The collaboration between data.org and the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana as part of the Epiverse initiative began with a shared goal: to make foundational epidemiology training accessible, high‑quality, and contextually relevant. What emerged from this partnership was more than a set of educational materials. It became a case study in how regional expertise, thoughtful localisation, and trust across teams can shape truly impactful learning experiences. This article reflects on the journey—its strengths, its frictions, and its lessons for global public health training.
Clarity and Trust as the Starting Point
From the outset, the project benefited from a rare alignment: clear objectives, a defined scope, and timelines that everyone understood. Clarity at the beginning prevented confusion later. That shared understanding fostered trust—trust in each other’s judgement, trust in each team’s regional expertise, and trust that candid feedback would be welcomed rather than avoided.
This trust proved essential, particularly because the partnership represented a meaningful example of South–South collaboration. Javeriana’s deep regional insight complemented the global technical perspective of the Epiverse team, allowing the groups to co‑create materials that neither could have produced alone.
Producing High‑Quality Learning Materials
As the work unfolded, the team found a rhythm. Production processes that initially required close coordination became increasingly smooth and efficient. By the time the final courses were ready, the team recognised the high quality of the output as the result of a rigorous, collaborative, and carefully designed process: visually polished, pedagogically thoughtful, and accessible to learners new to epidemiology.
Student feedback echoed this positive assessment. Learners consistently noted the clarity of the materials and the relevance of the content to their local contexts. That resonance did not happen by accident—it was rooted in the attention paid to localisation.
Localisation: The Quiet Engine of Relevance
While production progressed smoothly, localisation emerged as the most carefully considered phase, requiring the greatest investment of time and collaboration. This stage was essential to enable production; it could not be underestimated. While recognising that localisation is always an iterative process, the team prioritised attention to detail across multiple dimensions, including representation, graphic and visual adaptation, voices and expert insights grounded in local contexts, multimedia elements, and the use of examples and cases relevant to the region. As a result, this phase involved the highest level of collaboration and the most extensive discussion throughout the project. Localisation was not just about language; it was about cultural nuance, contextual accuracy, and ensuring that the examples reflected the lived experiences of trainees.
Regional experts, including reviewers, local experts, potential users, and local teams, played an indispensable role. Their continuous feedback ensured cultural accuracy and contextual relevance, reinforcing the authenticity of the material. Honest, confident input from local reviewers proved essential for achieving the right tone and emphasis. This transparency kept the content credible and strengthened engagement for learners.
Navigating Operational Frictions
It’s important to acknowledge that not everything proceeded smoothly. Time zone differences introduced early friction, making coordination difficult. Publication created its own bottlenecks: integrating materials into the final platform required multiple rounds of review and clarification.
A structured response emerged in the form of templates and standardised workflows, which became one of the project’s quiet successes. Once the team had a shared structure and a clear sense of platform constraints, back‑and‑forth communication dropped significantly.
It was also noted that having platform requirements defined from the beginning would have prevented some of the fragmentation experienced by learners. Some participants dropped off between units simply because the learning journey involved too many steps across too many tools.
The lesson was straightforward: pedagogical quality matters, but platform design shapes the learning experience just as much.
Adapting the Learning Model for African Contexts
One of the most forward‑looking parts of the conversation centered on extending the training––initially designed for a Latin American audience––to African regions. Encouraging feedback from trainees indicated that the course reflected their realities and fostered a sense of empowerment rather than dependence.
These reflections reinforced the importance of the localisation approach adopted in the project, particularly its emphasis on contextual relevance, representation, and locally grounded expertise. The discussion also underscored that any future expansion would need to preserve these principles while remaining flexible enough to adapt to diverse regional, institutional, and infrastructural contexts.
Operational Improvements to Support Scale and Sustainability
In parallel, the team identified several operational areas that would need to be strengthened to support future iterations of the programme and potential scaling across regions. These included:
- Automated reporting to ease administrative burden.
- Streamlined quality assurance, especially for multilingual materials.
- More predictable communication cycles to support learners with varying workloads.
- A learning platform capable of tracking learner progress and enabling timely feedback, allowing for ongoing adjustments during course delivery; and
- The ability for participants to download course materials, ensuring accessibility for learners facing constraints related to internet connectivity, electricity, or access to other physical resources.
There was strong consensus on the need for an end‑of‑training evaluation—both surveys and focus groups—to capture the voices of trainees more systematically. These insights will guide further adaptations and shape future iterations of the program.
Towards a Shared Learning Agenda
What emerged from the reflection was not merely an assessment of what went well or what could be improved. It was a recognition that this collaboration has produced lessons with value far beyond Latin America.
Documenting the process can help shape a shared learning agenda for regions seeking to build epidemiological capacity at scale. South–South partnerships, localisation as a core design principle, early platform integration, and trust‑driven collaboration are not optional—they are essential ingredients for successful training at global scale.
The data.org–Javeriana partnership illustrates what becomes possible when clarity, trust, and regional expertise converge. The project delivered high‑quality, relevant epidemiology training materials, but its deeper achievement lies in the blueprint it offers for global collaborations. As the teams move toward formal evaluations and future training rollouts, the lessons learned here will help shape capacity‑building efforts in Africa, Latin America, and beyond.
In the end, the collaboration shows that impactful public health education is not only about knowledge transmission. It is about building communities of practice—across borders, across time zones, and across cultures—committed to strengthening the world’s epidemiological capacity, one course at a time.