Scientific animations without borders (SAWBO): an innovative strategy for promoting education for sustainable development

Abstract

While the United Nations Millennium Declaration identified several key benchmarks for sustainable development, the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (ASD) now reaffirms, refines, and retools those sustainable development goals for the next 15 years. Specifically, the ASD calls for developing and extending opportunities for transitions to sustainable societies-a goal that necessarily includes more sustainable research practices capable of fostering the uptake of the values, behaviors, strategies, and lifestyles required to realize a sustainable future for all people and societies as well. This paper describes one such sustainable practice project: Scientific Animations Without Borders (SAWBO). Housed at Michigan State University in the United States, at all levels of its ESD project, SAWBO enacts a collaborative, flexible, adaptive, and resilient practice with global and local, scientific and indigenous, knowledge experts in order to transfer scientifically grounded knowledge about agricultural, public health, and socioeconomic issues of public concern to rural areas of Africa and other places affected by those concerns. SAWBO's principle medium of transfer uses animated, linguistically localized, educational videos, distributed free of cost, and intended to be both readily accessible and easily shared by all types of audiences, but especially by low-literate adult learners in developing regions. As such, SAWBO's ESD approach addresses many of Agenda 2030's 17 Global Goals and aligns with the global effort to develop educational approaches that are not only economically, but also socially and environmentally, sustainable. As a project, SAWBO also embodies a model of sustainability education practice adaptable to different methodologies across a variety of spaces and educational levels and is itself also methodologically sustainable.

Measuring the impact and reach of informal educational videos on YouTube: The case of Scientific Animations Without Borders

“…(2019) acknowledges several limitations and caveats to the approach (differences of viewership above all), including the general difficulties of quantifying speech charisma in the first place ( Michalsky and Niebuhr, 2019 ). Nevertheless, there may be a link between the disproportion of affective evaluations by viewers, accentual differences between content creators' North American and British speech, and the basic insight of increased messaging appeal for recipients when delivered in their most comfortably spoken dialect ( Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1997 ; Rodríguez-Domenech et al., 2019 ). More broadly, given that engagement, learning gains, and solution uptake from animated educational contents are at least equal to, if not greater than, live-action teaching or video content ( Bello-Bravo, 2020 ; Bello-Bravo et al., 2020 ; Bello-Bravo et al., 2017a , Bello-Bravo et al., 2017b ; Smith et al., 2012 ), future research might compare the affective evaluations for YouTube's popularity metrics between animated, live-action, and combined animated/live-action channel content for individual video content creators (e.g., the Game Grumps, Markeplier, the Yogscast), whether self- or fan-created.…”

“…While testing hypotheses related to charismatic speech as a possible driver of affective evaluations of YouTube videos, Berger et al (2019) acknowledges several limitations and caveats to the approach (differences of viewership above all), including the general difficulties of quantifying speech charisma in the first place (Michalsky & Niebuhr, 2019). Nevertheless, there may be a link between the disproportion of affective evaluations by viewers, accentual differences between content creators' North American and British speech, and the basic insight of increased messaging appeal for recipients when delivered in their most comfortably spoken dialect (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1997;Rodríguez-Domenech, Bello-Bravo, & Pittendrigh, 2019).…”

Iterative Adaptation of a Maternal Nutrition Videos mHealth Intervention Across Countries Using Human-Centered Design: Qualitative Study

“…The HealthPhone project, which provides a library of videos mainly on mother and child health, maintains the same video while changing languages globally [43]. The Scientific Animations Without Borders (SAWBO) project, which develops videos about health, agriculture, and socioeconomics [44], has an animated video about the armyworm that uses the same video but adapts the audio for several Asian and African languages [45]. SAWBO argues that the same illustrations can be used across cultures because people are willing to learn from not-local-looking characters as long as the audio’s speaker has a local dialect [46].…”

Breaking out: the turning point in learning using mobile technology

“…They argue that users in close geographic proximity who exhibit similarities in dialect and culture can spread Web content through word-of-mouth social connections. Relatedly, the geographical locality of interest-and thus the dialect and culture of educational animations produced by SAWBO-can achieve this by creating "animated, linguistically localized, digitally accessible, and readily sharable cell-phone form of SAWBO's audiovisual video productions meet these two major criteria" (Rodríguez-Domenech et al, 2019, p. 1107. Brodersen et al (2012) also add that "understanding how and where users watch YouTube videos is important because it informs the building of predictable models of user interest to designing recommended systems" (p. 242).…”

“…Currently, the continuing and accelerating proliferation of access to digital and Internet infrastructures in virtually every corner of the world positions ICT educational videos and animations as more and more relevant for delivering knowledge to people of very diverse educational levels ( Bello-Bravo and Pittendrigh, 2018 ; Nye, 2015 ; Reddy et al., 2020 ). The reach of this access, however, can be limited by several factors, including not only user costs, technological provider/user literacy, reliability of electricity, language barriers, and censorship ( Bello-Bravo et al., 2019 ; Cassim and Obono, 2011 ; Fedorov, 2015 ; Gitau et al., 2010 ; Gulati, 2008 ; International Telecommunication Union, 2012 ; Nye, 2015 ), but also the availability and feasibility of different types of technological devices for accessing digital (Internet) infrastructure ( Byrne-Davis et al., 2015 ; Rodríguez-Domenech et al., 2019 ; Selwyn, 2016 ). And while a growing body of literature has investigated and assessed the effectiveness of various ICT device delivery strategies, including tablets ( Montrieux et al., 2015 ; Pruet et al., 2016 ; Viberg and Grönlund, 2017 ) and cellphones ( Abbott et al., 2017 ; Bello-Bravo, 2017 ; Maredia et al., 2018 ), insufficient numbers of studies to date have quantified and compared access to online ICT educational content media by these device types ( Zhou et al., 2014 ).…”