Designing eLearning courses to meet the digital literacy needs of healthcare workers in lower- and middle-income countries: Experiences from the Knowledge for Health Project

Traditional conceptualizations of knowledge management fail to incorporate the social aspects in which knowledge management work operates. Social knowledge management places people at the center of all knowledge management, including placing the end user at the center when developing eLearning packages, particularly within the context of digital health literacy. As many health professionals working in lower-resource settings face the digital divide, or experience unequal patterns of access and usage capabilities from computer-based information and communication technologies (ICTs), ensuring that eLearning packages are tailored for their specific needs is critical. Grounded in our conceptualization of social knowledge management, we outline two of our experiences with developing eLearning packages for health professionals working primarily in lower- and middle-income countries. The Global Health eLearning Center provides eLearning courses to health professionals primarily working in the lower- and middle-income country context. The courses have robust and exhaustive mechanisms in place to ensure that issues related to digital health literacy are not barriers to taking the courses and subsequently, applying the course material in practice. In Bangladesh, we developed a digital health package for frontline community fieldworkers that was loaded on netbook computers. To develop this package, community fieldworkers were provided support during the implementation phase to ensure that they were able to use the netbooks correctly with their clients. As new digital technologies proliferate, guaranteeing that global health workers have the prerequisite skills to utilize and apply digital health tools is essential for improving health care.