. The key idea that we needed to build on an existing user’s habit made us choose WhatsApp© .

This design and program decision has some key advantages :

• All users with a smartphone already have and use WhatsApp©. There is little or no training required as the use of WhatsApp© is widespread especially among our target users.
• There is no cost barrier either for the users to engage with our content, as the app is free and data usage minimal.
• It is the only app that is truly cross-platform working across devices running many different operating systems. We can even access it on a laptop with WhatsApp web©.
• Another advantage of WhatsApp© is its’ “informalness”; people are able to share more openly what they feel about their work, or their experiences. It builds a safe space.
• Also, and as observed with the users in the research conducted to better understand the use of WhatsApp groups and communities of practice, “one of the issues that users face with lower end smartphones, is lack of memory on their devices. Thus the ability to keep a large number of applications on board is limited. Owing to this, it further makes sense to ensure we utilize a platform that has continued personal and informal usage”. (source)
• Lastly, and we will elaborate more on this aspect in the coming articles, WhatsApp© allows a variety of medium to be used : text, images but also short videos and audio messages.

We must acknowledge that all our users are not yet part of these communities though.

As tech mature, the speed at which smartphones are entering Indian households is increasing, and the price of data is reducing, which gives us hope that all our users will access the communities soon.

Hence and to conclude this first article, we feel we are building the right thing at the right time. It is the right time to build communities around our program and to start leveraging technology to magnify our services.

Stay tuned for more insights on creating content for online teachers’ communities, and moderating groups for high engagement.

To know more about our work, check out our website : https://321-foundation.org/

This article was originally written and published by Sophie Bereau ,former design manager at 321 Education Foundation for UX Collective Publication. You can follow her work at https://medium.com/@sophie_b