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Defeating Zoom Fatigue with Open edX

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A pen drawing of a woman sitting at a computer looking tired.

Editor’s Note: This post was co-authored with Caitlyn Ramsey and edited with Microsoft Bing Chat.

It’s September 28, 2020 and COVID deaths have just surpassed one million worldwide. And as you watch the news, your boss sends you an email. You’ve been stuck inside for months watching the pandemic, political unrest, and natural disasters unfold with little to no interaction with anyone outside your bubble, and you’re expected to keep working as normal. And as all of your activities, including work, were forced online, you find yourself realizing something you never would’ve imagined: you are fed up with the internet. You have, as it turns out, a severe case of Zoom fatigue.

Zoom Fatigue has been an unexpected side effect of the pandemic. Individuals are experiencing exhaustion and burnout due to the excessive use of video conferencing calls. To address this issue, innovative platforms are being utilized by promoting engaging interactions and enhancing the overall experience of remote learning and communication. One such platform is Open edX, an open-source learning management system, which supplies a ready-built framework for mitigating Zoom fatigue for programs that deliver training online. Instead of relying solely on video conferences, Open edX enables engaging educational methodologies designed for the internet. Since its founding in 2012, OpenEdX has been used by a wide range of organizations, from institutions of higher education to major corporations, and even national governments. The platform uses a combination of video lectures, interactive exercises, quizzes, and other tools to deliver course content. The open-source nature of Open edX means that anyone can access and use the software, and modify and improve it as needed, without software licenses or subscription costs.

While the pandemic has abated in most regions (or at least been accepted as the new normal), the pre-pandemic “business as usual” where programming is delivered almost exclusively in-person has shifted permanently. In the post-pandemic world, there is a greater reliance on online training as in-person events are not always feasible and are more expensive. Moreover, air travel is a large contributor to climate change putting pressure on organizations to rethink the sustainability of programming that requires frequent international travel. This shift toward convening online has also contributed to the rise in Zoom fatigue as programs attempted to move their programs out of meeting rooms and into Zoom meetings, without fundamentally rethinking program delivery or design. 

Well before the pandemic, NDI hosted its own instance of Open edX (ed.ndi.org) to offer a wide range of courses aimed at strengthening democratic institutions and promoting citizen participation. These courses cover various topics such as cybersecurity for democracy activists, combatting information manipulation, digital rights advocacy, and best practices for leveraging technology to support democratic development. Some of the courses are self-paced and can be accessed anytime, while others are delivered through virtual classrooms accompanied by live instructors. Additionally, NDI offers customized training programs tailored to specific organizations and contexts. The courses are designed for individuals and groups interested in enhancing their knowledge and skills to effectively engage in democratic processes and advance democratic values.

Recent adopters of Open edX at NDI have used it to turn toolkits or guides, that would historically have been published in PDF format, into engaging multimedia online courses with integrated features that track learner progress and evaluate learning outcomes. 

Edx courses enable engaging online approaches that yield real learning. This, we’ve found, is something that even the most expertly-facilitated Zoom call cannot provide. Courses can have videos, slide shows, text, audio, live broadcasts, or a range of other methods of sharing information. The platform also can facilitate quizzes and evaluations, provide discussion boards and interactive games, and even integrate surveys for post-class feedback. Many people value the credentials that can come with education so NDI worked to improve the open-source OpenEdX software to provide elegant certificates personalized with their information for those who successfully completed a course.

Interest in the online learning platform has recently spiked. Ironically, just as the pandemic is easing, new programs are coming online that are making online methodologies for program delivery central to their approach. This includes the House Democracy Partnership – an initiative of the U.S. Congress supported by the National Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute – which is turning their Legislative Oversight Guide into a series of mini-courses, and NDI’s Movement-Based Parties initiative which is using Open edX to deliver engaging online training at scale.

These new online courses are a positive sign that NDI is moving beyond attempting to deliver via Zoom programs designed to be done in-person. Almost any program that has some educational component can emulate this approach and consider using Open edX to improve their program delivery and learning outcomes. Exceptions may exist in cases where intended learners have high security risk or do not have access to quality internet connections. Any online approach could further the marginalization of groups with limited or no access to the internet. If you’re interested in exploring the possibilities of Open edX for your own programs or want to learn more about NDI’s use of the platform, I encourage you to visit ed.ndi.org to see what courses NDI is currently offering and try Open edX for yourself.

This blog was originally posted on dem.tools.

DemTools: Tech Tools and Approaches

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Democratic processes have struggled to keep up with the rapid pace of technological change, but the COVID-19 pandemic has forced democratic actors to accelerate their adoption of technology as traditionally in-person activities moved to online platforms. However, as groups conduct more work online, they become increasingly vulnerable to surveillance, advertising, and authoritarian influence. NDI is working to empower democratic actors with trusted tools and resources to protect from digital threats and make their work more effective in today’s digital reality. 

While these negative impacts of technology on democracy have dominated recent news coverage, myriad opportunities exist for technology to reinforce democracy as well. NDI has seen increased demand for digital products and resources for distance learning, conferencing, advocacy, programming, data collection, and more. Improved communication, data, and capabilities for organizing and advocacy have empowered marginalized communities and strengthened democracy around the world. A growing and global community of public interest technologists and technologies (also known as civic tech) are working to further democratic goals, often in stark contrast to some tech giants’ seeming prioritization of growth, market share and profit over democracy. The current challenge facing democratic actors is how to utilize technology without having it used against them.

Over the past decade, NDI’s DemTools project has harnessed the power of open source technology – you may have heard DemTech talk about Apollo, Civi, Fix My Community and DemGames. Now, we’re kicking it up a notch by expanding the universe of DemTools beyond the tools that NDI directly hosts for partners through its DemCloud hosting service. The redesigned Dem.Tools website, launched today, is a searchable library of software, approaches, toolkits, and guides that DemTech regards as trusted resources for the democracy community. The trusted tools and resources contained in this library come recommended by NDI’s technology issue-area experts, and have all been either created, used, tested, or identified as valuable by our team for enabling democratic actors to conduct their work in a safe, reliable, and cost-effective way. Every tool included has already been implemented in wide use–rather than an early-stage prototype.

The materials shared via Dem.Tools will enable the Institute’s partners to be more effective at managing democratic processes at a distance and to better understand how technological change is impacting democracy. We hope this library will empower democratic actors to make more informed and effective choices about the technologies they use. NDI will continue to support and improve its suite of hosted open-source digital tools, but through this expanded initiative the Institute is helping to create a future where technology and democracy are mutually reinforcing.

This blog was originally posted on Dem.Tools at https://dem.tools/blog/demtools-tech-tools-and-approaches

Organizations/Networks Working To Resist Trump and/or Support American Democracy

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Here is a list of organizations/networks that are working resist Trump and support American democracy. If you know of others, please add them in the comments. And PLEASE sign up with your favorite(s) to get involved:

  • https://www.indivisibleguide.com/
  • http://actiongroups.net/
  • http://www.thedreamcorps.org/lovearmy_action
  • https://www.countable.us/
  • https://www.sisterdistrict.com/
  • https://swingleft.org/
  • https://www.wall-of-us.org/
  • http://jenniferhofmann.com/…/weekly-action-checklist-democ…/
  • https://www.womensmarch.com/100/
  • https://citizensclimatelobby.org/
  • https://350.org/
  • https://www.climaterealityproject.org/
  • http://blacklivesmatter.com/
  • http://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/
  • https://www.aclu.org/
  • https://sunlightfoundation.com/
  • https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/

Will there be a fourth democratic wave?

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This article was originally posted on DemWorks.org.

As the Cold War came to a close, renowned political scientist, professor and author, Francis Fukuyama, proclaimed the end of history. He said humankind had reached the endpoint of its “ideological evolution,” and Western liberal democracy had won out as the “final form of human government.” At around the same time, another influential political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington wrote that the world was in the middle of a “third wave” of democratic expansion. But 23 years later, the third democratic wave has hit a wall. According to Larry Diamond, founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, the rapid democratic expansion, which began in the 1970s and continued until 2005, is now in recession.

A number of theories have been put forth to explain this democratic stagnation.

Diamond points to “bad governance” as the most influential factor that has led to an authoritarian resurgence and the retreat of Western democracy. Underdeveloped democratic institutions were ill-equipped to handle abuses of power, which were exacerbated by the global economic crisis and increasing inequality. Western democracy suffered a blow to its reputation, resulting from a perceived “decline of democratic efficacy, energy and self-confidence,” says Diamond. The United States has not been immune, suffering repeated bouts of political gridlock and economic turmoil.

Pat Merloe, NDI’s senior associate and director of electoral programs, contends that the struggle against authoritarianism and the deficiencies of established Western democracies are long-term challenges that require resolve. Factors like rapid authoritarian learning and the spread of new forms of terrorism complicate democratic development and must be met with effective democratic learning and innovation to create a “democratic stimulus” and avoid a “democratic depression.”

Democracy Works – a project by the Legatum Institute and the Center for Development and Enterprise, which coincidentally shares a title with NDI’s recently launched blog – says that the resurgent appeal of authoritarianism is also driven by economics.

China’s rapid economic rise accounted for 76.09 percent of global poverty reduction between 1990–2005, and was a primary reason that the world was able to halve global poverty five years ahead of the Millenium Development Goal target.

The Democracy Works project argues that China’s hybrid model – which employs market mechanisms alongside a command economy – has demonstrated an “attractive alternative to Western-style democratic capitalism.” But the Chinese model does not have a monopoly on delivering inclusive economic growth. The project points to three developing societies that are delivering economic growth, along with the other trappings of democratic society: stability, accountability, liberty and human rights. Three fifths of the BRICS – India, Brazil and South Africa – represent an often-overlooked democratic alternative from the South.

Warning that the third democratic wave would not last forever, Huntington’s 1991 article predicted a fourth democratic wave occurring sometime in the 21st century. He wrote: “The two most decisive factors affecting the future consolidation and expansion of democracy will be economic development and political leadership. Economic development makes democracy possible; political leadership makes it real.”

Will there be a fourth democratic wave? It will take democratic stimulus, political leadership and economic development.

Tracking South Africa’s Democracy In Real Time

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This article was originally posted on the World Policy Journal and Council on Foreign Relations blogs.

By Le Chen, Janice Dean, Jesper Frant, and Rachana Kumar

We arrived in Johannesburg after 17 hours in the air, with a short, hurried stopover in London. As the airplane doors opened, the scorching 80 degree weather of South Africa’s Highveld greeted us, melting the sub-zero temperatures from recent New York winter memory. The change in weather was cheerful but, as graduate students from Columbia University’s School of International Affairs, we were more interested in the changing climate of South African democracy.

We arrived at a crucial and transitional moment in South Africa’s history, beginning on what we hope to be an important project on the country’s democratic future. Following Nelson Mandela’s death in 2013, the May 2014 elections will be a bellwether for the future of democracy in South Africa. Whether this election will lead to a more representative and responsive government or increased political divisiveness and turmoil remains an unanswered question.

Our project, the South Africa Service Delivery Protest Tracker, will stand as a resource used to provide information for gauging the strength of South African democracy. To do so, we are focusing in on the country’s service delivery protests. These protests, a legacy of the apartheid era, are organic uprisings that occur with regularity across South Africa when a community feels its right to basic services – sanitation, water, housing, electricity, etc. – are not being met by the government.

The protest tracker is part of a student consulting practicum with John Campbell, former Ambassador of United States to Nigeria and Africa Fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations. His work and the work of many experts inform our new tech-driven project.

For many analysts, service delivery protests are an indicator of the strength, or weakness, of South African democracy. In “Pathways to Freedom,” a book co-authored by Ambassador Campbell, the authors write that civic organizations in South Africa  “now play an important role in agitating for better service delivery, more accountable governance, and policies to address poverty, inequality, and high unemployment.” Protest, a legacy of the fight against apartheid, remains one of the primary tools wielded by these civil society organizations. However, little is known about the character and scale of these protests in aggregate.

The protest tracker will aggregate news articles and other online media sources and subsequently visualize mentions of service delivery protests both geographically and over time. Building upon the methodology the Council on Foreign Relations used to build the Nigeria Security Tracker, we plan to develop an online platform that automates the process of tracking and aggregating data on these protests. The hope is that this tool will be a source of real-time data on protests that will be useful for policy makers, think tanks, journalists, academics as well as the general public.

A search of FACTIVA’s database revealed preliminary evidence that reporting on service delivery protests has been increasing since the early 2000s, with a sharp downturn in 2013. However, this data is limited by internal factors such as FACTIVA’s addition of new sources and external factors like the media’s use of the term “service delivery protest.”
Source: FACTIVA

Our field research in Johannesburg, which included interviews with key stakeholders and visits to townships, brought a better understanding of the current media and political environment in South Africa. This new information triggered debate among our team members on some of our project’s underlying assumptions and intended direction

The first aspect we debated was where to get our data. For example, we explored using FACTIVA, a service that aggregates articles from top South African media outlets, web media, trade and consumer publications. This dataset would be used as our baseline – a point of comparison to judge the reliability of the data we collect via the protest tracker.  Through our interviews in South Africa – covering academia, newspapers, non-profit organizations – we realized that FACTIVA’s data may be insufficient as a baseline for our project.

FACTIVA, although covering 28 languages over 35 years, excludes the dominating local languages in South Africa like Afrikaans and Zulu. More importantly, FACTIVA’s data is unreliable when looking for trends over time due to changing reporting patterns and shifting data sources. Relatively little reporting on service delivery protests in prior to 2004 (see graph) may not necessarily indicate fewer service delivery protests during that time because journalists may not have used the term “service delivery protest” as a description.


Moreover, the increasing number of articles mentioning service delivery protests may have more to do with FACTIVA’s addition of new sources than with the country’s political situation. While selection bias may be unavoidable with a methodology that involves aggregating news sources, the effect can be minimized by creating as comprehensive a list of sources as possible, favoring local newspapers, and designing search terms that accurately reflect the most commonly used lexicon in reporting about service delivery protests.

We then were forced to re-consider what exactly our project sought to contribute. We quickly learned of a number of research projects on service delivery protests, involving separate groups which employ similar methodologies: Service Delivery Protest Barometer, ISS Crime Hub, MunicipalIQ, Mail &Guardian, the University of Johannesburg, and Rhodes University. How was ours different?

Soon it became clear that, while these groups tend to be better at recording individual protests, few are open source and most leave the data sources disconnected from the final visualizations. Graphs and visualizations, although comprehensive and full of information, tend to be static snapshots of the data. Our project aims to fill in these gaps by creating an interactive online dashboard that empowers users to look beyond numbers and explore the context behind each data point.

As we begin to develop this platform, many questions remain unanswered. How can we make this project sustainable so that it will live on beyond our semester-long practicum? Can an automated methodology fully capture the complexity of service delivery protests and distribute valuable data? These questions, in addition to concerns over time-constraints and technological solutions, remain unanswered.

This is the first of three dispatches from South Africa covering our work. Follow along as we design a platform to track service delivery protests and report on South African democracy in the lead up to the imminent elections.

*****

Le Chen, Janice Dean, Jesper Frant, and Rachana Kumar are Master of Public Administration students at Columbia University’s School of International Public Affairs. They are working with Ambassador John Campbell. The project was made possible by faculty advisor Professor Anne Nelson.

mDATA: New Media Taskforce app competition submission

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I, along with two of my colleagues at SIPA (Ashish and Swami), submitted the following application to the New Media Taskforce’s first mobile app competition. Today, we had the chance to present our idea in front of an expert panel. There was some stiff competition and, unfortunately, we did not make the top three, but I’m encouraged by the positive feedback that we got…If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Feel free to take a look at our submission and let me know what you think in the comments section below. Also, check out the blog post I wrote (and didn’t immediately publish) that was the genesis of this idea.

[scribd id=111970094 key=key-222knpprk2d2cra6ygrx mode=scroll]

I won the lottery

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Last week I won the lottery. No, I’m not a multi-million dollar Powerball winner. I won the opportunity to see former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan speak at Columbia University.

Secretary General Kofi Annan at SIPA

Secretary General Kofi Annan Speaks at Columbia’s School of International Public Affairs

The discussion ranged from the UN’s failure to prevent the Rwandan genocide – which Secretary Annan blamed on a lack of international political will following the “Blackhawk Down” incident in Somalia – to the current crisis in Syria.

Annan briefly touched on his resignation as UN special peace envoy to Syria, blaming UN’s failure to broker peace on the international community’s failure to close ranks against the Assad regime (specifically blaming China and Russia’s intransigence). Annan mentioned his successful mission to Kenya as an example of what the international community can accomplish when it speaks with one voice. As chief negotiator in 2008, he successfully brokered a deal between President Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga to form a coalition government. Still, I can’t help but wonder if Annan was the best choice in Syria given the context. Simply put, Annan is not a muslim and does not carry the same authority in the Middle East as he does in Africa.

What are your thoughts on this? Let me know in the comments section below.

Participating in this event was an amazing opportunity that I doubt I would have had at any other school. That said, I was so drained from my statistics midterm the day before that Annan’s quiet and monotonous voice nearly put me to sleep during his opening remarks. Note to self: drink more coffee.

The president deserves four more years

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I hope everyone’s registered. The deadline is almost here. Also, if you voted in 2008 and you plan to sit this one out, you need to start paying attention…the stakes are higher than ever. Let’s not turn our backs on the president that kept the U.S. from falling into another Great Depression right as the economy shows signs of recovery. He deserves four more years to make good on his promises. The opposition is just peddling snake oil (i.e. budget cuts w/out increased revenue to close the deficit and grow the economy).

Can’t kick the political bug

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Last night was the first presidential debate of the 2012 election. Being the resident politico in my program, I felt obligated to organize a group viewing of the debate. Half-way through the debate in a crowded bar surrounded by my peers, a pang of nostalgia flooded my consciousness. Olivia, a classmate and one of my closest new friends, commented on the fact that the debate was happening at the University of Denver. I responded that had I not decided to change career paths and pursue a master’s degree at Columbia I might have been in audience in Denver (alright, yes, probably just the over-flow room), not a bar in NYC. I still think I made the right decision by coming moving to NYC, but there are many things I miss about working for Senator Udall. This is just one small example.

Speeding through Yonkers with Columbia Cycling

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The Columbia Cycling Team has been holding no-drop group rides every weekend to encourage new-commers to join the team. Today, I took advantage of that opportunity and went out on my first long ride in NYC: across the Washington Bridge and all the way up to Nyack, an over 50 mile roundtrip. Check out my route. It was nice to learn a new ride…one can only go around Central Park so many times.

My legs felt good most of the way, but things got tougher on the way back when the the group split up and I joined the faster pack. We screamed down Hillside Drive in a drafting echelon. I pedaled furiously at the back of the draft-line, letting others take charge of pulling at the front. Then, toward the end of the ride, I decided to take my turn at the front…bad idea. After only 15 seconds of effort, I was spent and the team dropped me. Luckily they slowed down and I was able to catch up.

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