AAACE 2021 Annual Conference

digital learning, public health training

This presentation reports an evaluation of the Immunization Training Challenge Hackathons (ITCH), delivered by the Geneva Learning Foundation. ITCH demonstrated an effective scalable, informal, non-didactic, experience-led, peer learning design. Characteristics of effective open-ended digital learning approaches are identified. Recommendations for program improvement, decision-making, and future consideration are provided.

This article reports an evaluation of the Immunization Training Challenge Hackathons (ITCH), delivered by the Geneva Learning Foundation. ITCH provided a global, synchronous, strategic way to meet the needs of advanced public health professionals participating in the Teach to Reach (T2R) Scholar Program. T2R focused on problem solving and enhancing training capacity in the immunization sector. ITCH consisted of 17 30-minute sessions held in 2020, nine in English, eight in French, with 583 participants. Challenge owners and respondents came from 15 African countries and spanned different roles with differing scope. This evaluation used thematic analysis, statistical analysis, and additional machine learning algorithms of the transcripts of the ITCH recorded sessions, a follow-up survey of all ITCH participants, and interviews of key stakeholders. The evaluation focused on the implementation phase of the ITCH approach and early outcomes. Finding showed that learning from ITCH was primarily in terms of the process itself—learning from each other, seeing a virtual problem-solving session in action, and the sense of community that emerged from feeling the problems each brought to the session were shared across country borders. ITCH demonstrated an effective scalable, informal, non-didactic, experience-led, peer learning design.