Scalable capacity-building through e-learning - lessons learned from EDULINK project L3EAP

Dear all,

I'd like to share a short review on our recently run e-learning course "Sustainable Energy for Small Island Developing States" (see below) and would  be very interested to hear about your experiences with ICT-based capacity building and exchange with other online learning professionals.

Looking forward to your comemnts and feedback!

Cheers,

Franziska

More than 1,000 learners reached with online course “Sustainable Energy for SIDS”

From July to September 2016, we, that is the EU project L3EAP (www.l3eap-project.eu) piloted a learner-driven, collaborative online course that focused on problem-based learning, flipped classroom settings and peer-review mechanisms. It allowed its learners to apply their localized knowledge and practice real-world skills. The didactic concept thus built on state-of-the-art teaching/learning approaches found in today’s higher education systems. Produced by the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, in collaboration with the University of Mauritius and the University of the South Pacific, the six-week long course comprised six modules with a set of videos, training booklets, case studies, quizzes, assignments, and much interaction and discussion within a truly global learning community.

By making current knowledge openly accessible to students and energy practitioners, the course first of all aimed at broadening awareness for sustainable energy provision and use in SIDS. Its content was closely related to real energy-related demands and distinctive local cases from Mauritius and Fiji which were presented by experts from the islands, underscoring the real-life relevance of the interdisciplinary curricular themes and deeply embedding island perspectives into the overall course design. Thematically, learners were guided from the global energy context to concrete actionable projects in SIDS. By following this storyline, learners could acquire latest knowledge and, at the same time, strengthen their proposal writing skills on a distinctive energy-related problem of a SIDS of their choice.

The pilot course reached a geographically dispersed, heterogeneous audience of 1.000 learners from all over the world, with more than half located in SIDS of the Caribbean, AIMS or Pacific regions. All in all, the course showed learners from 29 SIDS, coming from businesses, governments, NGOs and academia. Reflecting the heterogeneity in participants’ personal learning goals, almost two-thirds wanted to follow the suggested learning path and complete assignments whereas others choose to go through the content in one’s own time, maybe submitting assignments, or just look at the content. Another type of learners were teachers who were interested in the open educational resources, with some of them applying and/or re-using them in their own lectures nowadays. Interestingly, almost half of the participants never took such an online course before, suggesting a considerable unseized potential in such distinctive such distinctive online learning approaches given they are designed as open access offers.

From our persepctive, the course “Sustainable Energy for SIDS” has proven to be a valuable example of how ICT-based learning may support the quicker uptake of sustainable energy technologies in SIDS. As such, it resembles a valuable measure to start addressing a SIDS-specific challenge: The chronic lack of skilled human resources. As there is a paucity of research on such courses, we are currently gathering additional empirical results in a second run of the course (9 January to 26 February 2017 - see http://e-learning.project-l3eap.eu).