2017 ICT4D Conference

Mobile technology provides an unprecedented opportunity for delivering training to health workers, promoting healthy behaviors to families, and dispensing life-saving information -- especially in rural areas where infrastructure is poor and access to updated information is limited.

Social and behavior change communication and workforce development applications rely on the transfer of information and knowledge to the target audience -- this requires high-quality content. Content for training and behavior change communication exists, but is not always accessible to trainers.

The ORB platform is an online library of high quality, mobile-optimized training materials for frontline health workers. ORB allows users to access existing content for trainings, community education, supervision visits, and more.

However, global content alone is not sufficient. The importance of context cannot be disregarded. All organizations and projects engaged in mHealth and mLearning must engage stakeholders in content adaptation to make sure that the content is technically relevant to the target audience and appropriate for the local context as well as synthesized for delivery via a mobile phone or other delivery method. But, what does this level of adaptation and tailoring of content mean for scalability?

K4Health’s Making Content Meaning: A Guide to Adapting Existing Global Health Content for Different Audiences provides a framework with key steps and questions for consideration for content adaptation as well as activity sheets and an illustrative as well as real-life case studies that will help a user in making informed decisions in the content adaptation process.

This session will introduce the guide and ORB and share lessons learned from adapting content to various settings and delivery systems. K4Health and mPowering will give examples of how content can be structured and delivered to create a user-friendly learning experience while allowing for offline access, remote updates, and evaluation.