U.S. State Department | TechChange | The Institute for Technology and Social Change

TechChange Graphic Designer Rachel Roth explains to TechGirls Ghada and Nataly how to draw characters using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

Yesterday, TechChange hosted a job shadow day with Nataly Ayyad and Ghada Missaoui, two incredibly talented young ladies participating in this year’s TechGirls program with the U.S. State Department. This selective exchange program encourages Middle Eastern and North African teenage girls to pursue science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers. Within the next few weeks, they are travelling throughout the U.S. for their first time to visit technology companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Instagram.

Nataly and Ghada, hailing from the Palestinian Territories and Tunisia respectively, were selected to participate in this program and spent the day at the TechChange headquarters to learn what it’s like to work at an international edtech social enterprise. Nataly hopes to go into web design and believes that technological skills can be empowering to underprivileged people, especially women. She looks forward to sharing her new skills with them. Ghada is very passionate about astronomy and one day hopes to pursue studies in astrophysics. She has built her own website called “Go Girls Engineering” using Adobe Muse to showcase engineering role models for young students.

TechGirl Ghada shows Oscar Chen her website, Go Girls Engineering, she created using Adobe Muse. They discuss the pros and cons of using design tools like Muse as opposed to coding by hand with WordPress.

Throughout the day, Nataly and Ghada met with different members of the TechChange team to learn about digital animation, graphic design, digital photography, web design and programming, interactive infographics, data visualization, search engine optimization (SEO), customer relationship management (CRM) software such as SalesForce, instructional design for eLearning with Articulate Storyline, and more.

Upon arriving to TechChange, the TechGirls were eager to know when we would show them how we do our animation videos.

Creative Director Alon Askarov explains how he uses Adobe Edge Animate and After Effects to create TechChange animations.

“My favorite part of my day at TechChange was definitely learning about the animation process!” said Nataly.

Education Technologist intern, Emily Fruchterman, shows the TechGirls the online learning courses that TechChange developed with the Asian and Pacific Islander Wellness Center to scale HIV prevention.

Charlie Weems demonstrates how to change aperture settings on a DSLR camera.

Cathie Chen shows the TechGirls how to create a hotspot on Articulate Storyline.

Eric Bihl and Emily Fruchterman do a hands-on session to show how to create triggers and slide layers on Articulate Storyline.

“Everything I learned at TechChange was very interesting, from learning about animations, digital photography, eLearning software, to understanding the diversity of online courses available,” commented Ghada.

Thanks for joining us, TechGirls!

See a summary of last year’s TechGirls Job Shadow day at TechChange here and click here to learn more about the TechGirls program.

We had such a blast hosting Nagham and Sondos from the TechGirls program last year, that we’re doing it again this year!

We are very excited to welcome more participants of the TechGirls program to TechChange’s DC office tomorrow to experience what it’s like to work at a fast-paced edtech social enterprise. During their visit, the TechGirls will learn about digital animation, graphic design and illustrations, video production and editing, photography, instructional design for eLearning, web design and programming, interactive infographics, data visualization, and more.

TechGirls is a U.S. State Department exchange program that empower Middle Eastern and North African teenage girls to pursue science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers.

Follow us and the hashtags #techgirls and #letgirlslearn to keep up with updates on TechGirls in action. To learn more about the TechGirls, you can follow their program Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.

On Friday, Nov. 1, TechChange was honored to participate in a panel at the latest Tech@State conference on education technology, as well as sponsor the informal reception afterwards to celebrate ten years of e-diplomacy. We wanted to share a few thoughts below of the day to continue the conversation online!

Nick Martin (far right) on the Tech@State panel on “Using MOOCs in a Global Context”

1) There is a gap between a classroom and MOOC

Throughout the panel on “Using MOOCs in a Global Context”, the distinction between online education and MOOCs came up repeatedly. MOOCs are a form of online education, but not the only form. And that’s problematic because educators are feeling like they are stuck with a binary choice. However, there are alternatives that we’ve been exploring that allow highly interactive small-group forums. Taylor Corbett (@data4d) of OpenEMIS gave a short ignite talk during the session, and part of us wondered what it would be like if you could instantly go back and watch the talk afterwards or click around content while he spoke, or ask him questions directly in a conversational manner — just as students were able to do in our Mobiles for International Development course when Taylor spoke there only a few weeks ago.

John Maeda, President of the Rhode Island School of Design, giving his keynote address

2) Instructional design will be as important as educational content

A recurring theme throughout the day was the increasing significance of design. John Maeda nailed it during a talk that included elements of his previous TED Talk on How Art, Technology, and Design Inform Creative Leaders. We’ve written previously on how content will be vital for online education, similar to what’s happening with Netflix for online video, but what came across was that design will be at a premium for not just what gets included, but how. This is literally a matter of life and death, as Maeda pointed out that Florence Nightingale saved lives of soldiers not with nursing, but with statistics and a clever visualization that influenced decision makers to look at thousands of soldiers dying needlessly in hospitals. We’ve tried to think critically about design in our own work — getting the most information into as few seconds of student experience as possible, such as our logo animation redesign.

TC105: M4D course alumni hanging out at the e-Diplomacy happy hour at 1776 DC

3) You can’t network over a beer in online education

One of our course facilitators, Graham Lampa (@grahamlampa) brought up an excellent point in our MOOC panel, which is that the informal qualities of education and in-person experiences can be as valuable as the formal knowledge transfer. Until you can virtually “grab a beer” with someone, online education will not be able to replace the informal qualities. However, there are ways to leverage both! We sponsored the happy hour at 1776, where they had tweets from the day on #edip10 and #techatstate displayed on large monitors (courtesy of Zoomph), so that the walls were removed between offline and online content.

Moreover, we had a great time seeing everybody from our classes who we had the pleasure of meeting in person, including our Alumni Beth Ceryak (@bethceryak), Matt, and more!

Did you attend the 2013 Tech@State conference and come away with any other conclusions? Feel free to post your comment below and/or share your thoughts using the hashtags, #techatstate and #edip10.

We’re excited, honored, and humbled to be featured in Fast Company as one of the “best learning resources for aspiring social entrepreneurs”, with recognition for the “hybrid” online/offline learning category!

Here are some highlights from the article:

“A notable resource specific to [hybrid learning models] is TechChange, which has held hundreds of in-person small-group workshops, combined with video-based and interactive delivery designed with some game mechanics, simulations-based group projects, and live video chat with instructors. These cover topics such as “mobiles for international development,” and “intrapreneurship–Innovating from within.” [Note: there’s still time for you to enroll!]

“Their open courses draw an international audience of participants, interested in social media and social change. They also create custom courses in partnership with organizations such as the United Nations, World Bank, USAID, UNICEF, Red Cross, US State Department, training student leaders in Pakistan, civil society leaders in Sudan, or international aid workers.”

“Nick Martin, one of the founders of Techchange, saw a growing need in his field for continuing professional education. “We took dozens of online courses from all kinds of providers and found that most of them were pretty awful. So we set out to build a model that was more social, interactive, scalable, and suited to the needs of the social change community.”

See the full article on Fast Company here.