Since 2015, over one-hundred organizations have endorsed the Principles for Digital Development—a set of nine “living” guidelines that can help practitioners integrate a suite of best practices into digital development projects.

In the spirit of putting the Digital Principles into practice, TechChange is partnering with the Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL) to build an introductory training and workshop curriculum on the Digital Principles. This will enable digital development professionals to train their teams and equip their organizations with reference materials, tools, analysis, and relevant case studies to increase awareness of the Principles and enhance their application across programs.

 

As an example for gauging awareness, workshop participants join in on an activity where they can state how much they may agree or disagree with a prompted statement or question.

These prompts encourage participants to think critically about how the Digital Principles may be aiding or hindering digital development efforts on their teams. Examples of such statements include:

  • Colleagues across my organization have a strong understanding of the Digital Principles and are integrating them into projects and decision-making or;
  • I am confident that I know enough about the Digital Principles and have sufficient resources to advocate for endorsing them at my organization.

Through this activity, participants can see how their colleagues and partners view the effectiveness of the Principles and candidly discuss challenges that they may have faced in referencing or using the Digital Principles.

 

Outside of building workshop sessions, TechChange and DIAL are designing a set of training materials and tools that can be used by practitioners to talk about the Principles and see where they may fit in, or not fit in, with their own work. These tools could be used by anyone who may need more insight on how digital development relates to ongoing programs at their organization. They are meant to be accessible and shared with practitioners who may not have a strong technical background.

For example, a program officer could use a set of quick reference materials detailing how the Principles can be applied to uphold responsible data management during the deployment phase of a project or perhaps see how a potential program could address critical gender inclusion challenges.

 

 

Alongside these quick reference materials and workshop activities, TechChange and DIAL are building a self-assessment tool that can be used by practitioners to see how proposed programs or ongoing projects meet different aspects of each Digital Principle across different phases of a project phase. The tool can provide analysis of key gaps across different Digital Principles and offer initial steps to address any identified gaps for programs.

The Digital Principles are not stagnant nor are they compulsory; they are meant to invite critical discussions and perspectives on how organizations can adopt more effective digital-led practices across their operations for development programs. In addition to providing best-practice guidance, the Digital Principles serve as common ground for the digital development community to engage in these constructive conversations.

Does your organization endorse the Digital Principles? Do you want to engage with TechChange and DIAL as we build and publish these training materials and assessment tools? Email info@techchange.org to talk with us about this project!

 

We’re often asked at TechChange why our approach to learning is unique.

New clients want to know, what’s our ethos in providing all these trainings? Why do we do it? Why should they trust us?

Over the past few years, we have developed an educational philosophy to explain just that.

At TechChange, our community learning model is based on 9 ideas that explain our beliefs on what teaching should look like and how a learning environment can best be fostered. Take a look at the 9 pillars of our educational philosophy below:

1. Good facilitation is everything: Whether it’s online or in-person. Teachers are at the heart of the TechChange model. The hallmarks of great classroom instruction include: asking questions at the appropriate depth, weaving comments together in a discussion, staging creative activities, varying techniques to reach a range of learning styles, supporting learners that need extra attention, etc. The assumption that most online learning providers make is that software plus content equals great learning, and that if the instructor knows a subject well then he or she is automatically a great teacher. Teaching online is not the same as teaching in a classroom. It requires a strong command of pedagogy (how to teach) and the digital skills to implement your lessons creatively and effectively. We help you prepare for these demands.

2. Learning is co-created: Too many platforms focus on a top-down, one-size-fits-all model for content delivery. We believe in facilitating  experiences that deepen and enrich peer-to-peer collaboration and give participants the chance to influence how a community learns and interacts in real-time. Again, it comes down to good facilitation.

3. Engagement is everything: Simply put, people learn better when they engage with each other. To support this, we’ve built a platform that accommodates a range of different learning styles, connectivity constraints, device requirements, language considerations– and it even makes learning fun!

And it shows: our courses have a over 10 times the completion rates of most MOOCS.

4. Let the data drive: Want to know what’s working and what’s not? Our real-time learning dashboards and analytics capture all kinds of details and give you the data you need to make decisions around how best to support your community. We also help produce beautiful interactive reports for funders and senior leadership.

5. More real-world application: Tired of tests and quizzes? Our platform includes a catalog of practical and creative assessments that participants actually want to take. And we help you measure impact in new ways after the course ends.

6. Emphasize D E S I G N : Lets stop making ugly and painful elearning. Courses should be beautiful and user experiences, intuitive.

7. Learning is lifelong: Learning shouldn’t stop at college or graduate school. The pressure to keep up with the pace of modern work is tremendous and courses should evolve over time to reflect this. The old “set-and-forget” model for uploading a course and “calling it a day” is dying.

8. Quality over quantity: Let’s face it, people are busy. The browser is a battlefield of diminishing attention spans. Giving your community access to 600 courses made in 2003 is probably not what they need. Let’s make shorter courses and fewer courses, but let’s make them better and more impactful.

9. Your mission matters to us: Finally, we’re not just a run-of-the-mill LMS provider. TechChange is a social enterprise. We’ve worked closely with 150 social sector organizations of all shapes and sizes for nearly a decade. Your mission matters to us. It’s not part of a CSR pledge or a nonprofit write-off, it’s the very reason we do what we do.

When building modern web applications, it can be daunting to do it alone. We take all of the help we can get!

Handling payments, sending automated emails, and creating the infrastructure to serve a worldwide audience is hard, so we have worked with a handful of trusted third-party services to help power our platform.

We wanted to share some of our favorite services. We hope this will illuminate what Personally Identifiable Information or PII (digital information about you) is shared and why. If you want to read more about our data practices and the other services we use, check out this longer explanation of how we handle data security.

 

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean is a leading cloud computing platform that we use to host our application and database servers. They help us support learners around the world with reliability and fast load times.

Though DigitalOcean hosts our databases that contain Personally Identifiable Information from the platform, we take several measures to keep the data secure, including end-to-end encryption and private networking.

DigitalOcean has taken steps to comply with GDPR that you can read about here.

 

Stripe

We get a lot of questions about how we handle credit card payments securely. We never store credit card information or any other information that can be used to create payments. Instead, we utilize Stripe — one of the leading credit card processors for small businesses globally.

When we let Stripe take care of your payments, we offload all of the sensitive data to them, including your real name, email address, and credit card number. Stripe has their own rigorous standards to ensure that they handle your payment data securely. They have also been a leader in documenting best practices for GDPR.

 

Postmark

Postmark helps us send automated emails like password resets, weekly course summaries, and @mentions from the platform. They’re run by an awesome company called Wildbit that, like us, has never taken investment.

When they send you an email, we make sure they have as little Personally Identifiable Information as possible — they usually only have your name and email address.

You may be interested in this awesome resource Postmark created for smaller companies getting ready for GDPR.

 

Working with trusted partners focused on user security is a must for us here at TechChange. What third party services does your organization work with?

 

Image pictured here from https://www.digitalocean.com/

Becky Bell has joined the TechChange team as a Junior Web Developer! We recently sat down with Becky to learn more about her background and experience. So excited to have you on the team, Becky!

Can you tell us a bit about your background before joining TechChange team?
I graduated from MIT in 2017 with a bachelor’s in computer science and decided to stay a little bit longer to complete a one-year master’s program there as well. As a grad student I worked as a TA in an introductory CS course and did research involving the development of new machine learning tools for an online news analysis platform.
 
What originally interested you in joining TechChange?
In college I became interested in how technology could be used to address important issues in society and how I could help support those efforts with my background in computer science. When I came across TechChange, I was really struck by their mission and the fact that with technology advancing at such a rapid pace, education and training are paramount. I loved the idea of getting to help build something that would help democratize access to tech and I was especially excited about the focus on international development.
 
What exactly are you going to be working on at TechChange?
I’ll be working with the rest of the tech team on improving, maintaining, and developing new features for TechChange’s online learning platform.
 
What interests you about this type of work?
I think web development is cool just because the Internet is such an integral part of everyday life and I love learning all the nuts and bolts of the underlying systems that make it work. I love the challenge and logic of programming and being able to apply my skills to help others learn and continue to do important work.
 
Is there anything you are looking forward to working on or learning at TechChange in the next few months?
I’ve mostly worked on front-end web development projects, so I’m excited for opportunities to work across the entire stack! I’m also looking forward to learning more about the international development space in general!
 
Lastly, what’s something that not a lot of people know about you?
I grew up in Texas so I’m a bit of a taco snob. I’m a pretty easy-going person, but tacos are one thing I will not compromise on.