TechChange Course on Ushahidi

We're excited to announce the launch of TechChange's 4-week course on the Ushahidi platform. As we're fond of saying at Ushahidi: technology is at most 10% of the solution. The same is true when using the Ushahidi platform in any given project. To be sure, the Ushahidi platform is only 10% of the challenge and the platform alone will not automatically guarantee the success of a project. So we're partnering with TechChange on this distance-learning course, which will enable participants to get a good handle on both the technology part and best practices for high-impact uses of the Ushahidi platform.

TechChange has been doing some stellar work on distance-learning, having developed their own highly interactive and very user friendly web-based platform. Their courses draw on multimedia content and involve some of the leading experts in the field. This explains why we're excited to partner with them on this new course. Moreover, the quality of participants who take TechChange courses has been impressive: from humanitarian and human rights practitioners to stellar graduate students and tech-savvy professionals. We've worked with TechChange to develop a strong syllabus and have identified an excellent set of guest speakers. The course will be spearheaded by Rob Baker, a colleague and friend who has been involved with Ushahidi since the early days. Rob has worn many hats working with Ushahidi, including being project and/or technical lead for over a dozen deployments around the world, conceived and co-developed the first iteration of the Ushahidi Community website, is the first inductee into their Trusted Developer Network, was Director of the Universities for Ushahidi program, and has spoken at several events, conferences, and universities on behalf of Ushahidi including the World Bank, US State Department, MIT, and Harvard University. Participants of the course will be invited to join the Ushahidi community. They'll be given wiki accounts to contribute to the growing discipline of participating learning on collaborative mapping. They'll be able to add content as they learn and be active community members from the classroom to the world. In addition, TechChange will donate relevant videos from the course to us and our community. High quality video training is an important way that we can support our growing community. In sum, we're excited to see this first course launch and look forward to collaborating with our TechChange colleagues to making it a resounding success. Please follow this link to learn more about the course.