Education through
a Multimedia Lens:
A new CD-ROM developed for UNICEF demonstrates how partners, working together, afford a new approach to training
By Tess Black

In November last year, members of the UN and their bilateral donors received a demonstration of the new web-accessible edition of the UNICEF manual, “Humanitarian Principles Training: A Child Rights Protection Approach to Complex Emergencies.”

The project had begun three months earlier, when Bo Viktor Nylund, a project officer in UNICEF’s Office of Emergency Programmes, asked Rand Uehara, a technical specialist on the Center’s multimedia and graphics team, to convert an existing print version of the publication into an interactive CD-ROM and web-accessible document. Nylund and Uehara had been working on another long-term project, when the training proposal moved to the front of the line. The team saw this as an opportunity to demonstrate the Center’s multimedia design capabilities to the humanitarian agencies and accepted it as a short-term test case.

The work was exciting, but the time frame was tense and the geographical distance between the client and the production team presented an added challenge. Although the Center’s team initially did not meet face to face with the client, the communication, transfer of documents, and feedback worked exceptionally well. Beginning in early August, a steady volley of emailed messages bounced between Uehara in Hawaii and Nylund in New York.

“Technology erases distance,” said Uehara. “The hurdle was gone—it was like communicating with someone just next door.” Stressing the human element in this collaborative process he added, “Having a clearly designated and informed point-of-contact person such as Viktor was the key to our success.”

It was also imperative to clearly define the task. Brian Miyamoto, the project’s multimedia graphic designer at the Center, accepted this challenge. He said, “In order to create a design that is really responsive to the client’s needs, we asked to know various factors, such as who’s the target audience, and why, how and where the product might be used.” He added that it was also essential to know what kind of equipment training coordinators would typically use in the field.

Based on input from the New York group, the multimedia team decided to focus on the primary target audience—UNICEF staff—people who come from different backgrounds and traditions, from many nations, and representing all religions of the world. Because the project emphasized learning on the Web, the design needed to address the technological appetites and sophistication of younger staff members in their thirties.

“We decided to build the product in HTML [hypertext markup language, the design code used in web-authoring] to ensure it could be viewed on most platforms without a special plug-in, such as Flash,” Miyamoto explained. “We also limited the number and size of the images so that users with slow Internet connections wouldn’t have to download large files prior to viewing.”

The team raised a fundamental question about colors and images: how would their use augment the learning experience? UNICEF asked that the designer use real, action photographs, such as pictures of children in armed conflict, rather than building a collage which might be construed as too abstract. With this in mind, Miyamoto decided to retain the clean, modern appeal associated with the traditional white and blue UNICEF colors, but changed the color scheme. This allowed him to establish a distinct identity for the manual that would allow it to stand on its own without seeming disconnected from the parent organization.

Miyamoto said: “I wanted the site to have a natural feel to it, not too digitized or technological, to visually show the humanness inherent in the content…I liked the earthy colors we chose because they’re warm. They have a positive, friendly affect for the user. By incorporating into the design the children’s art that was supplied to us from UNICEF’s publication, ‘Dream of Peace,’ we added graphics that carried a lot of emotional impact.”

Miyamoto also strove to keep the process of navigating the finished product as seamless as possible. He created a splash page that had minimal animation, and created main page buttons to take the user to different parts of the document with ease.

The only glitches that occurred in the entire process centered on incompatibility of software. When asked what would be the preferred delivery method of original files to the multimedia team, Miyamoto said, “Ideally, they would give us HTML,” adding “Microsoft Word documents would have done the trick. They are easily translatable into HTML and the software is both widely accepted and is utilized worldwide.” Miyamoto said good quality original images are also important. “We were given some graphics that were embedded in the PDFs [Portable Document Files] that simply could not be retrieved.”

Once the CD-ROM was completed, Miyamoto and Uehara traveled to New York for the demonstration. They arrived early for a trial run but to Uehara’s consternation, the version of browsers available at the UN site would not support the format. Just before the meeting was to begin, Uehara downloaded a newer version that could accommodate the CD-ROM.

The program was well received. Nils Katsburg, Director of the Office of Emergency Programmes, expressed thanks to the Center for creating a tool that will assist in the training of UNICEF staff around the globe. As is standard practice for all UN documents, the manual is being translated into the seven languages of the UN.

The collaboration between the Center and UNICEF has led to talk of doing more projects together. This furnishes an avenue for the Multimedia Program to continue in pursuit of its primary goals. In support of the educational and training mandates of the Center, multimedia’s purpose is to deliver information through the most up-to-date communications technologies for the benefit of the relief community. Using color, line, text, sound, animation, and their layering—by engaging the senses as well as the mind—the team creates everything from conventional printed materials in support of the learning process to videos, slide presentations and interactive web-authored documents.

The success of this method is well documented. Edward R. Tufte, a distinguished professor in statistical evidence and information design at Yale University, speaks of the process of delivering information graphically as “envisioning information.”

“We envision information in order to reason about, communicate, document, and preserve that knowledge—activities nearly always carried out on two-dimensional paper and computer screen. Escaping this flatland and enriching the density of data displays are the essential tasks of information design.”

Several of the Center’s CD-ROM products exemplify the ways in which the Multimedia Program can expand and deepen the learning experience. By their portable nature, these products also open up that experience to operators in the field who cannot be present in a classroom at the time they urgently need additional skills or information.

Some past accomplishments and collaborations suggest paths into future inventions:

• The Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Terrorist (NBCT) Events CD-ROM, an interactive CD that captures the essence of the Medical Consequence Management of the Biological, Chemical Radiation and Terrorist Events Conference held in December 1996 as well as three interactive scenarios that help drive home the lessons learned.

• The Rapid Health Assessment Module—or the Multi-Lingual Translator Software—which serves as a “talking translator” allowing health care professionals to collect information and communicate with local populations in unfamiliar areas.

• The Disaster Preparedness Planning Surveys: Pohnpei State and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, CD-ROMs containing the text-based manuals providing the U.S. Country Team, the relief planner and the task force commander with pertinent information in the event of a disaster in a durable, duplicable and transportable format.

This constitutes yet another possible direction for multimedia to provide educational tools in “distance learning” or “virtual classrooms” via the Internet. In the end, the ultimate service multimedia offers is to magnify the opportunities for learning by its application of technology.

Uehara sums up the role of multimedia this way, “What we do is a small drop in a big pond—but knowing the technology can be used to benefit people, that is the biggest payoff for me.”

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