WhatsApp is a hugely popular means of communication around the world, but there is a strong sense that it’s mainly used for more informal conversations, despite growth in areas such as healthcare in recent times. A new project from MIT Governance Lab has tested the platform in an educational capacity.
The project, undertaken by South African civic technology company Grassroots, is believed to be the first training course delivered entirely on WhatsApp. The course is designed to improve the leadership skills of community organizers.
It was built in partnership with Harvard University’s Marshall Ganz, who has specialized on the use of storytelling to inspire leadership and commitment to social change. They chose WhatsApp as their platform for the delivery of the courses because they wanted to reach organizers who often lack access to either online or face-to-face training. They also wanted to provide a low bandwidth option for areas that lack strong internet connectivity.
WhatsApp-based training
The team chose WhatsApp as it’s a commonly used, and therefore familiar, platform for people to use to exchange rich media, without concerns about location or connectivity. The project was piloted with five classes, with 40 distance learners included in the Durban and Johannesburg areas.
“This is a timely endeavor,” one of the partner organizations said. “For many people, coming together to learn is not always easy. This course provides a low-tech, accessible way for organizers to learn with and from each other, which is something key for an organization like Amandla.mobi with a national community.”
The analysis conducted by the MIT team found that WhatsApp can be an effective medium for online teaching, but only if it’s combined with strong behavioral incentives, an excellent teaching team, and attention to design details is built in from the start.
The ability to create engaging content for the platform is far from easy, as rich content traditionally requires a lot of data. Similarly, maintaining student engagement without face-to-face interaction is also extremely challenging. As such, the team have developed a guide for any others that wish to create educational content for WhatsApp.
A strong base
The team believe that the results from the initial pilot are strong enough that it can expand into new areas, with a follow up project already being explored in areas such as IT for Health and Education Systems Equity, which would be led by George Washington University professors Seble Frehywot and Yianna Vovides. The project would help to train medical workers around the world, but especially those in low- and middle-income countries.
“Since currently e-learning is neither accessible nor equitable in many countries, understanding the process engineering behind what Grassroot and MIT have done to utilize WhatsApp as an e-learning tool may be one way to mitigate this problem, especially in training of health-care workers on the ground in countries that WhatsApp is being used widely,” the team says.
Grassroot are also developing a second WhatsApp-based course, which they will focus on organizing tactics and skills. Overall, they’re confident that WhatsApp can be an effective pedagogical medium, and plan to further explore its potential.
