How Gomo helped deliver innovative multilingual courses to humanitarian professionals

Gomo’s sister company LEO Learning has been working with the Academy since 2016 and, to date, they have produced five extensive eLearning courses, all authored in Gomo. These courses provide essential information on subjects such as health and nutrition, child protection, and coaching and mentoring, all in a humanitarian emergency context, and making use of Gomo’s powerful authoring features.

While the valued work of the humanitarian sector has many tried and tested approaches, the sheer scale, fluidity, and complexity of the challenges mean that new ideas are constantly needed for emerging problems.

The Academy approached LEO with a request to produce training focussed on innovation skills. The resulting course needed to help humanitarian workers better prime, recognize and nurture innovative thinking in themselves and their organizations. The primary audience included:

• Local responders
• Humanitarian organizations
• L&D providers
• Regional learning managers (who facilitate face-to-face workshops and virtual sessions)

This varied audience, coupled with the English, French, and Arabic delivery requirement of Kaya content, required flexible authoring software. The content needed to be designed to allow for the best possible desktop and mobile experiences, while offering similar parity between all language versions (which in turn, needed to be easy for the Academy’s in-house translators to implement. Gomo was a vital component of this solution.

The Academy provided access to a subject matter expert (SME) on innovation within the humanitarian sector, and LEO set about creating a draft script for the course based on the SME’s ideas and pre-publication thesis.

The centerpiece of the training was a 45-minute eLearning module, ‘Innovation Essentials’, built using Gomo. Using a custom template featuring familiar Humanitarian Leadership Academy brand colors, logos, and photography, the design is augmented with Gomo’s varied page transitions and advanced visual effects such as parallax scrolling.

Gomo's eLearning authoring tool allows LEO’s design team to follow all aspects of learning design best practice and produce an optimally paced learning environment with plenty of interactive elements aimed at cementing learner engagement. Individual topics are presented using a single vertical scrolling page foregrounding a sense of continuity while still allowing important points to stand alone. Elements such as clickable image hotspots, knowledge checks, and summaries help reinforce the material.

Finally, Gomo’s straightforward handling of multiple languages allowed the Academy to export LEO’s English language content, perform French and Arabic translation with their in-house staff, and import the resulting XLIFF files back into the system. No further editing was required to accommodate the right-to-left reading Arabic version—Gomo automatically achieves the best results with different written scripts.

The module was developed alongside a wider program in Kaya, which also featured:

• A glossary
• Printable factsheets
• A portfolio of eight real-life ‘innovation story’ case studies
• A guide to facilitating two-hour, face-to-face workshops or virtual sessions
• Pre- and post-learning assessment
• A completion certificate

LEO’s blended learning solution was a big hit with the Academy’s audiences, and the ‘Innovation Essentials’ course has reached over 1,100 humanitarians, with 280 already recipients of HPass badges commemorating their completion of the course as of November 2019 .

In keeping with the Academy’s emphasis on tailoring training to local needs, the components of the innovation learning can easily be recontextualized within the learning experiences of regional learning managers and humanitarian workers. Similarly, Academy partners such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) have used the learning as the basis for their own material.