eLearning | TechChange | The Institute for Technology and Social Change

Big data is already giving us better TV shows. Could it also help build a better education system?

This week our team went to 1776 Reboot: Education Meetup, where we heard from leading experts from Coursera talk about the future of online MOOCs, as well as entrepreneurs from TechStars about applying an accelerator approach to learning. But one of the real stars of the night was Richard Culatta of the Department of Education, who declared that we now have more data about what kids watch on Netflix than how they learn in school.

So what?

When Netflix rolled out House of Cards as all 13 episodes developed on metrics learned over the years from their watchers, Kevin Spacey stated in a Business Insider article:

“It’s a real opportunity for the film and television industry to learn the lesson the music industry didn’t learn. Give the audience what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, at a reasonable price, and they’ll buy it.”

In our last post, Four Reasons Why Universities Aren’t Ready to Move Online, we looked at how universities need to invest more heavily in producing compelling online content — not just videotaping professors lecturing. The dirty secret behind online all of the education platforms that are generating the creative chaos around online education is that they are not providing an online education at all, but rather educational content in a structured format. If that’s the case, what can online education learn from the current revolution in content distribution?

In criticizing current approaches to online learning, we often refer to the “Netflix” approach to online education — passive consumption of videos instead of interactive back-and-forth learning. But there’s no doubt that there is a market for passive consumption of educational videos, ranging from the current gold standard of Lynda.com to simply looking up a how-to screencast on YouTube.

Piecemeal Content (Amazon). Amazon is a retail company, that wants to also sell digital content. Think of this as purchasing and streaming an episode of Ken Burns Civil War. But are customers willing to buy educational content when there has been hesitation to do so for TV (hence the existence of PBS).

Free Prosumer (YouTube). YouTube is a Google product that wants to build general user data. The problem here for users is discovery and quality control — it’s hard to find quality, and it’s hard to find programs of study as opposed to small snippets of knowledge.
Freemium Model (Hulu). Hulu is an ad-supported subscription video service, that wants to build interest in existing broadcast content. It’s also perhaps the closest to the existing Coursera and EdX model. While the education is free, they are looking at “freemium” educational models where they can charge for certificates of completion or credit.
Premium Distribution Model (HBO). This could be TED talks right now, although those are free — TED controls the vertical by organizing the conferences, filming the speakers, and then distributing on their own platform. The content is often superb, but–like HBO–is restricted in it’s theme and format. HBO is a cable company that happens to be online.
Content Buffet + Original Content (Netflix). Netflix provides on-demand Internet video streaming. Most interestingly, they then used big data from how their users watch other media to figure out how best to deliver its own content. There’s not a perfect comparison yet, but there are some indicators of what’s to come.

Khan Academy started off with simple YouTube videos of basic skills. Since then, they have aggregated them into groups with clear skill progression and then allows students to practice with post video problems, which give them an enormous amount of feedback on how well students are learning. This data not only helps students learn through application of knowledge to problems with instant response, but easily enables Khan to present additional problems to support or remediate weak areas. And all that data can show Khan how to make an even better experience by combining it with theories on effective learning.

Big Data companies like Hortonworks are trumpeting data-driven education, while new startups like Clever and learnsprout are helping developers get in touch with new sources of data on achievement and teaching. Even government is getting in on the game. Led by the Department of Education’s Richard Culatta and the administration’s general open data philosophy, every metric available is being drafted to the use of improving education across the country. But the metric gathering potential of online learning is even greater.

Brace yourselves: We may be about to see some of the best educational content of all time built on metrics that traditional educators could only dream about. And moreover, since this isn’t just about producing content one time for one show, but for topics that will require constant updating and modification for improvements.

What will your courses look like when your professors are actually producing quality content and A/B testing the heck out of it? When they improve not semester to semester, but week to week?

This post was co-authored with Mike Brown.

Co-authored by Mike Brown.

The future of higher education may be online, but the present is still a mess.

The New Yorker recently published a thorough exploration of MOOCs and higher education. Coincidentally, this piece came out as the same week that my alma mater announced it had failed to fill about a third of its incoming freshman class. Whether a temporary enrollment misfire or permanent disruption of the education system, both the struggles of terrestrial universities and the potential for an online future raise important concerns about how higher education will survive.

Although perhaps not the author’s intention, the article revealed five key differences between traditional teaching institutions moving traditional courses online and courses designed to be online from the very beginning:

No experience in producing online content. The main video editor for Nagy’s course is a graduate assistant who recently defended her dissertation in Greek history, not a Web editor by vocation. Good educational content requires audio, video, graphics, and subject matter to work in unison. Universities are buying platforms like marble mansions and filling them with cardboard content. But live teaching is hard, which is why good lecturers are hard to come by. The same applies to other modes of delivery, and with MOOCs, the potential efficacy lost from skimping on the experience will scale with the course, growing linearly, while the cost of getting it right from the beginning is fixed, getting cheaper per person as number of students scale.

No clear teaching or evaluation model. This is still the “let a thousand flowers bloom” stage of online learning, but that has to end eventually. While it was good to see the back-and-forth on the socratic method, without methods of evaluating work, it seems premature to congratulate education on cracking this nut. Multiple-choice quizzes to test reading comprehension will never replace essays, and machines are a long way off from being able to grade 31,000 essays accurately. But besides peer grading, which is successfully used by Coursera and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization’s “Around the Globe and Around the Clock: The Science and Technology of the CTBT,” we don’t have better ways of evaluating student progress in depth, as well as breadth. New models and tools are needed for these subjects.

No clear business model. It initially seemed unnecessary to take a trip and cameraman to Greece as part of the budget for this course, but if students are willing pay for that authentic experience, then why not? It may well be that including such edutainment content as shots from the real places, much like the history channel used to do, will benefit students greatly; what’s most important is that they track how it changes how students engage, and perform further experiments to validate these theories.

No access to social networks. Perhaps the most telling part of the article was the admonition of universities not just as delivering elite education, but connecting elites with one another into lifelong networks. Emphasis on admonition. Not only is more data available to mine when students interact in social network type settings, but students and teachers benefit from the collaborative and iterative experience inherent in group-based contemporaneous learning.

Traditional universities are, in the words of the article, standing in front of an avalanche. They are understandably attached to their current model, which they have developed over centuries, but it leaves them vulnerable to the scale-free model of online learning. The prospect of a global audience and substantial cost savings from online coursework is attractive. However, they are poorly positioned to benefit from either without revolutionizing their entire approach. Universities, in this new age, are facing the classic Shumpeterian forces of creative destruction. Much like the railroads, which once dominated transport, innovation is placing pressure on their model, and if they remain attached to a model displaced by innovation, they will be destroyed by it.

Are there more ways that universities are failing to keep up with the times? Are products of e-learning startups falling too far from the educational tree? Join the conversation in the comments.

Our mHealth: Mobile Phones for Public Health Online Certificate course will run for its second time from June 3rd – 28th and we couldn’t be more excited about it. Along with The mHealth Alliance, we have had six months to reflect on course feedback and refine curriculum to make sure we are offering the most comprehensive and enjoyable online instruction possible.

Twitter Chat Contest:

Want to win a free seat? Then join us for a Twitter chat using #mHealth101 on Thursday, May 17th at 2 pm EDT to be entered in a random drawing! @Techchange and@mHealthAlliance will be co-hosting the event and will be discussing course curriculum, mHealth trends, and case studies. More details to come but tweet at @TechChange or @mHealthAlliance if you have questions and we look forward to having you join us!

What is the Course Structure?

Students will have the opportunity to engage directly with leading applications developers, and learn from practitioners who have had significant experience in implementing mobile phone based communication systems around the globe.

The entire course is delivered online. The total time commitment is a minimum of 2-5 hours a week. The course is designed to be highly interactive and social, but we also work hard to ensure that the majority of the content can be experienced in a self-paced manner. It will feature one or two real-time interactions each week, such as live discussions, live expert interviews, and live simulations. In order to accommodate busy schedules of mission staff from around the world, we’ve set up a learning environment where participants have plenty of options to explore content that is most relevant to them through live content and interactions, readings, and videos.

Facilitators will produce weekly audio podcast recaps for participants to catch up on key conversations and topics. Participants can also access all course content six months after course completion so the material can be revisited later.

Schedule:

● Week 1: Introduction to Mobile Health

● Week 2: Strengthening Health Systems

● Week 3: Moving Towards Citizen-Centered Health

● Week 4: Large Scale Demonstration Projects

For even more information about the course, visit the course page or take a look at the syllabus. To make sure you get a seat, fill out an application here and get enrolled.

When something breaks mid-class it can be awfully hard not to blame your students. But the truth is that nobody cares about the tech you’re used to using or how it works optimally. They care about what works right now.

I recently had the pleasure of facilitating a small, intensive course that revolved around back-and-forth between a handful of students in remote locations and a subject-matter expert. In the second day of the class, our video platform (that had only days earlier managed dozens of participants without difficulty) was already cracking at the seams while students conversed over low bandwidth from locations in Africa and E. Europe. One student suggested switching to Skype, which ended up working significantly better for the remainder of that session.

The reason was fairly simple: Instead of having to use the centralized OpenTok servers in remote locations, the Skype users could connect through nodes everywhere because they themselves were acting as nodes. Skype is essentially a modified peer-to-peer (P2P) network application, which is why Skype works as well as it does in remote areas — you are both the user and the provider for other users of video conferencing.

So, problem solved. Now we just move back to Skype and get rid of our existing OpenTok video platform. Right?

Not exactly.

Online education requires tradeoffs. The more interactive your class, the more strain you will place on your system at scale, which is exactly what Coursera stumbled upon recently during their “MOOC Mess“ as they tried to provide a facilitated format to 41,000 students. Online education gets lumped into one category, but ultimately 1-on-1 or small discussion sessions are entirely different experiences than facilitated workshops or massively open online courses (MOOCs). Since we try our hardest to be platform agnostic, we’re always looking for new ways to engage students via video while always looking for a better web-conferencing platform as needed. Generally, this is has created our current rule-of-thumb for class size and video conferencing:

Under 10 students: Skype Premium (especially in low-bandwidth)
10-150 students: OpenTok (but works fine for low-bandwidth with video toggling)
Massive: YouTube or Vimeo (use forums or such instead for asynchronous engagement)

If you’re looking for an off-the-shelf solution for holding a small webinar or sharing your taped lecture, you’d be hard pressed to do better than Skype or Vimeo/YouTube. We hold occasional webinars on Skype and host our educational video content (and animated videos) on existing video platforms, which we then share in our media library. But our problem has consistently been that we believe good educational learning and a “flipped classroom” model to exist somewhere between the two models — more than a webinar, but not quite a MOOC. And that scale is achieved not by speaking at an audience of 50,000, but by engaging an interested 50 online in as close to a classroom-like format as possible. That’s why we’ve gone to such lengths to build a customized video streaming solution in OpenTok for our students. Still, it’s good practice to constantly evaluate and re-evaluate the options, so we wanted to share some of our thoughts below on the relative advantages of each platform:

Skype	OpenTok
Requires download	No download required
Clearer and more responsive real-time audio chats of 4-10	Flexible real-time chat of 1-50 (simultaneously publishing, up to thousands viewing only)
Login required (SkypeID)	No login required
No administrative controls	Enable / block speakers as needed
No optimizing for high / low bandwidth	Client-side toggling of video
Proprietary format	Open API for custom integration

That said, we’d love to hear from you. What has worked well for your organization? Please let us know in the comments below if you have suggestions.

On February 26, USAID received the “Best Government Policy for Mobile Development” award at GSMA’s Mobile World Congress 2013. And while the Mobile Solutions team was receiving an award in Barcelona, TechChange and the MS team were also receiving over 1,500 mobile poll responses from recipients in DRC taking part in an online exercise designed by 173 USAID staff and implementing partners in 21 countries. The way this was possible is through harnessing the same potential for public-private partnerships used for external implementation and applying it to internal education and collaboration at USAID.

Fig. 1: MapBox visualization of GeoPoll responses.

The exercise was part of a 4-week online course in Mobile Data Solutions designed to provide a highly interactive training session for USAID mission staff and its implementing partners to share best practices, engage with prominent technologists, and get their hands on the latest tool. Rather than simply simulating mobile data tools, USAID staff ran a live exercise in DRC where they came up with 10 questions, target regions, and desired audience. The intent was to not teach a tool-centric approach, but instead begin with a tech-enabled approach to project design and implementation, with an understanding of mobile data for analysis, visualization, and sharing.

Fig. 2: Student locations for TC311 class.

This would have been a formidable exercise for any organization, but fortunately we augmented USAID’s development capacity with the abilities of three organizations. TechChange provided the online learning space, facilitation, and interactive discussions. GeoPoll ran the survey itself using their custom mobile polling tool. And MapBox provided the analysis and visualization needed to turn massive data into a simple and attractive interface. (Want to check out the data for yourself? Check out the raw data Google Spreadsheet from GeoPoll!)

But while the creation of an interactive online workshop for small-group interaction requires barriers to scale, the content is under no such restrictions. One of the videos from our previous course on Accelerating Mobile Money provided an animated history of M-PESA, the successful mobile money transfer program in Kenya, which allows everything mobile phone users to pay for everything from school fees to utility bills and is proving transformative in cases such as Haiti.

Fig. 3: M-Pesa animation used for TC311 and USAID Video of the Week

But there’s still plenty of work to do. As mobile phones continue their spread to ubiquity, the challenges for applying their potential to development will only increase, along with the continuing possibilities as the technology continues to improve. However, in the short term, we’re focused on increasing mobile access, which is the topic of our next course. If you work at USAID or with an implementing partner, we hope that you’ll consider joining us and lending your voice to this process.

Our OpenGov 101 Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is a Semifinalist in the Knight News Challenge! Submitted in partnership with Global Integrity, we’re hoping to develop a global curricula to connect the open government community with the tools, experts, best practices, and organizations driving the field forward. While we still have some skepticism of MOOCs as a cure-all for online education and believe there are many ways to improve how MOOCs are executed, in this case we believe a MOOC format makes sense.

We believe the challenge for OpenGov isn’t just making new tools to open up governments, but empowering citizens to use those tools to pursue accountability and transparency. After all, open data has little value if people can’t use it (according to the Harvard Business Review), or as we put in our introduction to our Digital Organizing and Open Government course:

But don’t take our word for it. There are a number of very cool finalists in the remaining 40 in the refinement phase, so head on over and check them out if you like. We’ve left applause and feedback for a few already!

If you’re interested in contributing to our submission, here are three easy ways to get involved:

1) Celebrating #OpenGovDay on April 8.

April 8 marks three years since key provisions of President Obama’s Open Government Directive were due. We think this is a big deal worth celebrating – but we want to hear what you think.

This week, tweet @techchange or use the hashtag #OpenGovIs to tell us what open government means to you.

Then – on April 8 – join our Tweet Storm by following and using hashtag #OpenGovDay throughout the day. We’ll be retweeting the best #OpenGovIs submissions to amplify your voice – and we’ll be offering special deals on our new class – Digital Organizing and Open Government.

2) Feedback or Applause on our Submission

While “applause” won’t affect our entry’s chances of winning, it will give us a chance to see who finds our project interesting and give us a chance to reach out. If you have a comment or feedback, we’d love your ideas to refine and clarify our submission for the next phase.

3) Talk with Your Organization about Partnership for the Day.

Watch this space, but we’re looking for institutional partners for the day. Let us know if you’re interested! Just tweet at us or leave a comment on this post. So far we’re proud to have organizations joining us such as Open Forum Foundation (@open4m), CrowdHall (@crowdhall), OpenGov Hub (@opengovhub), Global Integrity (@globalintegrity) and more!

Reports of the demise of the American educational system have been greatly exaggerated.

According to the New York Times, 2012 was the Year of the MOOC with the emergence of edX, Udacity, and Coursera as education providers, tearing down the walls for top-tier universities and providing free access to Ivy League professors and curriculum to a global audience. In another piece, NYT Columnist Tom Friedman breathlessly predicts:

“[A] day soon where you’ll create your own college degree by taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the world — some computing from Stanford, some entrepreneurship from Wharton, some ethics from Brandeis, some literature from Edinburgh — paying only the nominal fee for the certificates of completion.”

But there are fundamental limits on what a MOOC can accomplish at scale when introducing student interactivity. As we covered in a recent post (What Can We Learn from Coursera’s “MOOC Mess”), online education requires tradeoffs. You can broadcast a video or self-paced module to 41,000 students without difficulty, but things get tricky quickly if you start introducing group exercises without planning ahead.

However, there is a growing consensus that these massive courses are simply the future wherein top-tier universities will claim a global audience for rock-star professors while mid-range universities will be squeezed out of the picture. If we assume that the future of online education looks like a MOOC, then that is a reasonable assumption: You and your children will sit at home and watch videos, click through quizzes, and call it an education when you receive your degree. Mid-range universities won’t compete to pay $50,000 per course (the average cost of setting up a MOOC) without a globally known faculty, so why try to compete with the big players?

As currently designed, MOOCs fundamentally privilege existing brands. Universities want to establish multi-year partnerships with large tech firms to leverage their globally recognized name. However, edutech startups are starting to provide another answer for mid-range universities. A recent Guardian article (Are edutech startups plugging an innovation gap in our universities?) revealed a different path forwards for education during an interview with Victor Henning of Mendeley:

The recent boom in edutech startups, says Henning, reflects the fact that universities no longer need either to buy in bulk or build everything from scratch. Instead they should use their time and resources more wisely by collaborating with smaller companies already working on new software solutions, many of which have their roots in the higher education sector.

If true, then this provides another way forward for non-Ivy League universities: Don’t compete as institutions; compete as classrooms. Rather than multi-year deals for hundreds of thousands of dollars to compete for a global market you can’t possibly win, look to empower your teachers with the ability to teach online classes with video conferencing, social networking, and group projects by embracing a host of different tools provided by a variety of edutech startups.

The consensus is right on one thing: The Ivy League universities are going to win on name recognition. They will provide engaging videos to millions around the world that share the one-way “sage on a stage” lectures of their top-tier talent to lock in an unproven MOOC business model. But that’s no guarantee that their professors will be able to provide the most engaging course format. Universities that embrace this current tech chaos by empowering their professors to work with a wide range of startups may just find themselves ahead of the pack.

As we explored in a blog post last July (Three Questions to Ask As Universities Incorporate Hybrid Classroom Pedagogies), professors like Dr. John Boyer of Virginia Tech have managed to push the boundaries of the classroom using widely available tech like Twitter and Skype. While educational tools are advancing at an ever-increasing rate, the pedagogical challenges for incorporating their possibilities have hardly changed. Universities should embrace those challenges, rather than looking for a tool to solve them.

Are you interested in learning with TechChange? Check out our next class: Digital Organizing and Open Government. Class starts April 15. Apply now.

We make no secret of it at TechChange: Our staff are huge fans of Coursera. This innovative organization absolutely deserved to win TechCrunch’s Best New Startup of 2012 and are the gold standard in the growing field of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). And so I was really looking forward to taking the Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application course. Which is why I was a bit taken aback to receive this email on February 2nd.

I won’t go into this one course’s many problems here, but if you’re interested, Scott Jaschik wrote a superb article for Inside Higher Ed: MOOC Mess. There’s also a detailed breakdown of what went wrong from the student perspective on the Chewing Thistles blog: 24 hours – A long time in online learning. As providers of online learning, we wanted to capture some thoughts about this kerfuffle to see what we can learn about the field as a whole:

1) Collaborating ain’t easy. Much of the course’s criticism centered around using groups and collaboration tools like Google Spreadsheets (which has a limit of 50 simultaneous editors) for a class of 41,000 students. That’s not just a Google problem, as even the more flexible hackpad (our current favorite) has a concurrent editor limit of 250 students. But even if you could solve this problem with a technical solution, the organizational difficulty of structuring and facilitating exercises won’t go away. And that’s fine, because….

2) There are inevitable trade-offs between scale and interactivity. The great part about MOOCs is that they can easily disseminate content to tens of thousands of students — which is important since they can cost upwards of $50,000 to make due to the level of time and video production needed. But once you start to increase the group collaboration, interaction with facilitators, and more, you run up against staff constraints as well as technical constraints. And that’s tough because…

3) Quality control is hard for both content and facilitation. We like to say at TechChange that an online learning experience is really three services in one: A user-friendly online platform, interactive content, and relevant facilitation. Take away any of those pegs and the whole thing falls apart. When your platform consists of pre-recorded videos and automated tests, it’s much easier to manage at scale than when you’re facilitating group activities, which is a problem because….

4) If you’re asking for somebody’s time, it’s not free. There’s excitement about what “free” means to expanding access to education, but time isn’t free — there’s always an opportunity cost. And frankly, if you’re going to have a subject matter expert engage directly with students you’re going to eventually need to compensate that person for their time and expertise. And that’s fine, because many students will be willing to pay for that more interactive experience, which is why you need to…

5) Listen to your students, especially when they’re upset. Unlike Coursera, we do charge our students for access to courses. If you think people are upset when a free product fails, try experiencing the result when they’ve entrusted you with their hard-earned money. That feedback loop can change when universities and educators are the ones buying your classes, but students are the ones taking them. If you’re at Coursera and want to try experiencing this class from the point of view of one of your students, one article well worth reading is: How NOT to Design a MOOC: The Disaster at Coursera and How to Fix it.

Ultimately, Coursera still has a wonderful catalogue of free upcoming courses and will hopefully find a balance between quality control and student interactivity. But perhaps the most beneficial takeaway is the recognition that students and teachers are partners in the process of advancing the field of online education.

Students can always teach “experts” how to better run a course — even when everything goes as planned.

TechChange is excited to announce a new partnership with Transitions (TOL), a Prague-based journalism and media training organization with a focus on the post-communist countries of Europe and the former Soviet Union. Running a variety of programs – from the publication of one of the first online magazines to cover political, social, economic and cultural issues in the region since 1999, to providing young reporters with intensive training on best journalistic practices – TOL has been a regional leader on media and democracy building efforts.

Bringing their expertise on media and journalism development to their target region through our eLearning environment, TOL will be running their course: “Reporting on Education,” adapting a course that the Guardian Foundation originally created for TOL and the BBC’s iLearn platform. And though journalist training is a broad endeavor, even when focusing on a particular region, we’re hoping that this course will help to not only train journalists, but also to elevate national and regional policy dialogue on the issues of educational reform, open governance and democratic accountability.

Counting gets underway at a polling station in Moscow following Russia’s Presidential election, 4 March 2012.*

This new institutional relationship and course topic comes at a time when the role of the media in promoting such topics is an ever salient issue, particularly in Eastern Europe. Over the past few months, the Kremlin has tightened control over various aspects of civil society and acted to counter what it views as foreign interference in Russia’s sovereign affairs, moves that included booting USAID, a key funder of media training and other efforts, out of the country.

TechChange has helped organizations address these challenges and co-authored a piece in the Huffington Post (USAID’s Eviction From Russia: An Opportunity for Online Learning as E-Development) expressing that:

“there is reason to believe that using widely-available technology, democracy promotion organizations have the potential to greatly influence dialogue by amplifying local practitioner voices, and giving domestic organizations a channel for collaboration with international experts.”

This is where we are hoping that our partnership with TOL will further distribute valuable content – including across closed or semi-closed borders – and build up the capacity of a core group of journalists to report in an informative and engaging way on the sometimes complicated field of education. After all, the task of training journalists in this case isn’t geared just toward building a better media, but also a better, more equitable education system and more modern and democratic societies. We’re hoping that this first course will be yet another worthwhile addition to this process.

*Photo Credit: Credit: OSCE/Jens Eschenbaecher

Interested in digital activism and citizen journalism? Check out our 104 course on digital organizing, which will be run January 7 – February 1!

This piece has been crossposted from Health Unbound. If you’re interested in learning more, please visit our course page on mHealth: Mobile Phones for Public Health.

On November 14th the Mobile Phones for Global Health Online Certificate course officially kicks off and as we head into the final countdown we are offering a special preview of what participants can expect from the four-week course!

With 75 feedback survey s completed (thank you to all those who participated) we identified some of the most well-known thought leaders in the field speaking throughout the course. Students will have the opportunity to engage directly with leading applications developers, and learn from practitioners who have had significant experience in implementing mobile phone based communication systems around the globe. The agenda will include:

Weekly Course Topics:

Week 1: Introduction to Mobile Health
Week 2: Strengthening health systems
Week 3: Moving towards citizen-centered health
Week 4: Technology Standards & Interoperability and Learning from other mServices

Featured Speakers:
Patty Mechael, Executive Director of the mHealth Alliance will provide students with an engaging introduction to the field, discussing the evolution of mobile phones for international health, and how these technologies are being used to today to respond to some of the greatest global health challenges.

Kicking off week 2, Joel Selanikio, co-founder of DataDyne, will present on the development of Episurveyor, and how mobile phones are being used to collect, manage, and sort data.

Also in week two, the class will be joined by Isaac Holeman, Chief Strategist for Medic Mobile, who will engage with students on the range of open source applications in the Medic Mobile toolkit – including the well-known Frontline SMS system that allows computers to send messages to large groups of people at a low cost.

A number of other guest speakers and presenters will also be featured. Stay tuned as we get closer by checking the course landing page.

In addition to these guest speakers, participants will engage with case studies, multimedia tutorials, interactive exercises, and live demonstrations of such tools as interactive voice recognition (IVR), SMS (text message) communication programs, smartphone applications, and health information systems for data collection and management. Through this combination of hands-on experience, and engagement with practitioners on the ground, the goal is to provide students with an in-depth introduction to the field of mHealth.

Participate in the Live Twitter Chat and YOU Could Win 2 Free Passes!

Leading up the course, the mHealth Alliance and TechChange will provide an opportinity to for individuals to win a free pass to enroll in the course! Together TechChange and the mHealth Alliance will host a live-Twitter chat from @techchange and @mHealthAlliance using #tc309 on Friday, October 26 at 1pm EDT.

During the chat we will engage all participants in a variety of discussion topic and questions related to mHealth. We’re eager to hear from you about questions that you may have on latest innovations and projects in the field. All participants in the twitter chat will be included in a drawing to win a free seat in our upcoming course: mHealth Mobile Phones for Public Health. We will give a away a total of 2 seats. More details to come but tweet at @techchange or @mHealthAlliance if you have questions, and we look forward to having you join us there!