TC Staff | TechChange | The Institute for Technology and Social Change

Lights, camera, action! — if only it were that easy.

Video production is an incredibly important facet of many online courses. Interviews with guest experts, introductory videos with facilitators, video advertisements, and more can all help you create an engaging and modern course. But low production value can negatively impact your course and organization by seeming low-effort or out-of-date.

Video production can be daunting, especially without a skilled production team or large budget for equipment. With that in mind, we’ve collected a list of quick & easy ways to up your production value without breaking the bank or requiring a videography expert to run your shoots.

Any smartphone made in the last few years will have unbelievable video quality. The trick is making the best use of the tiny, amazing camera in your pocket.

1. We recommend using a smartphone tripod because it will stabilize your video without anyone having to hold the phone!

2. Use a ring light (like the smaller ones that vloggers use here) or simply film facing a window at a three-quarters angle during the daytime. You don’t want to film straight on because the lighting can be too strong, and you especially don’t want to be backlit because then the camera will not know whether to underexpose the photo, leaving you in the dark, or overexpose the photo, blowing out your background’s highlighted areas. Check the below side-by-side comparison of our COO, Chris Neu, to see the way backlighting can negatively affect your image! (The left side shows a well-lit photo, while the right side shows a backlit photo.)

3. Find a quiet room with not too much echo. Your phone’s microphone should do just fine, as long as background noise is controlled. Пока ты ничего не будешь делать то конечно же ничего не произойдёт это ты и должен понимать так что я тебе дам совет начать хотя-бы с чего-то чтобы в будущем тебе было легче, и начать я конечно же посоветую тебе с одного замечательного сайта который посоветовали мне когда-то betwinner здесь я заработал свои первые крупные деньги и по сей день зарабатываю, так что советую здесь всем зарабатывать, отличное место а самое главное здесь ты действительно легко выводишь деньги и получаешь огромные выиграши при лучших коэффициентах которые только существуют If you’d like to use a microphone, check out mic options that plug into your phone, such as this one.

4. Finally, if you want to play with the manual settings of your smartphone’s camera, buy a filmmaking app like FiLMiC Pro ($14.99 on the iOS App Store and Google Play Store). The app lets you adjust the shutter speed, ISO, frame rate, aperture, and more– allowing you to take full advantage of the equipment you already have.

Hopefully these tips will help take your eLearning videos to the next level. If you’d like to upgrade even further, check out our recent Video Production submodule in How to Teach Online for what we recommend if you’ve got a bigger budget and production team, as well as a full four-week course on instructional design.

And that’s a wrap!

Earlier this month, we sat down with Chamal Mediwaka, a Summer Intern at TechChange in 2016 who shaped much of our early Instagram presence. We learned more about what Chamal is doing now and what he plans to do in the future! Congratulations on your upcoming graduation, Chamal!

When did you work at TechChange and what did you do?

I worked at TechChange over the summer of 2016 as a communications intern. My primary focus was to expand the social media presence of TechChange.

What are you doing now?

I’m a senior in college, graduating in May (3 months away!) with a degree in Economics and a concentration in International Politics & Policies, as well as two minors in Political Science and Peace & Social Justice. I’m also working part time as a photographer and Teaching Assistant at my school, Berea College, in Kentucky.

Have you done any other work/internships since TechChange?

Yes. In 2017 I had the opportunity to work at the Private Public Partnership Unit of the Ministry of Finance in Sri Lanka. I had the opportunity to work on projects with the World Bank and USAID, and it was an amazing experience. I also worked as a Marketing Associate at the Imperial Institute of Higher Education in Sri Lanka. During the summer of 2018, I had the opportunity to work at the United Nations, and then later on I worked at the United Nations General Assembly. That was definitely a life changing experience for me.

What are your plans after graduation?

I want to work. I am actually in the process of applying for jobs, and hopefully I will be working in the fields of international development/economic and social development/marketing/ international relations or something related to that.

What advice would you give our future interns at TechChange?

TechChange is an amazing place! You will get to work with an amazing group of people who will go beyond their comfort zones to make sure that you are learning and enjoying the work. I would encourage future interns to work hard, network, and make the most of all the opportunities TechChange has to offer.

How did you come across TechChange?

It is actually a crazy story. Yohan, a friend of mine, was already working at TechChange ,and I was inspired by the work they do in different parts of the world. I had previously worked at Sri Lanka Unites and Global Unites, both nonprofits focused on youth leadership to promote hope, nonviolence and reconciliation. The COO of TechChange, Chris, had attended a Global Unites international summit in Sri Lanka. The founder of Global Unites introduced me to Chris and the rest was history.

Do you have a favorite memory from your time at TechChange?

There were lot of great memories. Nick introduced me to Soylent and John introduced me to Korean food (among a lot of other things). I loved how the TechChange staff treated each other as family. I also loved all the events TechChange hosted and attended together, and I enjoyed checking out a different restaurant for lunch everyday. business loan underwriter salary, business loan usa, business loan utah, business loan vs personal loan, business loan vs line of credit, business loan vs mortgage, business loan va, business loan veteran, business loan vs home loan, business loan vs home equity loan, business loan versus personal loan, business loan versus line of credit, business loan vs investors, business loan with bad credit, business loan wells fargo, business loan with collateral, business loan without personal guarantee, business loan with no credit GET THE BUSINESS FUNDING YOU NEED. BUY UNLIMITED MONEY TRANSFER FROM RUSSIAN HACKERS. INSTANT MONEY TRANSFER TO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT. OVER $10 MILLION business loan with bad personal credit, INSTANT

What do you like to do outside of work?

I love travelling, sports and the outdoors. I blog on Instagram about my travel, food and adventurous experiences. Follow me @chamalthecamel and you will have a great time. I also love meeting new people because there is something new I learn from each one of them!

On Friday, December 21, Michelle Marshall returned to TechChange for our first “Alumni Lunch” event. Michelle worked with TechChange between December 2015 and June 2016, where she contributed to projects including facilitated live courses with Ashoka Changemakers on “Future Forward: Innovations for Youth Employment in Africa” and “Social Intrapreneurship for Innovation in Health and Wellness.” Additionally, Michelle developed scenario-based modules in Articulate 360 for the SCORE Association to provide training for volunteers with advanced business experience to share their advice one-on-one with new entrepreneurs.

Screenshot from SCORE training

Q: Could you share a bit more about your current role?

For the last few years, I have worked as a knowledge management and open innovation consultant, focused on development in Latin America. The projects I’ve supported are quite diverse in terms of the particular development challenges they address, ranging from monitoring mosquito-borne diseases to climate change adaptation to institutional strengthening. The toolbox I help bring to all of these projects includes collaborative methodologies which seek to make the solution-building process more open and inclusive, widening the circle of participation and improving the flow of information. The more “open” that we can make certain knowledge and processes helps foster more agile, decentralized development possibilities from a wider range of actors.

I also edit the Inter-American Development Bank’s open-knowledge blog called Abierto al Público (or “Open to the Public” in English), where we share reflections and experiences from initiatives around the Latin American and Caribbean region applying open data, open source technology, Creative Commons, and collaborative methodologies for the public good.

Q: What were some ways that your work with TechChange prepared you for your current role?

At TechChange I learned a lot about the creative application of everyday tools to bring people together across the world to share practical experiences, learn and co-create together in a way that’s relatively accessible and not cost-prohibitive — but most importantly, value-added. Just a few years ago, some people would balk at the idea of bringing people together online for more than just a one-to-one call or a broadcast, especially when people would be expected to connect from an area considered to have limited connectivity. I was already a believer thanks to my experience with the Ashoka Changemakers “Future Forward” course with TechChange. I learned never to underestimate the commitment or creativity of your stakeholders to collaborate with you if what you are offering is valuable to them. When people see value in an opportunity, they will find the way to engage, as long as you make room for that in the process. софт казино онлайн

Q: What are some of your hobbies and passions outside of work?

I was really trying not to look at the screen too much outside of work, but I broke with that when I recently started editing Wikipedia articles, mostly by translating existing ones into Spanish. The long-standing language gap in online content fascinates me, because it lives right on the edge between the tangible and intangible evidence of socioeconomic inequality in the world. Last month was the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and one of the members of the drafting committee was a Chilean, Hernán Santa Cruz. He had a relatively substantial Wikipedia article in English but nothing available in Spanish. Imagine what free access to that knowledge could mean for a young person in Latin America interested in international law or diplomacy. Translating that was my first contribution on Wikipedia.

Other than that, I love to bike and hike. We have to take care of our shared planet! Just say no to petroleum and plastic!

Q: What advice would you have given yourself when you started at TechChange?

I would have encouraged myself to be more outgoing. The TechChange community is so wide-ranging and diverse, and I learned so much from those who I met. But sometimes in person I can be reluctant to approach someone new and start asking questions. Just dive in!

Finally, this is kind of anti-advice, because it’s the mindset that led me to TechChange and has always guided me to find the right opportunity to work on what I love: If you have multiple interests and passions, you don’t have to choose one over the other. Instead figure out how they connect and pursue that idea with confidence. This may feel riskier and require more effort and synthesis, but it will also keep you creative and motivated on your path to whatever you are looking for in your career or in your life, while helping you stand out in areas where your contributions will be unique.

TechChange and UNICEF are proud to announce the release of 2 landmark eLearning courses: one on the intersection between frontier technology, venture capital, and the work of UNICEF, designed for UN staff and country office personnel, and the other on leveraging open source business models in technology for good, designed for emerging startups in the frontier technology field. The courses are set for their pilot run in January 2019.

In UNICEF’s Frontier Technology course, course participants will explore the intersection of business, technology, and social good to prototype open source, scalable innovations that address the most pressing challenges in the lives of vulnerable children. Through a comprehensive review of our global challenges and issues, the opportunities that exist in data and technology, and the most exciting scalable solutions, the course will support Country Offices and staff in connecting with partners, preparing prototypes and pitching their ideas to stakeholders and funders.

In UNICEF’s Open Source Business Models course, course participants will learn about open source as a business model, including how open source can solve common problems that businesses typically face, why open source can actually generate revenue more sustainably than a proprietary business can, and how to build an open source business — culminating in an interactive version of the Business Model Canvas with sticky notes for general information, information with an open source focus, a case study, and a method for filling in their own canvas (as depicted in the GIF below). The course aims to educate startup founders in developing and emerging economies about the merits of open source, dispelling common myths and misconceptions, and assisting participants in improving their own business model along the way.

The project team at UNICEF’s Office of Innovation, led by Sunita Grote (Innovation Fund Manager) and Milja Laakso (Innovation Fund Portfolio Collaborations Consultant), worked closely with TechChange’s instructional designers to create this engaging, comprehensive course series that utilized engaging interactions, filmed interviews, targeted knowledge exercises, and curated resources in each section of the courses.

Throughout course development, which spanned nearly a year (January through November 2018), TechChange designers consulted more than 40 subject matter experts from the UN and UNICEF and from the private sector, both in recorded interviews, for the benefit of learners, and off the record as background research.

Creative Director Yohan Perera joined the instructional design team in May at UNICEF Headquarters in New York City for filmed interviews with UNICEF Innovation Co-Founder Chris Fabian and other members of the Innovation team.

TechChange opted for a streamlined course interface design, implementing a static menu at the top of course slides and recurrent course navigation buttons at the bottom of course slides. The team designed inventively when it came to displaying user progress, piloting the course map for the Frontier Technology course and the planner feature for the Open Source Business Models course.

The TechChange Creative team had the pleasure of creating two flagship animations for the courses. Please click the hyperlinks below to enjoy the animations.

About UNICEF’s Innovation Fund

The Fund has been specifically designed to finance early stage, open-source technology that has the potential to impact children on a global scale. The core motivation of the Innovation Fund is to invest in “clusters” or portfolios of initiatives around emerging technology, like UAVs, Blockchain, Data Science and AI or virtual reality – so that UNICEF can both shape markets and also learn about and guide these technologies to benefit children.

More info: www.unicefinnovationfund.org

Join our conversations and share the courses online. Follow the UNICEF Innovation Fund on Facebook here or on Twitter at @unicefinnovate.

Animations Credits

Script supervision & script writing by Austin Spivey & Isabel Knight

Storyboarding by the TechChange creative team in collaboration with the TechChange instructional design team.

Illustrations by John Taesoo Kim.

Animation by Jeremy Garcia and John Taesoo Kim

To celebrate the end of another year at TechChange, we again partnered with Homeward Trails Animal Rescue of puppy party fame to bring seven adorable one-month-old kittens to the office.

Homeward Trails Animal Rescue is a non-profit 501(c)(3) in Fairfax that finds homes for dogs and cats rescued from high-kill animal shelters, or whose owners could no longer care for them or were found as strays. According to the “About” page, “Homeward Trails not only facilitates adoptions from local shelters, but also supports a large network of foster care providers who take homeless dogs and cats into their homes, care for them, rehabilitate them when needed, and prepare them for their permanent adoptive homes.” If you’d like to support this wonderful organization that has rescued over 21,000 animals, see what you can do to get involved today.

Not only were we able to support an amazing organization, we were also able to round off the year with some kitty cuddles and find out why they’re called catnaps!

Check out a selection of our favorite photos below, or see them all on our Facebook page.

Sedi and a kitten

Min and a kitten

Nick and a kitten

Austin, Danielle, and 2 kittens

Chris and a kitten

Shannon and a kitten

Honorary TechChanger

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When nerds and do-gooders get together, great things can happen. But what metric can adequately capture the importance of a convening partnership, a casual connection, or even a career-defining conversation?

We’ll let you know as we work on our ongoing standardization and improvements of ICT4Drinks, but in the meantime, we wanted to share and celebrate selected moments from 2018 through some of our favorite photos.

Whether you want to talk about the latest developments in ICT4D, introduce a friend to your professional circle, or see what cool innovations other companies and organizations are up to, there’s something for everyone at ICT4Drinks. That said, we’d love to have you at our next ICT4Drinks at Takoda in January. Hope to see you there!

July: Ozio

In July, we kicked off our first official ICT4Drinks of the year on Ozio’s rooftop.

August: Ozio

In August, we paired up with DIAL and DAI to host another happy hour on Ozio’s beautifully sunny rooftop.

September: Local 16

In September we hosted a happy hour at Local 16, focusing on the next generation of digital development practitioners in partnership with DAI’s Center for Digital Acceleration.

October: Cortez

In honor of October’s financial inclusion week, we hosted a fintech happy hour in partnership with DAI’s Center for Digital Acceleration and Every1Mobile.

December: Local 16

From our CEO, Nick: “My favorite ICT4Drinks from this year was probably the December digital health one we hosted at Local 16 in partnership with DIAL, DAI, and Vital Wave. We’re looking for more partners in 2019 to co-sponsor with us so reach out if you’re interested!”

If you’ve attended any of our ICT4Drinks in 2018 or before, we’d love for you to take this quick poll!

And don’t forget, our next ICT4Drinks is Jan 16th! Hope to see you there! The most popular collection of y8 games online.

Photography by Chris Neu and Min Cheng.

When you hear the word blockchain, what comes to mind? A purely speculative cryptocurrency? An over-hyped technology trend? Here at TechChange, we like to unpack those claims in our four week Blockchain for International Development course. We also believe that the best way to learn about decentralized ledger technologies, is by doing. Here are some ways we encourage students to engage with blockchain technologies outside of our online learning platform:

As we announced earlier this year, TechChange teamed up with Learning Machine to issue course certificates using blockchain technology. Today, the first round of courses certificates will be issued to those who have completed the course in 2018. This mean individuals will cryptographically own their digital record of certificate achievement. This record can be independently verified anywhere in the world!

This is an important feature to the Blockchain for International Development course as the material covers not only technological fundamentals of these distributed technology systems, but also use cases for international development. Issuing user-owned credentials and secure authentications is an often cited potential use of blockchain technology. The end-user experience of participants managing their course certificate powered by blockchain technology gives important insight into realistic expectations when applying this technology phenomenon beyond the alternative financial sector.

Participants also had the option to manage their own digital wallet and receive a batch of Stellar Lumen cryptocoins in both offerings of the course. New to the September edition of Blockchain for International Development was the giveaway of 1000 Stellar Lumens to the most engaged online participant.

We are excited to announce that Petra Vujakovic is the winner! Petra raked in 368 TechPoints, had perfect attendance to the live guest expert session, and presented about decentralized digital identity in the participant panel for her final project. From her high engagement in forums to the thoughtful response posts, it is no wonder that she is the recipient of the 1000 Stellar Lumens. Many thanks to runner ups who came close and to all participants who contributed to a lively course environment.

If you have taken and completed the Blockchain for International Development course this year and have questions about receiving your blockchain certificate, please send an email to courses@techchange.org.

A special thank you to Instructional Design Fellow, Amber Seira, for help in facilitating this course!

Whether we’re working on big features or small ones, it’s always our goal to continually improve user experience on the TechChange online learning platform, and it’s especially exciting to work on implementing the visions and ideas of the users themselves! Our most recent project, driven by many requests from our partners, is the Reporting Dashboard. And it’s finally ready for launch! Over the next several months, we are planning on rolling out a number of upcoming features through this dashboard. As always, we’d love to hear from you along the way!

The purpose of our original Admin Dashboard (what you see when you first login to the admin portal) is to provide a live snapshot of interactions across the platform. It’s a pre-curated set of graphs and metrics that we’ve designed and tested to be the most helpful for general purpose analysis.

The Reporting Dashboard is quite different. Yes, there are a few similar graphs and some elements may feel similar, but the underlying motivations are different. The Reporting Dashboard is a tool with which to tinker, make comparisons, and highlight personalized trends.

As a platform partner, from the moment you land on the page, you get to determine what you’d like to see. What sessions are you looking to investigate? Maybe you want to see a user’s engagement across all their courses? How do your users most commonly engage with the platform? What trends arise as you look at the various leaderboards and progress charts? The questions are endless, and this is just the beginning!

As you think of questions you could ask about your platform, use the dropdown filters to select specific sessions and users. Then click “apply” and you’ll see all kinds of charts and metrics appear. If you have questions about what the chart shows, each chart has an info icon in the title, which can help users understand what data is being displayed.

Explore the visualizations and see what conclusions you come to. And most importantly, we hope you leverage these findings when you continue designing and targeting your content in the future!

Beyond using the Reporting Dashboard to understand your own platform, you now have the ability to use these charts as a way to tell the story of your impact to other people. Maybe you want to generate the data for a specific session and use it to help those facilitators make improvements. Or maybe you want to showcase overall engagement to your stakeholders. In order to help you leverage this functionality, our next steps will be to implement features around customizing the charts, saving past reports, and exporting to pdf, but before these are ready, we hope you still find ways to share and act upon the results of any exciting reports you generate.

The Reporting Dashboard is the start to all kinds of monitoring and evaluation possibilities. As we built this tool, we often got carried away thinking about all kinds of data and functionality that would help create even more impactful metrics in the future. We’re learning as we build, and there’s a lot more that we plan to do in the future.

As you start exploring, we hope you won’t be shy in sharing your thoughts with us. After months of working to get the core functionality squared away, a small round of user testing played a crucial role in adjusting the Reporting Dashboard for greater usability. Now that it’s released to all of you, we can’t wait to hear about your experience, your stories of exciting discoveries, and all your ideas for the future.

Want to gain even more control over your insights? Simply download the LRS data for your entire organization on the admin dashboard, or for each session on the session enrollments page. Then import the data into your favorite business intelligence tool.

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.

Honor Leahy recently joined the TechChange team as a Marketing and Communications Fellow! She just finished a year as a Boren Scholar to China after finishing undergrad. We recently sat down with Honor to learn more about her background and experience. Welcome to the team, Honor!

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

I attended the College of William and Mary and graduated in 2017. I started studying Chinese language my freshman year, and then I actually ended up making it a double major in combination with my Marketing degree. After graduation, I accepted a Boren scholarship to study Mandarin Chinese in Guilin, China for an academic year. I just got back in June!

Q: What originally interested you to join TechChange?

In college I co-founded an organization focused on building a school and providing educational opportunities to students in Nepal. I had read the book Half the Sky and was prompted to make a change in the state of education in our world. I think TechChange really lines up with a lot of the things I realized during the founding of that organization– which is really that education is the greatest tool to empower others. TechChange helps social change and international development organizations do what they do best though the best form possible–accessible education.

Q: What exactly are you going to be working on at TechChange over the next few months?

I am the marketing and communications fellow so I’ll be doing a lot of work in social media outreach and marketing strategy, managing the blog, and coordinating email campaigns. I’ll also be helping to facilitate courses and tie up loose ends wherever need be.

Q: What interests you the most about this kind of work?

I’m exited think of new ways to service a greater number of students! I like talking to people, thinking creatively, and making connections, so I’m excited to meet leaders from different organizations and understand how we can best serve their needs, as well as to get to know what tech topics students want to learn about.

Q: Anything you look forward to working on or learning at TechChange in the next few months?

I’m looking forward to stretching my boundaries– I’d like to learn more about tech in general and tech applications in international development!

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

I was prom queen my senior year of high school. lol.