KoboToolbox for Public Health Data Collection

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About Course

This practical, hands-on course provides a comprehensive introduction to KoboToolbox for digital data collection in public health settings. It is designed for epidemiologists, data managers, monitoring and evaluation (M&E) teams, researchers, students, and field practitioners who need to design, deploy, and manage high-quality structured data collection tools.

Throughout the course, participants will gain step-by-step guidance on how to design field-ready questionnaires for a wide range of public health use cases, including surveys, outbreak investigations, routine program monitoring, rapid assessments, and operational research projects.

What You Will Learn:
– Designing effective and user-friendly digital questionnaires
– Structuring forms using KoboToolbox (XLSForm and online builder)
– Implementing skip logic, validation rules, and data constraints
– Managing media, calculations, and repeat groups
– Deploying forms for mobile and field use
– Conducting data collection using KoboCollect and web forms
– Exporting and managing datasets
– Performing basic data cleaning and quality checks to ensure reliable results

Practical Learning Approach:
This course is highly practical and application-oriented. Participants will build their own forms through guided exercises and learn best practices for real-world implementation. By the end of the course, each participant will be able to design and deploy a complete, operational KoboToolbox project.

Expert Insights:
In addition to technical skills, the course includes practical tips and field-tested insights from an experienced public health practitioner who has implemented multiple KoboToolbox projects in real-life settings. Participants will learn key considerations for planning data collection activities, managing field teams, ensuring data quality in challenging environments, and avoiding common implementation pitfalls.

Course Outcome:
By the end of this course, participants will be equipped with the knowledge and confidence to independently design, deploy, and manage digital data collection systems using KoboToolbox in both routine and emergency public health contexts.

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What Will You Learn?

  • Turn a vague data request into a measurable, decision-focused collection objective
  • Design a field-ready questionnaire and build it in KoboToolbox (web builder and XLSForm)
  • Add skip logic, constraints, calculations and repeats that protect data quality at entry
  • Connect external data (cascading selections), GPS, media and specialised question types
  • Test, pilot, deploy and manage forms with KoboCollect and Enketo, online and offline
  • Set up users, permissions and team roles, and monitor data quality during collection
  • Export, clean, document, analyse and report collected data
  • Complete a capstone: a full Ebola/VHF surveillance form set (case investigation, contact tracing, alert/triage, supervision)

Course Content

Unit 1 — Foundations & Project Planning
This unit sets the groundwork before you touch the form builder. You'll understand why public health teams collect data digitally and what KoboToolbox is, then learn to plan a collection project — defining a measurable objective, your target population, and your unit of analysis — and to design a clear, ethical questionnaire on paper first. By the end you can turn a vague data request into a well-scoped plan, using the real Ebola/VHF case investigation as your worked example.

  • Module 1: Introduction to Digital Data Collection
  • Module 2: Planning a Kobo Data Collection Project
  • Module 3: Questionnaire Design Principles
  • Unit 1 quiz — Foundations & Project Planning

Unit 2 — Building Your First Kobo Project
Now you build. This unit takes you from an empty KoboToolbox account to your first working form. You'll set up a project, add the foundational question types (text, numbers, dates), create single- and multiple-choice questions with clean response lists, and organise everything into named sections with support for multiple languages. By the end you'll have a structured, bilingual case-investigation form built from the ground up.

Unit 3 — Advanced Logic & Data Quality
This unit makes your form intelligent and trustworthy. You'll add skip logic so questions appear only when relevant, constraints and validation that stop bad data at the point of entry, and calculations that generate indicators and automatic decision support — like flagging a probable Ebola alert. You'll also build repeats and rosters to capture contacts and their daily follow-up visits.

Unit 4 — Advanced Data & XLSForm Mastery
Here you move beyond the web builder into full XLSForm control. You'll connect external data with cascading selects (health zone → area → facility), capture GPS, media, barcodes and other specialised types, master the XLSForm survey/choices/settings structure across all four course forms, and tune appearance and user experience so a long clinical form is fast and accurate to complete in the field.

Unit 5 — Testing, Deployment & Field Management
This unit gets your form out of the builder and into real use. You'll validate, test and pilot the form with a structured protocol and bug log, deploy it and configure KoboCollect for offline Android collection, set up users, permissions and team roles (investigator, tracer, supervisor), and monitor incoming data for quality problems as they happen.

Unit 6 — From Data to Decisions, and the Capstone
The final unit turns collected data into evidence and consolidates everything you've learned. You'll export and clean your data, run descriptive analysis and reporting (case fatality rate, notification delays, coverage), apply ethics and data-protection practices for sensitive case data, and troubleshoot common Kobo and XLSForm problems. It closes with the capstone: designing, building, testing and presenting a complete field-ready surveillance system against the course rubric.

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