Does anyone have any experience and advice on running DHIS2 trainings in low bandwidth settings? We (Frontline AIDS) have developed our own instance of DHIS2 for monitoring our HIV and human rights programmes. The partner organisations we work with generally have strong internet connections in their offices and outreach workers have access to mobile phones/tablets for offline data entry. The issue is the training venues, where a strong internet connection is needed for around 20 people to be using DHIS2 at the same time, learning about data entry and analytics on our instance of DHIS2. We’ve run into many problems linked to poor connectivity during training, which is frustrating to both participants and facilitators. Any successful use cases that have addressed this issue? Any advice around hardware that may be needed such as travel routers or portable servers? Any low cost recommendations?
My opinion;
I would recommend you install a local instance and configure it for training on a machine / local server and use it for the training connecting through a common local network environment / an IP address / localhost client.
The simple and best solution is to have a local network setup and server for training. In this case, you don’t even need the internet. The usual conference venue intranet will allow this type of setup all your user’s computers and mobile devices can connect to this training server. We encountered the same problem and changed our training approach as I said. It worked like a charm!
Thank you both so much for the advice! Can you please describe in layman terms (I’m not a very techie person) what steps this would entail? I.e. is any hardware required to set up a local network and server? What instructions can I pass on to our server hosts to install a local instance?
We at the IRC have come across this issue. our hosting partner was able to assist in providing a solution. Which is based on what MSP and James shared above. Basically, we have a mini PC (Intel® NUC Products) where we restore database from our DHIS2 instance that gives us the local server. at the venue, we bring a basic wifi router to give us a local network allowing users to connect to the NUC.
You need to install DHIS2 on a local machine with good performance (you will need someone with IT Skills who can clone your database to the local instance)
As Asif has highlighted,
you should have the local machine connected to the local network and also all devices being used to connect to the same network. This should enable you to train the team efficiently without slow network issues.
I highly recommend you get in touch with your IT team for support.
Thank you @jomutsani. @MSP, and @Asif very much for your helpful comments and feedback! I have noted all of this down and will follow up with our server hosts and our IT team for additional support
