 Well, hello everyone. Good afternoon or good evening depending on where you're joining us from today. Welcome to Engineering for Change, or E4C for short. Today, we're pleased to bring you a special segment in the E4C 2016 webinar series focusing on mobile data collection. My name is Yonah Aranda, and I'm the Director of Programs here at Engineering for Change. And I'll be today's moderator for the webinar. Now I'd like to take a moment to tell you a bit about the mobile data collection series. The widespread availability of mobile communication offers international development researchers, practitioners, and students new tools and techniques for collecting field data and determining success of projects. So we've partnered with the Development Impact Lab at UC Berkeley, or DIL for short, for a series of six webinars to introduce a sample of survey software tools and demonstrate how to implement each tool in practice. For a recorded introduction to the series, we invite you to visit the E4C homepage. Today's webinar is the second in the series featuring Kobo Toolbox introduced by Co-Founder Fong San. Our next webinar will be with Survey TTO on March 10th at 12 p.m. EST, and we hope that you'll join us for that. If you would like to make a recommendation for a specific platform, future topics and speakers, we invite you to contact the series team via the email address as visible on the slide. Now before we move to our presenter, I'd like to tell you a bit about engineering for change and who we are. E4C is a knowledge exchange platform and global community of nearly one million engineers, designers, development practitioners, and social scientists leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges by underserved communities. These can include access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy, improved agriculture, and so on. We invite you to join E4C by becoming a member. E4C membership provides cost-free access to relevant and current news, professional development resources such as this webinar, and a growing database of hundreds of poverty-leading products in our solutions library. E4C members enjoy a unique user experience on their site behavior and engagement. Essentially, the more you interact with our site, the better we will be able to serve you resources that meet your needs and interests. We invite you to join our passionate global community and contribute to making people's lives better around the world. Check out our website to learn more and sign up. We're excited to collaborate with Dill on this and future webinars. Dill is an international consortium of universities, research institutes, MGOs, and industry partners addressing global poverty through advances in science and engineering. Headquartered at the University of California in Berkeley, Dill was launched in 2012 with support from the U.S. Agency for International Development through the U.S. Global Development Lab. This leveraged the innovative capacity of world-class universities to design development solutions, which couple new technologies with novel economic and behavioral interventions. Dill calls this approach, development engineering. Now, this webinar you are participating in today is part of the Fritz's professional development offerings. The webinar series is free and publicly available, showcasing the best practices and thinking of development practitioners. Information on upcoming installments in the series, as well as archive videos of past presentations, can be found on our site and you have the URL listed there, as well as on our YouTube channel. If you're following us on Twitter today, I'd like to invite you to join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C webinars. Now, a few housekeeping items before we get started. I'd like to see where folks are from today on the webinar. So this is a great opportunity for you to use the chat window, which is located at the bottom right of your screen, not to be confused with the question window. So I'll go ahead and get started today. I'm in lovely New Jersey. I see we have folks from Pennsylvania, but you have to put that into the chat window. If the chat window is not also on your screen, you can access it by clicking the icon on the top right-hand corner of the WebEx window. Any technical questions or administrative problems should go into the chat window. You can also feel free to send a private chat to the E4C admin. You can also use the chat window to type in any remarks that you may have. During the webinar, please use the Q&A window located below the chat to type in your questions for the presenter. Again, if you don't see this, you can access it by clicking the icon on the top right-hand corner. If you are listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any trouble, try hitting Stop and then Start. You may also want to try opening up WebEx in a different browser. So I see we have folks from Germany and Calgary and definitely Berkeley. So welcome everyone. Following the webinar, to request a certificate of completion showing one professional development hour or a PH for this session, please follow the instructions on the top of the E4C professional development page and the URL is listed right there. And I see some other folks have entered their locations into the Q&A window. Just I see from Kinshasa and other parts of the world. We also see folks from Massachusetts and Indiana. So if you have any questions, please contact us at the Q&A window for any further comments, but keep your questions in the Q&A window. So thank you so much for sitting through our preamble with us. I'd like to introduce today's presenter, Hong-Fam, who is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Director of Evaluation and Design and Implementing Epidemiologic and Evaluation Research, Tech Solutions, Educational Programs in ongoing and post-plural countries such as Northern Uganda, DRC, Rwanda, Central African Republic, and many others. She co-founded PeaceBuildingData.org and Cobalt Toolbox, which she'll talk about today. Dr. Flam joined HHI after holding the position at UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center at the Space and Center for International Development. We're very honored to have you here and look forward to learning more about Cobalt Toolbox. You'll have to take off your mutes. There we go. Welcome. Thank you, Rihanna, for the introductions and thank you for Engineering for Change and Development Impact Lab for organizing today's webinar and inviting us to participate. Rihanna mentioned I used to work at UC Berkeley, so I'm quite familiar with the group there and I'm glad to be back and participate in one of the events. We started Cobalt Toolbox back in 2005. Really, I'm an Epidemiologist by training, so I do a lot of research, especially in post-conflict situations. So originally, Cobalt Toolbox was developed for our team to meet some of our needs that were not with some of the commercials and some of the free software that were available. I think since then the scene has changed a lot and there are much more software and tools available much more than back then. I think back then when we started it we didn't even have a smart phone, so that's how, you know, we had to use these PalmPilot handheld organizer and attached GPS devices to be able to do some of the capability that we are doing now. So the scene has changed a lot and so today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about this in general about digital data collections and then I'll jump in and introduce you to the Cobalt Toolbox. Before I wanted to start I think I used to, when we first started out this field we had to try to convince people that collecting data digitally was superior to paper-based but I think now it's transparent that it does provide much more efficiency and it does no long run better quality data and I think this slide is just to say for the information when using such outdated technology I think doing paper-based there's still time and places for it but I think in terms of research I think more and more people are using digital platforms to collect their data and manage their data. So why collect data digitally? It's both opportunity to improve process and output of primary data collections. I think designing and preparing questionnaires and recruiting and all that it may take longer than using a digital platform and that's in terms of only just in terms of time it takes more advanced planning but a lot of these can be done in advance and I think over time as we found out in our research we've been conducting research in over 15 countries 12 or 13 years that over time actually going digital save us a lot of time because all of our instruments are digitized and so the process becomes much more efficient as you move forward. This is not needed to say but to get from you know data collections to data presentation takes a long time before it needs to take me about 3 to 4 weeks just to enter data and to verify the data and now we can look at data on a databases on a nightly basis. It also improves quality, greater accuracy easier analysis, increased comparability and improved sharing so these are some of the benefits of collecting data digitally. Some of the key features I think this has changed a lot when I first started out to create a form you needed some programming languages and I think over time this has improved and became more user friendly so one of the challenges that I gave my programmers when we first started out I wanted them to create a tool that allowed me to use it in a field without their support because I can create the forms I can look at the data that I've collected and I can visualize it without their support and at the beginning of the first few years we still needed their support but over time as they advanced in their development the tool got much easier to use the second criteria that we had because of the type of research that we did I was based at the Human Rights Center had to be secured and encrypted and so that was another key feature requirements for developing the tool the third one is we work in a lot of post conflicts in the humanitarian crisis situation so often there's no internet connection so we needed a lot of offline capability and the other thing is to have support in remote deployment and that the technology really need or permit low tech implementation meaning that we can work on devices that doesn't require a lot of batteries or that we have some sort of backup systems in case I think one of the first place that we pilot our technology was in the Central Republic and outside of the capital there was no electricity so we needed devices that could allow us the functions outside of the capital a recent requirement we had was we realized that over time as we did our research a lot of the if you're involved with research three fourth of your time that you're spending research is at the beginning trying to develop the questionnaires the design and a lot of times you have to do a lot of background research and for example you want to do assessments on mental health you would try to reach out the other researcher and try to find out questions that they had posed to assess mental health and so they exist in Excel PDF form and all different formats and so it takes a long time to get all of those and so one of the recent requirement we wanted to do was to create a library function that allows you to archive research questions and then share them with others and then also be able to index it in a way that is easy to search and for you to organize those questions so that's one of the new features that we have and I think over time I think as that feature gets expanded and more people contribute to the library I think we're going to see a lot of improvement and standardizations of research over time and also you will see the research cycle much more efficient for the next researcher the other features that is key is the data cleaning and data visualization and then the last one is the ability to import and export the data in different tools and have different APIs but those are some of the key features that I'm going to go over that our tool has so before I introduce you to Kobo this is a typical workflow if you are the administrator and administrator is a person who actually managed the data collection process so you know first always is selecting the right devices then designing creating the questionnaire online then create a place to store it manage the data and then you create a visualization analysis typical workflow for data collectors with Kobo Toolbox you can collect data there are two ways one if you use an android devices you can download the app or if you use other devices such as iPhone or the window based one you can use it through a browser so you can install the app through the market and then or you just open a browser to that URL that you provided and then you download the data forms and then you collect the data and then you submit the data and the data can be submitted when you have internet connections or you can transfer in the old way just connecting until you record I'm putting in a computer and then upload the forms when you're ready and you have the internet connection Kobo Toolbox is developed by the Harvard Humanitarian Resources Open Source Tool for data collections and some of the more recent changes that we've made was actually catered toward humanitarian worker working in emergency situations so with that I'm going to switch screen I'm going to start sharing my desktop and go into the tool can you see my screen so when you get there our website is KoboToolbox.org and to get started you just click on get started and you can create an account in two ways if you are working for a humanitarian organization you can sign up here and the benefits of it is that you get much more support and also you have unlimited ability to upload as many forms as you like or many data points as you like KoboToolbox we have some limitations of how much forms and how much data though no one has reached those limits yet and so you can sign up on either sites I recommend if you're not a humanitarian working for a humanitarian organization you can do the researchers and workers I think as of today we have equal number of people using both sites and so you just click on sign up or login and you shouldn't get this case I'm already logged in so it's taking me to a form but for the first time you should see a login screen and you sign up for the account and then you would go to your email and click to verify that account and it will allow you to open but once you open the form the sites and you login you should see the screen if this is the first time that you created the account you would not see any form but the first place it will take you is the form one thing I didn't mention is that we are now in a we're releasing a beta version we're in a process of making that a full up right now you have the options to opt in but I think in a couple of weeks we're going to force everyone into this new version so when you login for the first time this is the old version how it looks like but you will also get this kind of orange lag in the bottom that allows you to take you to the new version I recommend you using the new versions if this is your first time using Kobo Toolbox we left the old versions available for those who are familiar and want to kind of ease in even if you opt in you have the ability to opt out afterwards so you can click here and it gives you kind of an overview of some of the new feature and I think some of the new features are some of the questions in library that we have developed some of the feature there has been updated but I'm going to quickly go into the new tool and just kind of give you an over sense so Kobo Toolbox has three workspace one is the form that allows you to create the form the other one is the library that allows you to index your library questions that you've archived and the last one is the project this is one to start data collection this is where you manage the data so those are your three workspace and you can see here that there's other setting like leave beta as I mentioned you can leave the beta version anytime at this moment but once we force everyone in you can't do that so let me go back to the form so what I'm going to do for the purpose of this demo is I'm going to create a new form you can also upload a form that someone shared with you as well so I'm going to create a new form and here on this kind of icon setting you can set up these metadata and these are the data that are collected in the background and your data collector will not see this I always have the start time and end time because I want to know how long it takes them I like to also have the dates as well so you can choose other metadata that you collect but those are the three that I normally click but by default it will already collect the start time and end time you can uncheck that if you like so if you want to add questions you click on here and let's just say let's do a question about data collection tool so first I want to know your name and so you add the question and here a box an option box sorry name an option box appear and here are all the different types of questions options that you have a select one is like for example gender you have one for male two for female select many if you have a question like how do you feel today and you allow people to select a couple of options text since this is name this is a text field for this one numeric let's say if you ask how old are you decimal let's say give me your weight with decimal points what is your birth date for the next field which is the date time functions what time do you normally eat breakfast in the morning and a time and a date field that allows you to collect both the time and the date GPS in all my questions I always include the GPS as the first question actually I'm going to change this to GPS because I always do that and the reason why is that I like for all of my data collectors to record the GPS points so that I can monitor them in the field and see where they're collecting data and whether they're following the right sampling strategy another one is photo you can take photos let's say you're doing an assessment on injuries and you want to take a picture of that injury so you can have a field questions on allow people to capture the photo an audio this is great if you're actually using this function this form to do a mixed method or to do a qualitative assessment let's say you're doing focus group and you are doing 10 different focus groups and so you can organize the focus group audio using this form by saying this is focus group number one how many people participated in it and then you can have the audio function that allows you to record the entire focus group video the same way instead of audio you have video notes these are questions that allows you to have a placeholder what happens is on the applet by default it shows you one question at a time so if you have section this allows you to kind of say this is your starting section too or if you want a field that allows you to provide a note to your interviewer to read to the participant or a note to your interviewer so let's say you know please read this to the participant you know this question is a 5-point or something like that it's not necessary a field for them to complete but it's just a note for the interviewer barcode is great this allows you to see on barcode and we use this function a lot when we do longitudinal study or we do a panel study where we for example did a study where we interviewed a child and so we would have the same barcode created for the child and caregiver and we would have two forms and the barcode would allow us to know which child belongs to which parent and so it allows us to merge the data later on the acknowledge is great let's say for example you have to read an informed consent and you want your interviewer to acknowledge that they've read the informed consent form calculate is wonderful for those who are trying to come up with some sort of calculation based on two or three questions for example let's say you're doing nutrition assessments and you want to measure the upper arm circumference and try to determine and the way to determine whether a child is Mount Nurse so you can based on a couple of fields you can say oh this child does this or not and have that calculation done and a lot of people find that it's useful because then we can have it right there rather than waiting until after the data collection is completed to determine that child's needs referral to a health provider or not. Matrix and rating are great this is a complex form is actually collecting a couple collections at the same time and you can say you can just say what is your priority and rate them and so it allows you to do that or let's say you have a PT-DSD scale and it's 17 questions using five like or score and so rather than repeating those options over and over you can build a matrix that has one column and one row and one column and then the five option choice on the next five columns and ranking the same thing like what is your priorities and it allows you to list all the priorities and then allow the needier to rank them in the order of importance so those are really nice features that we need quite often so let me just select GPS and create another one and let's do age and that's going to be a number going to add another one called gender and that's a single select of the screen gender add a question select and I'm going to do male and then female and then numbers everything in one, two, three, four, five I'm going to create male as zero I like creating zero space and one so that when you do logistic regressions or something like that it's already coded in binary numbers and then the next question let's do let's go let's do a question about let's ask all the female questions let's say we want to ask this maybe I shouldn't have made this maybe make this about Vujica are you pregnant and sorry move the screen up here add question, I'm trying to get the screen below this is that are you pregnant and the next question is the reason I want to show you the skip logic and this will be select one no yes set this as zero and setting this as one and then I want to go into this setting and I want to ask this question only to female so I go into the skip logic and I want to show you the condition set this question then and this is to be female I can also add a gender and say another condition will be age and only if this person is like I would say of reproductive age so let's say 15 years old and older so those are the two conditions and then you can excel at that so that's how you would do that you can do on the age and let's say if you interview people and I go here validation rule I want to add a condition that let's say this question has to be greater than somebody who is 10 years old, I mean if they interview anyone younger than 10 years old there will be an error in that you interview please select please make sure you have the correct age or or select an eligible respondent so those are the error message that will come up and so I'm going to say this but a good feature of this is look in the preview if once I do some of these conditions I just want to test it so I'm going to try to enter somebody nine and then the GPS because this is a web form you would have to choose the location so you would see that an error message arrives here that nine you have not correct somebody so I would have to enter something that is above 10 if I do 10 hopefully that's the error message will go away so I'm going to do 10 and then let's do female if if so now it's the right condition I do female and it's required and there should be another question that showed up and it didn't show up so I need to get out here and I can go back to my setting again and I need to go to the setting and see if I selected the right condition are you pregnant and skip logic this person has to be over 15 so that's why I do preview I enter somebody who is 16 years old and female and then you see that option so you see that skip logic and that validation will work so this is how you test your form just for the fun of it I'm just going to do one question that is a photo so let's say photo of somebody do photo and add a question and this is going to be a photo question so I'm going to save it and I've already test out all of the preview functions and so now you save it and when you're ready to deploy it you can just deploy the other function I didn't show you is on here let's see if I can do them in a little bit more you see here it said add to the library let's just say I always have library a GPS and I don't want to program it again I can just add this to my question library so I can just click on here and just click on add library and it will add to the library add if you want to add any questions then just click on it and it just adds to the library so now I'm done I'll save and then I close it and then I have a couple options I can share this if I want to share this this is one of the new feature of the new cobalt you won't see this all of these options in the old version this is only now in the the new version the beta version you can share this with another person and give them different privileges and just say you have to have their names or you can share their link so and they have they can edit it or view it only they can give them kind of working like Google Doc allows you different privileges you can download this forms into an XLS forms you can clone it if you want to revise this form but you want to keep an old version of it you can clone it and then revise the version of it deploy it when you're ready to collect data so you just hit deploy and once you hit deploy you're just going to create an ID I'm going to call this Zika Zika2 and I click ok so the form has been deployed that means now you can see in this project view so if you want to be able to collect the data check on how to collect data on mobile devices and here you will see there's instruction here if you collect it on using an Android device you download the applet and under the general setting you will enter a URL and here it will give you the specific URL to the specific site and once you have this URL there's an icon to say download forms and you click on download forms and it should have a list of all the forms that is available for you to download and then that's how you have this form the other way is to give people this website if you're online I'm going to copy this over and I'll put this link to the chat room and if you can go to that form and if you can start filling it out or if you have an Android phone or a tablet I welcome you to download the applet and do this but if one or two of you can start filling out the form that would be great I'll give you a few minutes to do that and that way I can show you some of the next few functions within the project setting if you see here the submission form I see right now that no one has submitted any form so if a few of you can do that that would be great and then I will be able to see let me see I'm sorry actually I'd send it to all the site I see one submission so far that's great would you be able to open the link yourself as well so I will do that right now it should look something like this if you're using the web for the locations you will have to zoom into your locations or type in the address and then I do invite you to take a photo of yourself if you can selfie time yeah okay great so I see six the thing I could do immediately is look on view maps I always like to view maps that's why I like the GPS because then I can zoom in to see where all of the GPS locations are for me this is great because we do a lot of survey sampling so I like to see if they follow the right sampling strategies if they're clustering the other thing is to see if people make faking data if you see one person standing at a location all the time then they're taking 10 minutes to complete the form something went wrong let me move out of here because I only see one GPS location or is there more oh yes there's a few more so here view by the other thing you can view by the different categories that are collected by gender so here I can see that there's three male collected the data and four female you can do view by pregnancy to see where the pregnancy cases are no or view by any other categories that you have your data on that's a nice function to look at so you can see different type of clustering already with the map so that's one great place to look at so let's go back the other one you can do view gallery so here is if you have photos you can view all the photos that's collected it takes a few seconds you'll see some photos of the participant oh okay that's the first one somebody come laptop somebody slide great sense of view I see a lot of great photos there okay great the other thing that you could do is view data in table form and so here you can browse your data just as like it's in Excel the other thing is you can show the value in XML or you can show the label that you provided so then you can actually see the label of it I'm going to go back the other thing you can do is analyze do some basic frequency let's do gender is easy you can do frequency or percentage you can see the response there the other thing you can do is analyze the data download the data you can do XLS I always do a CSV those are easy the other one that we've also allowed is this Excel analyzer and this is an Excel spreadsheet that allows you to download I see a little error message something's wrong with that I'll ask the programmer to look at it but you can download the Excel analyzer basically this Excel analyzer has some pre-coded tabs that allows you to do basic analysis and graphing that has already been programmed for you based on the data structures that we have here so this is a really neat function we were using this to train people in UNICEF on how to analyze some of the data and so it's really a nice feature so that's really basically really here in the project I'm going to take you back to the form and one of the things I want to show you which I didn't go through is let's do the Zika survey I'm going to edit it one of the things I didn't show you is the library function so if you have a library here you can search for it let me see if I thought I have a library here okay so let's go back to here and let's do the tab survey here edit and so let's say I want to search my library and I want to do something on gender based or let's do how about IT education and let's see okay so you see a lot of things here let's say number of children pre and close crisis school information regarding safety in school let's look at that or vocational training I can expand the details some of these questions exist in blocks that means for example if you want to do vocational training you can have a set of five questions so once you expand you can see the questions and let's say I want to use this question I decided do people have jobs education let's just say I really like these questions I can drag these questions over to my questions and that's how you would use the library so once you archive it you can pull any questions that you search and you saw that at the beginning for the form I had to add and program each question it takes a lot of time but once you have this library you can start pulling out let's say this one I just pulled this and I can just build my form just based on pulling existing questions that I've already built so that's just the library functions just wanted to go back on that but I'm done right now with a demo in terms of our basic functions but I want to open it up to some Q&A for any questions that you may have thank you so much so very quickly while you're on the library so just to confirm the library is comprised of questions of the individual builds or it's actually pulling questions from other organizations that have already built surveys via co-visual box both the library questions right now we're going to create a library I mean a website that allows you to pull libraries that other people have created but right now the way the library functions work is that it's your individual library and then you share those libraries with others once you you've created a library so let's say I'm in the library functions and this is the IRC and I want to share it so just click share and you can share this with whoever you want or you can share the link publicly and this is where I said we're going to create once we release this beta version we're going to create a page where people can start sharing those library links and download the library function so this is why this is my next push is trying to get people to start kind of like the Wikipedia creating a survey library bank we're fans of libraries here at Engineering for Change so we certainly support that effort so a few questions that come in and I want to make sure to address them even though we're a little short on time the first question is regarding your definition of humanitarian organization can you please write a little clarification of how you qualify those organizations well I think it's any organizations that is now working on one of the L3 crisis that's the way I think Ocha is defining it I believe and I welcome others who you know I think Patrick is online if he wants to chat function to answer that but I believe right now it's any organizations that is working on one of the L3 crisis okay cool thank you and Patrick will certainly please share your insight another question of a practical nature is there any cost associated with using cobalt toolbox no it's free so it's open to anyone and so there's no cost associated with this fantastic so those are really good insights for the users I think we're going to have to pause here and we'd like to definitely thank you for sharing this fantastic overview with us I'm going to actually open up the slide here and thank all of our participants today so for those of you whose questions weren't addressed we do apologize please feel free to email us with your questions and we'll be happy to pass them on for feedback for those of you who are looking to receive your professional development hours the code is listed on the slide and we'd like to invite you all to join us as the first members to receive invitations to upcoming webinars and also to keep tabs on issues of importance for development engineering with that I'd like to thank our speaker I'd like to thank all of you for joining us from around the world and wish you all a fantastic afternoon evening or morning depending where you are talk to you all soon take care