Literacy Bridge has learned a lot since we began in 2007 about how to create audio recordings that help people with the least formal education adopt new practices and behaviors to improve their family’s health and income. We have learned by studying academic research, by reading reports from other successful projects, and by doing a lot of first-hand learning with the people we are dedicated to serving.
With this knowledge, we have begun training our partners and documenting best practices for creating the most effective content. We’ll soon blog more about this important aspect of our work; but today I would like to focus on how we help our partners learn to improve upon their content by using technology easily collect and analyze the feedback from the communities they serve.
In an earlier post announcing the new Talking Book operating system (version 1.50), I mentioned that we delivered a set of feedback features requested by our partners. By co-releasing the Talking Book upgrade with a new version of our Audio Content Manger, we have offered organizations a way to easily organize their recorded Talking Book messages and to track how community members are responding to those messages.
ACM Beta 4
The Audio Content Manager (ACM) is like a digital music manager (e.g. the iTunes app); but instead of searching, sorting, and filtering music by artist and genre, it searches, sorts, and filters messages by language and category. For example, with a single click, you hear all messages about maize farming, child/maternal health, or adult literacy; with another click; you can hear only the ones in the Twi language. For an overview of the ACM, see the first blog written about the ACM by its lead developer, Michael Busch, or go to our website.
With this latest release, the Talking Book and the ACM work together, not only to organize content, but also to help our partners learn how to improve the content they offer to local communities.
Recorded User Feedback
From the beginning, Literacy Bridge designed the Talking Book to encourage user comments and original recordings to share with their peers. Over the years, we’ve found that many people will record feedback intended for the author of other recordings, such as the health and agriculture messages. We also heard from our partners that they were very interested in feedback. Some feedback messages ask for clarification, some explain that a particular message is not applicable in their community, and some feedback messages ask for information about a new issue.
In this new release, we now prompt users to leave feedback about the message they have just listened to, and we link the original recording with the feedback. This encourages user feedback and will soon allow feedback recordings to be grouped with the original message, both on a Talking Book and in the next release of the ACM. This will make it easier for our partners to quickly review their own recordings and comments about each recording (just as I can review this blog post to hear what text comments readers have made – we’re just doing the same with audio for users who live on less than $1 per day).
Monitoring Usage
While recorded user feedback offers a chance for an individual to give detailed opinions about an original recording, these recorded messages may or may not represent what the rest of the community thinks. To give content authors a sense of whether their recorded audio message is popular and frequently referred to, we monitor what users are doing with the recording. For instance, the new Talking Book tracks every time a message is started and every time it is listened to in full; it also tracks each time one listener decides to give a copy of the recording to another user.
With the latest release of the ACM, these statistics are automatically imported from a Talking Book whenever it is connected to it. In fact, the ACM not only reflects the usage of that Talking Book, but also the usage of every Talking Book that was at one time connected to that one. Every time a user gives a copy of any message to another Talking Book, the two devices exchange usage statistics so that any one of them offers a glimpse into what is popular throughout the community.
Built-In Surveys
While usage statistics can give the content author a sense of what is popular, it doesn’t necessarily indicate that people are learning and applying what they have learned. To answer these questions, we added a survey feature to the Talking Book. Just as a user is prompted to leave their recorded feedback, the user is also offered the option to answer a survey question. The question we ask users in this release is “Do you plan to apply what you have learned from this message?” or “Do you think this message was not helpful to you?” Their response is recorded along with the usage statistics and all survey responses are exchanged when two Talking Books connect to each other to copy a message.
This allows the ACM to reflect the number of times that a user (of the Talking Book connected to the ACM or of any Talking Book that was connected to it) indicated they would apply what they learned and the number of times that a user thought the message was not helpful.
Combined with the recorded user feedback and the usage statistics, this gives content authors a comprehensive picture of which of their recorded messages are successful and which may need to be revised.
Literacy Bridge
