Looking at TeachAIDS;
This week we did a brief overview of many different learning principles, and then tried to apply our understanding of the learning principles, the 6 degrees and ABCD to the evaluation of a website.
Our team, Katy, Tanya, Jaehi and myself, took a look at TeachAIDS which is a non-profit organization that works towards improving HIV/AIDS awareness and teaching HIV/AIDS prevention strategies to younger children in a culturally appropriate manner.
When we looked at the website, there were two things we first noticed. One was the tutorial versions below for the different regions like general english, indian english and mandarin. The other was the news feed which highlighted the list of indian celebrities who support the program, and volunteer to help out the organization by spreading the word. This seems like great way to increase awareness about the program, and these endorsements will probably get their audience to pay closer attention to their product and message.
The Audience that TeachAIDS is primarily targeted towards are young learners in countries where the incidence of HIV/AIDS is high and where education about HIV/AIDS presents significant challenges because of the conservative social structures and the stigma attached to discussing sex education openly. The program is currently operating in South Africa, China, United States, Botswana, India, and the United States. TeachAIDS is hoping to increase the aware of HIV through the culturally appropriate learning materials they have created. On a closer look you can see that materials are also gender appropriate, which is very true of India where because of the conservative culture, these learning materials are usually shown in classrooms segregated by gender .
The situation they are dealing with is quite grim in nature. For example in India, currently 2.31 million people are living with HIV/AIDS. The socially conservative culture makes it very difficult to penetrate, and provide appropriate learning materials to children and adults, but much more so to children. Hence the use of interactive applications and animated agents in the video to convey the messages really helps to maximize comfort and efficacy amongst the audience. TeachAIDS also explains that they try to “Minimize stigma associated with discussing sexual practices by combining them with biological aspects of HIV/AIDS with cultural euphemisms."
The videos themselves are designed to induce meta-cognitive thinking in its viewers, to force them to take a closer look at the problem, and think about the disease, its causes and lack of cure. The videos make good use of multimedia principles, and are learner controlled. They allow the user to learn in informal settings which they themselves are comfortable with, use dual-coding. And finally the principle of cognitive apprenticeship can be applied to the videos since once someone in the audience has learned it, they can then transfer the knowledge and the videos themselves to other people.
The content does seems scalable in terms of being able to translate it into different languages and use the series of animations with culturally appropriate characters and stories for a regional context. It is however difficult to decipher if the audience also contains users who live in remote areas in these countries with less or no access to technology. TeachAIDS does offer a Creative Common License available to end user NGOs, but there isn’t much detail about these NGOs and the audiences they have reached using the TeachAIDS videos. In countries like India, there is also the issue of dealing with multiple regional languages. So that is another factor TeachAIDS seems to be currently working on in trying to get the videos dubbed in various languages. Fortunately, in India, they may be able to reuse the original videos and just dub them in different languages.
It wasn’t very clear from the website but it looks like TeachAIDS also has a model where in they get paid for use of some of the tutorials while the others are free. The website goes a little more into the research behind the product, the prototyping and character design process and the team, which is quite impressive.
We discussed a little more about access, sustainability and dealing with the audience who is already HIV/AIDS positive. There were some ideas about distributing the content in areas such as maybe turning the videos into a comic book, or a street play of sorts through NGO partnerships. How do they deal with young learners who are already HIV/AIDS positive ? Or is that dependent on the NGO partner ? It would have been great to see a little more detail about which audiences TeachAIDS has directly targeted and who their partners are and what audiences they have been dealing with. The product is great, and I hope it has the potential to survive in the long run by finding ways to self sustain themselves.
Overall for our team it was a great exercise at being able to look at a website and its associated products closely and apply the theories we have been discussing in class to it. It helped me better understand the considerations that should go into trying to design a learning medium for my audience in the future.
This week we did a brief overview of many different learning principles, and then tried to apply our understanding of the learning principles, the 6 degrees and ABCD to the evaluation of a website.
Our team, Katy, Tanya, Jaehi and myself, took a look at TeachAIDS which is a non-profit organization that works towards improving HIV/AIDS awareness and teaching HIV/AIDS prevention strategies to younger children in a culturally appropriate manner.
When we looked at the website, there were two things we first noticed. One was the tutorial versions below for the different regions like general english, indian english and mandarin. The other was the news feed which highlighted the list of indian celebrities who support the program, and volunteer to help out the organization by spreading the word. This seems like great way to increase awareness about the program, and these endorsements will probably get their audience to pay closer attention to their product and message.
The Audience that TeachAIDS is primarily targeted towards are young learners in countries where the incidence of HIV/AIDS is high and where education about HIV/AIDS presents significant challenges because of the conservative social structures and the stigma attached to discussing sex education openly. The program is currently operating in South Africa, China, United States, Botswana, India, and the United States. TeachAIDS is hoping to increase the aware of HIV through the culturally appropriate learning materials they have created. On a closer look you can see that materials are also gender appropriate, which is very true of India where because of the conservative culture, these learning materials are usually shown in classrooms segregated by gender .
The situation they are dealing with is quite grim in nature. For example in India, currently 2.31 million people are living with HIV/AIDS. The socially conservative culture makes it very difficult to penetrate, and provide appropriate learning materials to children and adults, but much more so to children. Hence the use of interactive applications and animated agents in the video to convey the messages really helps to maximize comfort and efficacy amongst the audience. TeachAIDS also explains that they try to “Minimize stigma associated with discussing sexual practices by combining them with biological aspects of HIV/AIDS with cultural euphemisms."
The videos themselves are designed to induce meta-cognitive thinking in its viewers, to force them to take a closer look at the problem, and think about the disease, its causes and lack of cure. The videos make good use of multimedia principles, and are learner controlled. They allow the user to learn in informal settings which they themselves are comfortable with, use dual-coding. And finally the principle of cognitive apprenticeship can be applied to the videos since once someone in the audience has learned it, they can then transfer the knowledge and the videos themselves to other people.
The content does seems scalable in terms of being able to translate it into different languages and use the series of animations with culturally appropriate characters and stories for a regional context. It is however difficult to decipher if the audience also contains users who live in remote areas in these countries with less or no access to technology. TeachAIDS does offer a Creative Common License available to end user NGOs, but there isn’t much detail about these NGOs and the audiences they have reached using the TeachAIDS videos. In countries like India, there is also the issue of dealing with multiple regional languages. So that is another factor TeachAIDS seems to be currently working on in trying to get the videos dubbed in various languages. Fortunately, in India, they may be able to reuse the original videos and just dub them in different languages.
It wasn’t very clear from the website but it looks like TeachAIDS also has a model where in they get paid for use of some of the tutorials while the others are free. The website goes a little more into the research behind the product, the prototyping and character design process and the team, which is quite impressive.
We discussed a little more about access, sustainability and dealing with the audience who is already HIV/AIDS positive. There were some ideas about distributing the content in areas such as maybe turning the videos into a comic book, or a street play of sorts through NGO partnerships. How do they deal with young learners who are already HIV/AIDS positive ? Or is that dependent on the NGO partner ? It would have been great to see a little more detail about which audiences TeachAIDS has directly targeted and who their partners are and what audiences they have been dealing with. The product is great, and I hope it has the potential to survive in the long run by finding ways to self sustain themselves.
Overall for our team it was a great exercise at being able to look at a website and its associated products closely and apply the theories we have been discussing in class to it. It helped me better understand the considerations that should go into trying to design a learning medium for my audience in the future.
Nice post - Indian Celebrities ..Keep Posting-- Tip: Keep your post active- commenting helps it
ReplyDelete- Santu
Indian Celebrities