LevelUp Webinar Notes: Preparing Your Digital Security Training

 in FabToolkit / The FabBlog  tagged Capacity Building / Digital Security / LevelUp Webinar / Training (updated 2912 days ago)

During this webinar which took place on April 28th, 2016, and was cohosted by Dirk Slater, FabRiders and Nic Sera-Leyva, Internews, we discussed:

  • Step Zero, what to consider before you even start planning a digital security training
  • Setting Expectations, both with participants but also with organisers.
  • Learn About Your Participants with some tips from our guest speakers, Abir Ghattas
  • Building Your Curriculum and Solidarity
  • Evaluation Metrics

View the webinar recording

Start with Step Zero,

how do you decide whether or not conducting a training is advisable.

  • The safety of participants and organizations involved
    • Will this training overtly endanger any of the involved individuals and organizations?
  • Use of resources
    • Is the cost of doing an event worth the possible outcome?
    • Is there an approriate venue, training time, & are the trainers qualified?
  • Nature of the need
    • Is a training event even appropriate?

More details on the LevelUp Site

A first step would be to articulate how the training will benefit from the point of view of the participants. I.E: As a result of this training you will be able to:

  • Lessen the likelihood that your email will be read by others than those you intended
  • understand how your own online behaviors can put others at risk
  • understand how to choose appropriate digital security tools and tactics

Setting Realistic Expectations for Participants, Organizers, and Yourself. 

  • First set of expectations you need to have in place: What you can reasonably expect yourself to be able to do?
  • Its important to have initial conversation about expectations – otherwise, you may not be equipping yourself with all the information you need to best prepare
  • What questions can I ask? What’s a good place to start from?

Ways to learn about your participants:

  • One on one interviews, don’t discount how valuable these can be and  you can learn loads by talking through
  • Pre-training surveys
  • Online research
  • Training exercises

More details on the LevelUp Site

Our Guest Speaker:

  • abirAbir Ghattas is a Lebanese activist, blogger and a digital communication strategist with a focus on women rights, freedom of speech and digital security in the MENA region. She heads GlobalVoices digital advocacy project “Global Voices Exchange” and is also the Outreach Director for Majal a network of digital platforms centered on two complementary goals: freedom of expression and access to information. She is always online and somewhere between Marseille and Beirut.

Abir talked about:

  • Using survey questions to understand participant’s needs – have a lot of questions, just don’t require participants to answer all of them and learn from what they answer
  • Create scenarios with personas based on the users experiences as an exercise for the workshop to both learn more about participants but also a training tool throughout the training.
  • Having an intimate understanding of the day to day realities and contexts of the participants can put you miles ahead

How Adults Learn

Malcolm S. Knowles, author of “The Modern Practice of Adult Education: From Pedagogy to Andragogy” theorises that:

  • Adults need to understand and accept the reason for learning a specific skill.
  • Experience (including error) provides the basis for learning activities.
  • Adults need to be involved in both the planning and evaluation of their learning.
  • Adult learning is problem-centered rather than content-oriented.
  • Most adults are interested in learning what has immediate relevanceto their professional and social lives.

More details on the LevelUp Site

Build Your Curriculum

Use ADIDS methodologies to build a really good training

  • Activity, (which includes a 
  • Discussion about that activity),
  • Input (related lecture or background material),
  • Deepening (the hands-on portion of the session), and
  • a Synthesis (wrap-up, review, and Q&A).

Build Solidarity

  • Look for exercises that allow partipants to explore each other’s issues and contexts
  • The best exercises will allow participants to share knowledge with each other

Think Through How You Will Evaluate 

How will you measure the success of your training? Some examples of potential metrics:

  • Do they feel confidence in being able to use technologies safely?
  • Are they advocating for security and are they able to teach others?
  • Are they being more effective in their ability to accomplish change?

For more detail see: http://www.fabriders.net/webinar-notes-evaluating/

Participate in LevelUp!

The place you can engage other trainers about how to make your trainings more effective is via LevelUp. To continue the conversation about how to prepare for trainings, please subscribe to the LevelUp list by sending an email to levelup (at) riseup (dot) net.