At the end of last week, Roman and I were at the GETHealth Summit in Dublin. Roman had a poster presentation accepted (get it here) and I was on the mPowering sponsored breakout session on content adaptation.
I was great to get to meet many people who I’ve only ever spoken to on skype, and with the size of the conference (~200 attendees) it was small enough to get chance to make new contacts with some new faces too.
There was plenty of lively discussion during all the sessions, however now I’ve had a bit of time to reflect on it all there are a few comments and queries that are still outstanding in my mind:
- Much of the training appears still to be NGO driven, so although this training may well fit with countries health ministries priorities, until this training becomes a core part of health workers career progression and “professionalisation”, the incentives to attend training may still be limited to per-diems.
- There was little discussion about the quality of the teachers/trainers – for me, the teachers (whether it be via face to face or blended learning) are critical to truly engaging their students in the subject matter, whether or not they have quality content/resources to use. Perhaps this could be a good topic for next years discussions?
- The dreaded ‘pilotitis’ word appeared a few times, with a suggestion to reterm this as ‘phase 1’. I would prefer to use the word ‘research’. Unfortunately, although there was talk of the number of pilots (30,000 – although no idea how this figure was arrived at, it’s certainly a lot), the systematic review of published research presented by Travis Porter (from Tulane Uni) cited a very limited number of published research articles (~55). So there’s a huge mismatch here between the work that’s being done and what has been properly studied and published. Until more results (good or poor) from these projects are published, we could keep repeating the same mistakes.
One of the highlights for me was to see the “CHN On the Go” mobile app being presented (more info on this project). This is work being done in Ghana, with Concern Worldwide and Grameen Foundation and was presented by Jahera Otieno. What’s great for us is that the app is based on OppiaMobile and has been developed/extended in-country with no support from Digital Campus apart from a short skype call over a year ago. This, to me demonstrates that we have taken the right approach in making the OppiaMobile platform open source, and that it’s in a state where others can expand and adapt to fit their needs.