chances are
you've heard of the who for well
obvious reasons
but who exactly is the who yeah i love
that
who the who is so the the world health
organization
is the specialized health agency of the
united nations
our mission at who is to promote health
keep the world safe and serve the
vulnerable
lately they've had their hands full
trying to turn valuable health
information into high-impact educational
resources for those who need them
you can actually see with cobit 19 how
rapidly
the scientific base is expanding and in
fact there's a doubling
of the evidence every two weeks
how can we actually make all this
fantastic content that who had much more
accessible
to health workers so that they have one
place where they can get anything that
they might need and it's very easy to
navigate
so the who decided to build a platform
to do exactly that
embarking on a journey to create the
world's first open source
learning experience platform is not to
be taken lightly we had to move quickly
rapidly we don't want to dream by the
way which has already been done
and we're doing it in house for the
first time this is completely new to me
because when you look at the
configuration you feel like this is
never going to happen
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let's say you're a nurse or a doctor who
wants to learn more about an illness
or about treating a disease like
covett19 you find out there's this new
learning platform you can go
to input a set of preferences including
your particular skill set
your experience level and the topics
you're most interested in
then a machine learning based model
recommends courses to you based on all
of the data you've entered
giving you the most relevant information
you need to gain new competencies
perform new roles get credentials and
change healthcare practices and policies
for the betterment of all
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if this sounds game-changing it is
because this is how things normally work
it's taking anywhere between 10 and
sometimes 17 years
to put recommendations and health into
day-to-day practice
yikes the learning platform i just
described could change
all that by taking up-to-date
information and transforming it into
educational content for healthcare
workers around the world
but here's the problem it doesn't exist
the who would need to build it from
scratch
and if successful it could be a
lifesaver
literally we are designing a product we
are designing a solution
that will impact the life of everyday
health professionals it's not just tech
for the sake of tech
it's human after all that's why this
project
is really important the team called this
platform the lxp
which is short for learning experience
platform it actually puts a learner in
the middle of everything
and not only did they want to bring it
to life they
wanted to make it a thing i think was
said best by barath he wanted alex b
and chill to be a phrase which makes me
think he doesn't really understand what
netflix and chill really means
maybe not that kind of thing yeah
so how do you bring this lxp to life
first
the who settled on a way to make it as
easily adoptable as possible
the ambition is to use open source
technologies to ensure a minimum cost in
reaching people in low-income countries
open source means the source code is
available to everyone to share and
contribute
and while that's a great goal here's the
issue
we are not an i.t company or a product
starter that's where red hat
open innovation labs comes in have you
ever heard the kind of
saying like teach about fish so what
we're trying to do is we're trying to
teach
villages to make fishing rods in other
words red hat would give the who agile
methodologies and open source tools
so they could build the platform in a
much faster and much more efficient way
we really strongly believe in
collocation having everybody
under the same roof that could be a
problem with pandemic happening
how are we going to bring a team that
i've never met or never worked with each
other
and are starting from the beginning
different native languages
different cultures different time zones
i immediately thought
okay so you guys are going to start
working when it's going to be 4am for me
riley was gonna need a lot more coffee
next up was working on the platform
itself
the first problem the team needed to
solve was how do you get this platform
to different parts of the world where
it's difficult to access the internet
how would the learners in those places
be able to access the lxp
one of my conversations with an
epidemiologist in yemen was
the need for low bandwidth learning
content
and courses because the internet is very
spotty there
the team came up with a solution what if
the lxp was also available on mobile
devices
so that it could work on those low
bandwidth settings and what if the
learning content could be saved offline
to make that happen the foundation of
the lxp would need to be scalable and
adaptive
in addition to accessibility there was
also the question of usability
the who wants 10 million learners on the
platform by 2023
creating a user experience that was as
easy as possible would be critical
if you wanted to see adoption on that
scale
so to make sure they were heading in the
right direction the team conducted a
series of user experience tests to see
how real doctors and nurses might
interact with the platform
99 of the time it doesn't go as
as planned this front screen i think
it's very empty so i'm a little bit
confused
the terminology is just a little
clunky-ish
start learning button should be i don't
know whatever green or
blue or something else okay if you were
to turn this on
right now i i'd give it a
c minus so they needed to make a few
tweaks
this experience actually taught me a
lesson just you know what this is
something you cannot ignore
they were getting closer to the end goal
the final demo
that would include a presentation to the
senior management
including its chief information officer
the goal is not just to show them
something
but also to give the confidence in the
in the stakeholder that
this team can take it forward
so how did all go down welcome everybody
my name is anachua and
we had around 50 viewers in the audience
so i'm gonna take you down to the demo
and this is our first
kind of impression i hope you all are
able to hear me
i could tell that the team was a little
nervous
we are in the back of the room kind of
eating our nails
so now the user has completed the
onboarding they can start learning right
now
so our application isn't just the front
end but it's made up of all of these
other apps
if i want to do any changes what i have
to do is i just have to
make the changes i have to commit it i
have to push it
you can see from the video this is
exactly what it's doing it's clicking
around making sure everything behaves
and so what we've shown is our ability
to implement continuous delivery
with quality gates built in it's the
time to assess
how did we do and
and then people started to comment on
the chat and this is where we
felt so much better lots of surprised
face emojis and how did the who's chief
information officer feel about it
what i saw was much more than what i had
expected
in a very quick turnaround time we had
something developed something that we
could work on something that we could
take to the next level
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in the end the team's hard work paid off
i'm elated uh relieved a bit tired but
also
very very proud i feel great definitely
a rewarding
experience we discovered technology we
discovered ourselves
once we have a good team we can do
anything with them so
what's next for the lxp in a few months
time we're going to have health workers
getting onto the platform for the first
time and actually
getting in touch with other people
around the world getting in touch with
state-of-the-art learning
successful society is one that is
healthy
the decisions that are made about where
we live how we work
how we move around all of those things
impact our health so
the audience is not just health workers
it's also
you know it's everybody
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you