Advice Needed: Enketo vs. KoboCollect for Enumerators with Limited ICT Literacy

Dear Kobo Toolbox Community,

I’m embarking on a project soon where I will not be supporting enumerator training remotely. The enumerators we’re engaging with have varying levels of ICT literacy, many of which are not particularly high. They will be utilizing different Android devices to collect data.

In the past, we have faced certain configuration issues with installing and using the KoboCollect app, so we had chosen to use Enketo instead. This was around four years ago, and I am wondering if things have evolved since then.

Could anyone provide insights on which platform might be more suitable in our situation - enketo or KoboCollect? Given the limited ICT literacy among our enumerators and the array of Android devices in use, I’m particularly interested in ease of installation, user-friendliness, and minimal configuration.

Any experiences, suggestions, or advice you can share would be immensely valuable to us in making this decision.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Best Regards,

Welcome back to the community, @DavidT! Maybe these support articles should help you decide on the appropriate tool for your study:

Thanks so much Kal! This new version of Kobo Collect is very interesting. Since I won’t be present at the training, it’s important to make the app installation process as simple as possible. In 2019, it took me hours to set up Kobo Collect, and we we ended up using Webform instead. However, with this new solution, if my enumerators are using Android, the process should be as simple as:

  1. Create the QR code remotely and send it to my team
  2. Download Kobo Collect
  3. Scan the QR code

Will this process work reliably? We can set up the enumerators with a single username and password and have them enter their name in the form from a dropdown menu populated by a parent form. Additionally, we could have a backup solution for them to use Webform if needed.

Please confirm if this is the most straightforward solution for my circumstances or if I should opt for Webform instead.
These instructions to use webapss have improved I believe which will be very use to incoporate into the online modules.

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@DavidT, I would say both approaches work equally well. Maybe you will need to do some testing to see which is easy. But I, too, would say the QR approach should be more straightforward as you will not need to remember the credentials. However, the team should also cross check the username before the start of the survey as if the QR is accidentally configured to another project (username), the enumerators might have a hard time getting the blank forms to the app.