This community innovation has been accepted at the 2025 DHIS2 Annual Conference
Overcoming barriers to DHIS2 online learning
Background Health workers from STP could hardly exploit DHIS2 Academy online coursework, due to the challenges of language and lack of conditions for online learning. An initiative was established firstly to mobilize and secondly provide enabling conditions. Course videos were audio translated (i.e., replacing English with Portuguese voice over) using AI. A workshop (total of 20 participants) was then organized whereby the following was done: survey assessing experience with online learning and specifically with DHIS2 Academy; presentation of online learning with pros and cons discussed; discussion of the need and strategy for accelerating local capacity building; orientation on navigating the DHIS2 Academy. Thereafter, participants undertook various courses individually (depending on background and role), at own pace, with support provided only for issues such as navigation but not the learning content. Results Before either workshop, 30% had not completed any DHIS2 Academy Online course and 70% had zero or one. By the end of the 2nd workshop, all (100%) health workers had successfully completed > one course with 85% having two or more. Health information technicians had completed all targeted courses (4 5) per person and worked on tasks directly applying the new skills from the academy to accomplish new tasks on the local DHIS2 instance. Participants reported satisfaction with the workshops including the coursework material and conditions, recognizing, and applauding it for filling important knowledge and skills gaps. Conclusion: The experience demonstrated that in low resource settings lacking conditions for online learning, the online resources can successfully be exploited through a “hybrid” approach, and AI can be successfully utilized to overcome language barriers, through reproducing translated versions of video lessons with satisfactory (close
Primary Author: Alec Mkwamba
Keywords:
Language and other barriers to online learning; artificial intelligence
Very exciting work! It’s great to see you were able to reuse the Online Academy resources and leverage AI translation/voiceover and a hybrid approach to instruction to get good results with the team in Sao Tome and Principe.
Were the participants completing the course material in English on the Online Academy website, or did you also download and translate the text parts of the courses as well?
Thank you so much Max for the feedback and interest.
Regarding the text part, most of it gets translated by selecting the language page on the web so the participants were shown how to do this and would do it that way. For some text that cannot be translated even when the page is in Portuguese, participants would have to translate “manually” by putting the text onto a selected translator.
Amazing! Have you thought about sharing a video demo with feedback from the participants? 
