Bringing Digital Training Courses to Entrepreneurs in Local Languages with Moodle
Bringing Digital Training Courses to Entrepreneurs in Local Languages with Moodle
August 5, 2022 | Elizabeth Brown
In 2020, Building Markets was already in the process of searching for a platform that would allow us to expand our digital training offerings to businesses in diverse contexts, with varying needs. The businesses in our networks speak different languages, reside in countries with different social and political contexts, have different infrastructure challenges, such as electricity availability, and other needs that had to be considered when choosing a platform partner for our digital training courses.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we accelerated our efforts to digitize and found Moodle, a learning platform that offers language flexibility, sustainability, flexible learning options, and freedom to iterate. And since Moodle is open source, it is very easy to manage and allows for creativity! Today we host 23 courses on Moodle, featuring topics ranging from marketing to finance to the circular economy and more.
Delivering Building Markets‘ training courses in local languages is a critical component our model’s success. Business owners would not be able to benefit from the courses if they were not delivered in their local language. In Turkey, Building Markets has been working with refugee businesses since 2017, and one of the crucial factors of our success is that we deliver all of our services Arabic, in addition to Turkish and English. Moodle brought us the flexibility to develop our online courses in all three languages and allow users to navigate not only the course but also use their overall site in their native language.
Translation also makes our efforts more sustainable and accessible to a larger audience. For example, our courses have been translated into Arabic because we specifically work with Syrian entrepreneurs, but are now accessible to any Arabic speaker. Similarly in Myanmar by adding Building Markets’ courses onto the Moodle platform in the Myanmar language the moodle translation support is now above 60%. This is very exciting to us because that means any Myanmar language speaker can benefit from translation into their local language for any course on Moodle.
Hear more about how we’re using Moodle to deliver critical capacity-building training courses to small businesses in local languages in this interview with Bora Arican, Building Markets’ Program Services Director, on the Moodle Podcast.
