The East Asia and Pacific region has the second highest number of children globally who have wasting or severe acute malnutrition, but less than 5% of the children who need treatment get it. This 10-module course, based on WHO guidelines, was developed to provide training to frontline healthcare providers on how to screen for, detect, treat and manage children with wasting in their communities. A range of subject matter experts contributed to developing and refining the content.

We translated the content into Articulate, using the Rise platform and the more flexible features of Storyline to create an accessible, interactive, visual and audio pathway through the content — some of it quite dense with medical terminology and treatment regimens. Because it is not possible for all of this information to immediately go into long-term memory, we created “Essential Information” documents for learners to save for future, quick reference.

There was a concern that some learners would not have had much access to computers and would not be able to navigate their way through the course. We included some overall navigation instructions at the beginning of the course and specific navigation instructions on any slide that might be tricky. When we tested this on the ground in Lao, where there was the most concern, the learners had no issues finding their way through the course. This is credit, in part, to how easy it is to find your way around in Articulate.

Once the course was developed in English, it was translated into Lao and aligned specifically with their country guidelines. We were in Laos in December 2022 to facilitate a training-of-trainers with a group of pediatricians. Out of that, we developed a facilitator’s guide to go with the course in both English and Lao.