- We've had to adjust within The DAISY Consortium particularly, in our capacity building work, which previously involved lots of visiting and face-to-face trainings. So let's hear now from Dipendra Manocha, he would tell us about capacity building during COVID times. - Hello, I'm Dipendra Manocha, Director for Developing Countries Programme and Lead Training and Technical Support for DAISY Consortium. And today, I'm going to share some of our challenges and our remedies caused by COVID and in our disruption that came for our training and technical support services at DAISY Consortium. The main challenges were that all our onsite trainings got stalled, and because of which the our various contractual obligations under ABC capacity building programmes could not be fulfilled. And in fact, the ABC, the Accessible Books Consortium itself, could not sign many contracts with people for the capacity building programmes, because the trainings could not be initiated, and the rest of the activities heavily depended on such trainings, such as the production and validation of books, et cetera. Due to which our several contracts, related to training, technical support, books validation, et cetera, were postponed. And we were facing this challenge of being able to sustain ourselves, and our services in the period where travel was completely stopped. These included the strategy or orientation and awareness workshops in various countries. We also normally take fact finding missions for establishing DAISY production, et cetera, in new developing countries. And all of those activities were stopped suddenly with COVID restrictions. What we did was that we tried to explore that how could we shift these trainings to an online mode? So we did our first experiment way back in April of 2020. When the travel restrictions started and our first experiment was a very small module on Indic AI platform, which is run by a not for profit organisation in India. And we provided a, ran a trial training for the Kenya Institute for the blind, which ran very successfully, but simultaneously provided us with several learnings on how we could improve or what kind of facilities are need to be built into our learning management system to able to deliver services in low bandwidth, low resource countries of the world. We embarked upon creating our own learning management system based on Sensei LMS platform of the WooCommerce they have done actually took this part on within the DAISY Consortium team itself. And that gave us a lot of flexibility in terms of, you know, hosting many expenses of the same platform for different people such as we have a separate URL running specifically for ABC capacity building programmes. We have one instance for trying out the new module development so that we do not disturb our active running courses. And the third one again, which is obviously consortium itself, where we are hosting more training courses, such as the one for the Marrakesh treaty training programme in collaboration with the world blind union, the content of these trainings were created by the DAISY Consortium team comprising of Richard and myself and Prashant Ranjan Verma. And these modules include text, images, screenshots, caption videos, and quiz, and also the assignments which people could download and complete and send it to the trainers, because these training modules were actually not just the ones that we will have to just read on their own, but we actually provided interactive sessions in between these modules. This could be one, two or three interactive sessions per module in the going course, which gave this, you know, we could monitor the progress. With our own elements we had this facility of creating a multilingual LMS, and we actually ended up creating this whole course in three languages English, Spanish, and French, and deliver this course very effectively in this language. The establishment of this course in 2020 enabled ABC to, you know, sign contracts and provide capacity building programmes in 14 different countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And we offered these, started offering these trainings practically to all these countries, if right, from January, 2021. Here is a screenshot of one of the screens of our late trained platform, which will give you an idea of the richness of this platform and how this actually has been providing effective services. We have under this ABC programme, we have 10 modules covering various topics, such as basic orientation on Marrakesh treaty and the eco-system of the accessible books, the reading systems, the how to get different formats books into Microsoft word and how to format the Microsoft word document to create several distribution formats, how to create accessible EPUB and braille, and also how to generate a human voice recorded audio books using Obi. We in addition to creating this module, now we are also adding the translation to Arabic of this whole course. We are also creating another module in the same course to produce STEM content in accessible format. We are also creating a new course for publishers, where they can use their own tools like InDesign, et cetera, and how they can actually create books, which are bond accessible using their own workflows and tools. As a result of this training programme, about 87 trainees from 43 different organisations in 15 countries attended this training programme capacity building programme. We delivered these courses, not just in English, Spanish and French, but also in Arabic. The interactive sessions were offered in Arabic and with the help of an interpreter in Burmese language. Besides ABC capacity building programme, these LMS has also been used in providing additional training outside the ABC capacity building programme in Malaysia, South Africa, and Nigeria. In addition, we have actually delivered workshops and the strategy development meetings, et cetera. To build network of key stakeholders in Kenya. This was supposed to happen in a face to face meeting actually, but we shifted to online mode, even for this programme. And we were very successfully developed the whole strategy and set up a network of almost 65 organisations in Kenya, dedicated to providing accessible book services to persons with brain disability stat. This is that screenshot of the last session that we held for our trainees in Myanmar interestingly, this session was held just two days after the military takeover of the government of Myanmar. And we actually thanked our stars that our trainees were not dead in Myanmar, when this very unfortunate instance had happened. And we were just training, delivering this training online during these challenging times in Myanmar. There are several pros of shifting to this module, which are very very long lasting and will be there for all times to come, which includes drastic change in the cost of delivering these trainings because of the, because there is no travel costs associated with delivering this training anymore. The trainees could now learn, you know, engage in these trainings at their own pace. The whole training could be spread out over several weeks instead of trying to deliver all the modules within three or four days itself, which gave adequate time for each and every trainee to go through all the exercises and assignments and learn these things thoroughly and do practise sessions, at their own. Besides this, the quality instructional material is now made available all through the year to the trainees because they can come back to the LMS and it is kept open for them at least for one year, so that they can revisit any of the modules while they're engaged in the actual production work of books, after receiving training from us. The few drawbacks that we faced and the challenges we faced during this time was that there are, you know, because of lack of bandwidth, a lot of, many trainees faced outages and their connectivity problems, but we try to work on this challenge by, by providing, you know, recordings of our interactive sessions to them, so that they could go through that same content again at their own pace. But yes, there were also people who did not have any control over their environment and the environment around them was very not really conducive for training, you know, because they were attending the programmes most of the time from their home and children would come and to stop them in between or some other factors, which are not in their control. So such training, such challenges were there, but all in all, I think it has been a very empowering experience of delivering or being able to continue to deliver our training and technical support services, in spite of this major disruption caused by the COVID pandemic. Thank you.