Thank you so much for this well-written article. I especially love the calculations on cost-effectiveness & comparison on newborn deaths versus other EA cause areas – your proposal clearly makes sense clearly as an alternate GiveWell cause area from a DALYs perspective.
As a student during the pandemic, I’m quite skeptical of online education – but on the other hand, the unit economics are too good for me to ignore. It only takes one decent, quality course to scale and one can have an outsized return on investment.
Therefore, I’d love to know: how do you train people online, effectively? And to the extent previous health training courses exist, how effective have they been and what are their shortcomings?
If it works out, I feel like this “med-ed-tech” model could work really well for a lot of different health professions in developing countries for making an outsized impact. Would also be curious to hear what would make certain professions easy to train online and which would be the most difficult relative to its impact.
Thanks for the comment! I agree with you—ensuring that the training works truly is the key. There are multiple lines of evidence showing that it’s entirely possible to create effective online training for health workers—all of the technology exists. There’s more to be said on this than can be covered well in one comment, but here are some thoughts.
There’s plenty of research demonstrating that online learning can increase knowledge and clinical skills of HWs living in LMICs (and other research demonstrating the same in high income countries).
Keep in mind that in-service HWs are working adults—they have greater motivations and capacities for self-regulated learning than they did when they were students, particularly when that learning is directly applicable to their work.
All that said, there’s much work to do in terms of developing better trainings, evaluating them, and measuring their impacts on clinical practices and public health outcomes!
Thank you so much for this well-written article. I especially love the calculations on cost-effectiveness & comparison on newborn deaths versus other EA cause areas – your proposal clearly makes sense clearly as an alternate GiveWell cause area from a DALYs perspective.
As a student during the pandemic, I’m quite skeptical of online education – but on the other hand, the unit economics are too good for me to ignore. It only takes one decent, quality course to scale and one can have an outsized return on investment.
Therefore, I’d love to know: how do you train people online, effectively? And to the extent previous health training courses exist, how effective have they been and what are their shortcomings?
If it works out, I feel like this “med-ed-tech” model could work really well for a lot of different health professions in developing countries for making an outsized impact. Would also be curious to hear what would make certain professions easy to train online and which would be the most difficult relative to its impact.
Thanks for the comment! I agree with you—ensuring that the training works truly is the key. There are multiple lines of evidence showing that it’s entirely possible to create effective online training for health workers—all of the technology exists. There’s more to be said on this than can be covered well in one comment, but here are some thoughts.
It’s critical to have an understanding of why most online learning doesn’t work well and deliberately design better solutions based upon that understanding.
There’s plenty of research demonstrating that online learning can increase knowledge and clinical skills of HWs living in LMICs (and other research demonstrating the same in high income countries).
Keep in mind that in-service HWs are working adults—they have greater motivations and capacities for self-regulated learning than they did when they were students, particularly when that learning is directly applicable to their work.
All that said, there’s much work to do in terms of developing better trainings, evaluating them, and measuring their impacts on clinical practices and public health outcomes!