TechChange Digital Teacher Corps

Create a corps of well-trained digital teachers to support the professional development and capacity building needs of social sector organizations

Increasingly, social sector organizations are turning to digital training to develop staff, build capacity as part of community development projects, support fellowship programs, and even create course marketplaces that generate revenue.

But overwhelmingly the current digital training model is focused on listing large catalogs of poorly-produced self-paced courses that adult learners dread having to take. The hype from the MOOC craze has worn off, but the the prevailing assumption still seems to be that software plus content (largely videos and quizzes) equals great learning.

Over the past decade, TechChange has been the leading organization for social sector digital training needs. We’ve worked with over 150 organizations to develop and deliver more than 500 digital courses of all shapes and sizes. We’ve touched nearly every social topic from malaria education to greenhouse gas emissions, to anti-corruption, to gender and sexual diversity, to data literacy, and more. We built the first online course in Sudan in 2010 and since that time have worked in virtually every country in the world.

Experience has taught us one thing: teaching matters.

But teaching online is not the same as teaching in-person. Teaching online requires reframing and adapting the hallmarks of great classroom instruction to a digital medium: asking questions at the appropriate depth, staging creative activities, varying techniques to reach a range of learning styles, supporting learners who need extra attention, etc.  It requires a strong command of pedagogy (how to teach) and the digital and data literacy skills to implement and adapt effectively. Digital challenges like bandwidth, security, language, access, and hardware are constant threats that require creative solutions.

That’s why, as we think about our second decade of operations, we want to double down on finding and cultivating great online teachers.  

The Solve solution we propose is to:  

• Build an online teaching certification program that packages all of our experience (and a range of other best practices) into a series of three four-week online courses.

• Develop a corps of digital educators and use our extensive partner networks to match them with social sector organizations that have a variety of virtual training needs.

• Provide these educators with access to the TechChange digital training platform (and a range of other tools) to teach courses well.

• Work with them collaboratively to build new software features and experiences that improve their ability to teach well online.

The future of work will involve reskilling vast amounts of human capital, and much of that will have to be done online. Technology and software are part of that solution, but so is teaching. Right now, no one is focused on building better digital teachers!  

A well-trained digital teaching corps will dramatically improve the quality of online course instruction and lead to an increase in course retention and learner outcomes. It will save already resource-strapped organizations valuable time and money.  And it will lead to better and more useful software solutions as digital educators directly contribute to feature and design decisions, rather than simply leaving things to the engineers.

The vast majority of online learning is:

• Teacher-less

• Generic video and slide-based content (though getting better in production)

• Not tailored to individual learning styles

• No meaningful connections to other learners

• Not focused on “soft skills"

The TechChange approach is:

• Teacher-centric: We believe good teaching matters

• Data-driven: We capture millions of real-time data points about how learners interact with course content and with each other

• Adaptive:  We meet learners where they are and connect them to personalized content/automatically match them with learners who have shared goals/interests

• Soft-skills focused:  We measure, develop, and encourage the use of soft skills like empathy and emotional intelligence inside courses of any topic

The TechChange platform has been supported by an incredible team of developers (who all have teaching experience) for the past 10 years. It’s been optimized to meet the needs of social sector organizations working in the hardest to reach places in the world. It’s mobile-optimized, supports a variety of languages, works in low bandwidth settings, and puts the idea of learning as co-creation at the center. Other highlights:

• API-driven stack provides a common interface for internal services and potential for greater extensibility in the future

• Modern frameworks and languages

• Data-focused approach allows us to adapt and iterate in real-time

• We plan to begin recruiting for our first cohort of digital educators and launch the first course in our digital training series this Fall.

• Our goal is to recruit 30-50 digital educators by the end of 2018 and 200 by mid 2019.

• At the same time, we’re aggressively working with our partner organizations to identify opportunities for facilitated learning and building out additional features on our software platform.

With this program we aim to recruit a total of 200 digital educators per year for three years (600 total). With that amount we believe that each digital educator can help to train several hundred people in a year. But again, we’re going for quality of interaction over sheer numbers. MOOCS technically enroll tens of thousands of people with extremely poor results.  Scale is a deceiving metric in education.

Our training platform software is already being used by 60+ social sector organizations and we aim to increase that to 200 in the next 3 years. 

The digital educator certification program will be deployed on the TechChange platform. We’ll recruit extensively through our existing digital marketing channels.

Retention is key. If our digital educators teach with us as part of the gig economy then we have to ensure that there are enough opportunities for them to utilize their skills in the marketplace. Having partnerships in place is essential.

As we pair our digital teachers with organizations, we will rely on our extensive real-time learning data metrics to determine gaps in facilitation, identify students needing extra support, and figure out preferred content formats and types, etc.

TechChange currently works with over 150 organizations and has trained roughly 50,000 students in the last ten years. They either learn directly on our platform or on one of the hundreds of courses we've developed for organizations to train people on a variety of topics. 

With this program we aim to recruit a total of 200 digital educators per year for three years (600 total). With that amount we believe that each digital educator can help to train several hundred adult learners in a year. But again, we’re going for quality of interaction over sheer numbers. MOOCS technically enrolled tens of thousands of people with extremely poor results. Scale is a deceiving metric.

Our software is already being used by 60 social sector organizations and we aim to increase that to 200 in the next 3 years. 

The executive team (CEO, COO and CTO) have been working together for nearly 10 years. Our team of 15 has a strong combination of organizational, technical, and creative capacities to build beautiful and engaging online courses. 

In the last 10 years we've learned a tremendous about how to teach online. We believe we can package all that expertise into a teacher training certification program and pair our graduates with software solutions to dramatically improve the way the social sector builds capacity. 

We are a for-profit social enterprise and have been entirely boot-strapped operation from our inception with no debt or equity infusions.  

We charge a license fee for our software platform based on monthly active users (ex: 500+ users for $2000/mo) and a stack of additional services like facilitation and creative asset creation that can be added to the base cost.    

We also support fixed price learning product development for building course content on other learning platforms. We have been operating for 9 years and have been profitable for 7 years. We see our growth coming in the form of additional platform licenses.

For the digital teacher certification program, we plan to charge tuition (<$1000). Applicants would be eligible for reduced or free tuition in exchange for a revenue share of courses they teach to their networks on the TechChange platform after they graduate.

Solve has vast networks and would make for a great partner as we try to launch our new digital teacher training program. We see this partnership as twofold - helping us recruit new batches of digital educators and supporting us in identifying organizations that can benefit from new ways of utilizing digital training/learning. 

Convincing organizations to value and invest in digital teachers and facilitators is an uphill battle.

Solve is an incredible convener and can help make the case and support us in identifying organizations who are eager for new ways to training and learning.  

Solve also has deep connections to tech-savvy recent college graduates - we want to engage this demographic as we recruit for our digital teacher certification program. And we want to create jobs/opportunities in other countries by finding and recruiting the most talented and passionate educators we can and reskill/upskill them through program.