Author Archives: che katz

Case Study – Training for Primary Health Care

To follow is a case study that I believe fits well within Week 4, Week 6, or another week. The case-study is based on a real scenario drawn from my experience working in various countries in Asia and the Pacific. As requested, names of places and people are fictional.

Yovita heads the Institute of Midwife Education in the Ministry of Health in the island nation of Fa’usi in the South Pacific. Fa’usi recently acquired independence after a prolonged war with a neighbouring country which occupied it. As a result, Fa’usi is now starting to recover, but is still ranked one of the poorest countries in the Pacific.

Yovita recently completed a Master of Public Health, thanks to being awarded a scholarship in Australia, and has come back to Fa’usi inspired with new ideas. On her return to Fa’usi, she undertook a training needs assessment of the 520 midwives in her country. Yovita was shocked with the poor results of the assessment and has identified several gaps in the competencies of midwives in her country, which in part, explains the high maternal mortality rate in Fa’usi. Yovita also learnt through the assessment that 90% of midwives have not had any in-service training in the past 5 years and many of the newly graduated midwives are moved immediately to remote parts of the country to work on their own without any support.

Yovita concluded from the training needs assessment that she needs to find a way to build the competencies of midwives in her country, but she is also mindful that the Minister has informed her that he doesn’t want midwives to be away from their health facility for extended periods. She also learnt that the few midwives who have recently had the opportunity to do in-service training in the Midwife Training Centre reported that the training was of a very poor standard and their assessment results after training indicated no improvements in their competencies. What’s more, training in the Midwife Trainer Centre is very expensive because the government policy requires obligatory per diems and travel to be paid to all participants. Moreover, the country’s health budget is very small and there are many health priorities, so Yovita only gets a very small portion of the national health budget. However, Yovita was excited to learn that while she was away in Australia, a Canadian government supported project, issued all midwives in Fa’usi with a smart mobile phone to support health data collection in their communities and the government is providing a small monthly phone credit for work related calls.

Yovita has limited experience with technology other than using Facebook and WhatsApp for socializing. Interestingly, Fa’usi has one of the highest subscriptions to Facebook in the Pacific. The broadband connection in Fa’usi is also quite good, but there are weekly outages, and broadband coverage of the country currently stands at about 80% but is growing daily; though many people complain of slow speeds. Other technological challenges include phones breaking down from time to time and electricity outages. But on the positive side, most midwives are familiar with the basics of their mobile phone.

Yovita has recently learnt that the Canadian government is calling for proposals for projects in her country in the area of digital health, and Yovita is considering using mobile phones as a platform for in-service training of midwives, and she decided to go to a Non-Government Organisation in her country which specializes in the use of technology for development called ICT4D to get advice.

Discussion

The Director of ICT4D has asked you, as the Education & Technology Adviser, to meet with Yovita to discuss her educational challenge. What strategies would you recommend for Yovita to create an engaging learning experience for midwives? What might be some of the pitfalls that she may also need to consider?

What advice will you give Yovita? Please post your thoughts and recommendations in Week X discussion forum.

Katie Schultz and Che Katz

We worked together (Katie Schultz and Che Katz) on this digital story for the course we are developing in Moodle on International Development: Anthropological Perspectives, an elective course in the School of Anthropology for undergraduate 2^nd or 3^rd year students. The digital story will be embedded in Week 2 of this blended course and works closely with: Week 2 face to face and online content, the readings, the overall course themes, and the formative assessment Assignment 1 project which is the development of a digital artefact.

Che Katz – Self Reflection

In this self-reflection of the Learning Management System (LMS) rubric assignment, I will revisit and contemplate the learning goals which I set at the outset of the Course in my Flight Path. To recap, these comprise of: (i) reflecting on my personal and professional journey to date in terms of education and technology, (ii) gaining a deeper understand of the language, concepts, theoretical perspectives of educational technology, (iii) developing new skills, and (iv) evolving myself in new ways.

In the area of reflection of my previous professional journey, the rubric assignment helped me to consolidate and revisit my experiences of using similar tools in the past. The challenges of developing tools and processes that are user friendly, objective, and measure the important variables whilst not being overly burdensome for the user. My belief that the assessment ‘process’ is as important as the rubric tool itself, was further reinforced. The value of working in teams, to gain a range of perspectives and expertise to create a better final product was also consolidated, despite the challenges of working across three corners of the globe.

With respect to understanding, the educational assessment model of a rubric is somewhat new to me, so this was an opportunity to further dissect the components of this tool, think more deeply about: wording, challenges of scoring and weighting, and the strengths and limitations of the rubric tool. With respect to the limitations, a recognition of the importance of building a process around the rubric, including the participation of multiple stakeholder and group reflection before a final determination was also highlighted. Applying the SECTIONS model in a concrete way helped me to consolidate this practical and comprehensive framework (Bates, 2014). Importantly, I also gained deeper understanding of the complexity of sourcing a LMS with the multitude of considerations that need to be addressed in determining selection.

In the area of developing new skills, the assignment helped me to build competencies in rubric development which are transferable to many other domains including: educational course development, contracting of other technology systems, and various other applications. The assignment also facilitated my further exploration into the availability of online tools for health-related case management and clinical assessment; and I was surprised to find a considerable number of resources for case management, but relatively little for clinical review. This is an area I hope to explore further in the future. Through this exercise I was also able to strengthen my skills in the google suite, especially google hangout which I hadn’t used previously, but is analogous to other tools I’ve used extensively such as WhatsApp and skype.

Finally the assignment helped me to consider how I can evolve my interest in educational technology with my long experience in public health. The assignment helped me further consider how these different areas of interest can be blended in a meaningful way in my personal and professional journey. In particular, I became clearer that in a low resource public health context, learning environments will likely be more about what Spiro refers to as facilitating and guiding the ‘pull’ of learning, rather than the ‘push’ learning which has been the dominant model used by LMS to date (Spiro, 2014).

References

Bates, T., (2014) Choosing and using media in education: The SECTIONS model. In Teaching in digital age. Retrieved from https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/part/9-pedagogical-differences-between- media/

Porto, S. (2015). The uncertain future of Learning Management Systems. The Evolution: Illuminating the Lifelong Learning Movement. Retrieved from http://www.evolllution.com/opinions/uncertain-future-learning-management-systems/

Spiro, K. (2014). 5 elearning trends leading to the end of the Learning Management Systems. Retrieved from http://elearningindustry.com/5-elearning-trends-leading-to-the-end-of-the-learning-management-system

An unconventional flight path – Che Katz

My journey into the MET Program and ETEC 565A is from an unconventional flight path. I’m neither a teacher of children nor adults, or a technology specialist. Nevertheless, I’ve found education to be a core part of my work as an international public health specialist focussed in the areas of: community education, in-service training, management, policy advisor, and advocacy. My focus in health has cut across a wide spectrum including: reproductive and sexual health, maternal and child health, HIV/AIDS, smoking cessation, immunization, quality of care, social franchising and social marketing, behaviour change, participatory action research, and most recently digital health. In all of these aspects, education has been a core element; whether designing community education interventions, capacity building of teams and health providers, organisational development and managing organisational change, integration of evidence into policy, or leading structured (and less structured) workshops.

My journey into digital health in a low resource context has been particularly profound in a multitude of ways. Whilst I don’t jump on the bandwagon that technology will solve all the problems, which sadly is a growing mindset. At the same time, I’m very excited about the affordances of well-developed technological applications, for being able to do things at scale, with impact, cost-effectively, and at a level of quality that we could never have dreamed of previously. The dilemma in this space for me, is that the voice of technologists with their bells and whistles and magic bullets, sadly is increasingly speaking louder than the voices of health specialists. With shrinking financial resources and higher expectations of donors, the quick fixes of technocrats are more salient to donors, who rarely step foot in the field where their funds are being utilized. A website with automated project impact numerical updates, increasingly is adequate to make donors feel warm and fuzzy about doing ‘good’, irrespective of what’s happening on the ground. In educational theory it is well understood that individuals are different and need different approaches (Bates, 2014, p311); this is also true of: teams, organisations, communities, and nations; which all have different challenges needing different complex solutions, which need to be localized through meaningful engagement with different stakeholders. In my opinion, no one individual, organisation or discipline has the solutions and it is incumbent on us as 21^st Century actors to recognise the values of collaboration across a multitude of stakeholders to solve complex problems. Sadly, in a development context, technological solutions (hardware or software) are increasingly becoming the focal point of solutions, they are ‘sexy’, and in my opinion, can even be compared to ‘my precious’ (for those who remember Gollum in the Lord of the Rings).

My personal vision for my participation in MET and more specifically ETEC 565 falls into four categories: reflection, understanding, developing skills, and evolving:

Reflection – I want to self-reflect on my past role as an educator. What have I done well? Where could I improve? For instance, I learnt in ETEC 512 that without knowing, the adult constructivist educational approaches that I’ve predominately used (ie situated learning and simulations) align well with good practice, although previously I wouldn’t have been able to articulate the evidence base for my choice (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). This new insight gives me confidence with the investments that I’ve been responsible to deliver on, and I feel it is especially incumbent upon us, who work in low resource contexts, to take time out to scrutinize our work and our impact. To do this reflection, I’ve taken a year off work to immerse myself in exploring new insights.

Understanding – I want to be more confident, evidence-based, and articulate in voicing my views in relation to digital solutions. As a health specialist, I feel that I don’t well understand the values, language, and theoretical models of the world of technology, and that puts me at a disadvantage when trying to make a case for, or against the use of technology. I feel especially disadvantaged when confronted with technologists who are good at ‘selling’ an easy fix-all solution.

Develop new skills – After more than twenty years in the developing world, I feel that I’ve become somewhat deskilled, and that I would like to learn more about the technological tools that could help me to strengthen my work and impact. The areas I’m particularly interested in, are the affordances of mobile phones in in-service training of health providers. The challenge of continuously training health providers seems insurmountable in low resource countries, with the World Health Organisation continuously updating protocols. The financial challenges of governments to provide ongoing in-service training coupled with the outdated protocols sitting on shelves accumulating dust, really saddens me. I can’t help thinking we could to better with tools like the Safe Delivery app. Simulations in virtual reality spaces also holds much promise. At the same time, I want to stay strongly grounded in local realities of a low resource context, and the enormous challenges of hardware and bandwidth; and I sincerely hope that I don’t get swept away with what is possible in a high resource context, and lose site of the vision that drew me to MET in the first place.

Evolve – In truth, having completed two Masters previously, I don’t need this degree for my career. My motivation in this respect is to add a new dimension to my toolbox coupled with my commitment to lifelong learning, by being exposed to new ideas and re-energized. I especially love plunging myself into a sector that is completely new, but still familiar, with a mix of seasoned experts as well as younger post-graduates who bring energy and passion and a ‘can do’ and ‘anything is possible’ mindset; and I hope the latter will keep me in check with some of my cynicism. My interest in MET is also driven, by wanting to evolve my career in new ways, allowing me to be more virtual, more flexible to work when and where I want, and to balance this against all the other fun parts of my life.

References

Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32-42.

The Safe Delivery App, Retrieved from http://www.maternity.dk/safe-delivery-app.

The Lord of the Rings [Video] Retrieved https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz-8CSa9xj8