Nithya has recently returned to TechChange as a Web Developer with our tech team! Two years ago we launched our first round of summer fellowships, where Nithya was actually a part of our inaugural group of tech fellows (see her previous staff highlight here). We took some time to talk more about her background and how it feels to be back at TechChange. Welcome to the TechChange Team, Nithya!

 

Q: So, what have you been up to since the end of your previous TechChange fellowship?

After my TechChange fellowship, I finished my last year at Harvey Mudd College and did a year of contract engineering projects in a variety of countries, including India, Myanmar, and Mali. I’m trying to figure out how to combine my tech skills (everything from programming to mechanical engineering) with my passion for tackling pressing social issues, especially with a focus on developing countries. I loved the travel and working on the ground in so many different places, with so many different people.

 

Q: What brought you back to TechChange?

The last couple of years have been filled with many very enriching experiences, but I’m still working on figuring out what kind of a path I’m hoping to continue down in the longer run. Especially given the intensity of my past year, I wanted some time to process, reflect, and research what could come next. However, I also didn’t want to stop feeling productive and driven to solve problems. Being at TechChange a couple years ago gave me my first taste of the social impact world and many members of the team have continued to be great sources of support and inspiration since. Coming back to TechChange has been the perfect way to contribute to an organization I believe in, work with a truly fantastic team, and do some exploring to figure out my future goals.

 

Q: How does web development fit into your interests? What interests you in your projects?

To be honest, I don’t know yet. There are a lot of ways web development can play a role in the kind of work I aspire to be part of, but there are also a variety of other types of technology/engineering that I have loved building. I think web development is a skillset I hope to maintain and grow, regardless of whether it is full-time or on the side. My work with TechChange keeps me learning on a daily basis and I’m excited to tackle as many problems I can. The great thing about being a developer at TechChange is that I know, at the end of the day, every piece of code contributes to organizations and projects around the world that are doing work I support.

 

Q: What is one thing that you’d love to learn or do in the next year?

I’d love to learn a new (spoken) language (or work on any of the languages I know partially), spend time in a new country, and figure out what direction I am taking my career. It will be a great year if I can manage to see a bunch of friends and family in the process too, given that I move around a lot.

 

Q: Lastly, what’s something that not a lot of people know about you?

I often play minesweeper while watching TV – yes, the game from forever ago where you click squares and try not to let bombs go off. Turns out it’s actually a logic puzzle if you don’t just play by randomly clicking squares! I can’t sit still long enough to just watch television like a normal person, I guess.

Earlier this month, Global Innovation Week 2017 convened development professionals from all over the world right here in Washington, D.C. to explore how the best ideas, innovations, and technologies are changing the way the U.S. Government, business and philanthropy work together. One key focus is how practitioners and social entrepreneurs and innovators can strengthen the evidence focus of their work, and facilitate awareness of these resources for collaboration.

Central to this discussion is the Office of Evaluation Sciences, who just launched a TechChange animation to explain how their evidence-based approach in collaboration with USAID is changing international development through the application of research insights about how people access, process, and act on information. For example, in Mozambique, a simple text reminded people living with HIV to take their medicine and go to the clinic. Patients who received the text were 25% more likely to stay on treatment – improving their chance to live long, healthy lives. A text is small, but its public health impact could be huge.

You can watch the OES and USAID video here, or in the embedded video below.

Sign up is open for the next Social Intrapreneurship for Innovation in Health and Wellness Course happening Nov. 6th – Dec. 15th, 2017! Apply soon, spaces are available on a first-come, first-served basis!

Social Intrapreneurship for Innovation in Health and Wellness is an online professional development course made possible through the Making More Health (MMH) partnership between Ashoka and Boehringer Ingelheim. The course is hosted by platform partner TechChange, for the fourth year in a row! 275 participants attended the course this past spring from 50 different countries.

Making More Health identifies, supports and scales innovative, entrepreneurial solutions to global health challenges in order to make more health happen for individuals, families and their communities.

Social intrapreneurship is when employees are empowered to adopt the innovative mindset of an entrepreneur within their organizations in order to foster a culture of productive engagement, both with their coworkers and clients. Sonja, who attended the spring course from the Netherlands, said “Looking at my project, not from the social entrepreneur view but the social intrapreneur one, is pretty exciting for future collaborations. That is why I really enjoyed this course, it gave me a lot of insight and great ideas on how to be a good partner for businesses in the near future.”

This course covers essential skills needed to effectively push new frontiers within an organization, such as pitching ideas to your team, leveraging shared value, and navigating institutional hurdles that may come up. By the end of the course, 26% of participants said they had already initiated an intrapreneurial action.

In the fall iteration of the course, the Ashoka team is continuing to bring in engaging and dynamic cross-sector guest experts, adding fresh content and insights into how to develop your intrapreneurship skills, and improving group collaboration.

Featured guest experts this past spring included Smita Satiani, a social innovation strategist at X (formerly known as Google [X]) who previously worked as Deputy Director of the White House’s Presidential Innovation Fellows Program, and Simon Manyara, an International Management Fellow at Boehringer Ingelheim, who uses social enterprise models to improve healthcare access within marginalized communities. We can’t wait to see who will be speaking in the course this fall!

To learn more about this course, contact Amy at courses@ashoka.org. Apply for the course here.

Over the last seven years, TechChange has hosted and delivered thousands of webinars to teach, convene, and communicate on technology and social change. So we wanted to share a few tips that we’ve learned for upgrading your webinar setup.

That’s because even though we’ve tried dozens of livestreaming services from OpenTok to UStream to Google Hangouts On Air (now YouTube Live), and now Zoom, the video you push out to a livestreaming services is only ever as good as the video, lighting, and audio that goes into it.

So before we start our September livestreaming from PopTech and the Connected Health Conference, here’s a few tips that may help for your next livestream. 

Tip 1: Upgrade Your Camera

While casual conversations are often most effective for learner engagement, relying on your laptop webcam for a strong event can often let you down. There are a variety of full-HD upgrades you can make for $50 or under, which you can easily order online and test for your needs. Of course, many individuals and organizations are already accustomed to high-quality video, sometimes because they have a DSLR or other solution which enables quickly recording, editing, and distributing video content. Until recently, linking your DSLR to your livestream has been a headache, but new solutions such as the Cam Link by Elgato makes it easy to turn a clean HDMI out into presenting itself to your computer as if it were any other webcam.

Camlink

But even the best camera won’t fix basic issues around composition. Make sure your subjects are visible in the shot, try to shoot from a higher angle to avoid double chins, and be wary of leaving too much empty space above (which makes the subject look small) or below (which makes the subject look far away).

Tip 2: Check Your Lighting!

Even a fantastic camera will have a tough time producing a solid picture in poor light. Being aware of shooting “with” the light will not only create depth and a visually interesting picture, but it will also make the subject look much better than the typical office or conference room lighting. When you’re ready, it’s worth exploring artificial lighting options such as custom LED light panels (TechChange uses these), in order to achieve consistency and a good shot every time. But you don’t need fancy lighting to achieve your desired results. Natural light from a window can be more than enough for creating a warm, natural look (left), provided you don’t have your back to the window without another light source, which will result in a backlit shot (right).

Chris Lighting

 

Tip 3: Invest in Audio 

Audio is what differentiates good webinars from great webinars. And it doesn’t have to be that hard. The main trick is to never rely on the microphone already installed in your camera or laptop. For best audio results, we like to use a wireless lavalier microphone, which lets you get the mic close to the speaker’s mouth without distracting from the shot. Best of all, some options you can plug directly into the camera (like these Sennheiser lavs), although we still prefer to use a secondary recording device like the Zoom H4N.

But…lavs can be tricky to set up and expensive to buy, as can shotgun mics or other solutions. Cheaper, easy options ouch as a Rode on-camera mic can be perfect for your needs, and get “good enough” audio even from multiple speakers.

GH4 Rode

 

In closing, these are just a few tips we’ve learned over the years, but there are many, many factors you might consider to keep improving your setup for student experiences. None of these tips are a substitute for engaging speakers and informative content, but they can help make sure that your video quality doesn’t take away from the learner experience.

Do you have any tips you’d like to share with us? Tweet @techchange and we’ll check it out!

Mihret Tamrat recently joined the team this month as an Instructional Design Fellow. Mihret brings a wealth of experience – ranging from education, language, development and more. We sat down with her to learn a bit more about her background. Welcome to the TechChange team, Mihret!

Q: So…how’s your first month going?

Fantastic! I love the atmosphere and my coworkers – I feel right at home. I get up every morning excited to start work.

Q: Could you share a bit about your background before joining the TechChange team?

I grew up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and moved to the U.S. in the summer of 2013. I graduated from Cornell University with a B.A. in Economics and minor in History this past May. Before my TechChange fellowship, I had interned at Eleni LLC (a company that built agricultural commodity exchanges for emerging markets based in Ethiopia), the Innovations for Poverty Action (in Lusaka, Zambia), and Harlem RBI (an education nonprofit in New York City).  

Q: What originally interested you in joining TechChange?

I was immediately drawn to TechChange because it encompassed the three things that I want to focus my career on: education, technology, and international development. When I was in high school, I knew I wanted to do something to help improve the quality of education for people in my community. TechChange solves part of the problem by providing high quality engaging and accessible educational materials to development workers.

Q: How does Instructional Design fit into your interests? What interests you in your projects?

I used to struggle to get my nine and ten-year-old students to write creative plays when I worked as an Odyssey of the Mind coach in Ithaca, NY. I quickly learned that regardless of how much information I threw at them, sometimes the delivery is more important than the material itself. A well thought out instructional design ensures the material gets its spotlight. Instructional design is all about structuring material in a way that maximizes understanding, engagement, and retention. At TechChange, I love the challenge of thinking through how a user will go through the material that we prepare and how best to present it. As a bonus, we get to work with our in-house creative team, so the possibilities are endless.

Q: What is one thing that you’d love to learn or do this Fall?

This is the first time I will be working in e-learning and I’m excited to sharpen my Articulate Storyline 360 skills. I think it’s a great tool that will serve me well in my career.

Q: Lastly, what’s something that not a lot of people know about you?

I speak four languages: Amharic, Tigrinya, English, and French. However, I wouldn’t call myself a native speaker in any of them. My love of Middle Eastern history led me to my passion for belly dance, which has lasted three years and counting!