Important news! May Course Enrollment Extended until May 23.
OL 341—Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change
This week, we continue posting samples of our light version of our most popular course. This will allow you to have a little background on what students are posting on our Facebook page, and at our Development Community. Just click on the two links below.
Week 4: Will the community buy into it?
OL 341 Assignment Four CBA Discussion
Magee Example Project OL 341 Assignment Four
Assignment 4 Family Garden Field Guide Example
| Asking for feedback from your community, writing a ¾ page field guide on one simple activity, and assessing expertise. | |
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By now your project is beginning to take shape. You last saw your community a month ago after completing the participatory needs assessment. Although they had an idea of what kind of project you might be developing, your project has progressed tremendously since then. It would be a very good idea to return to the community, just for a short meeting, to let them see how the project has evolved before you invest more time in it. |
Meeting with the community at this stage will let you see if you’ve accidently designed any cultural taboos into the project. But it also has a larger purpose, and that is that as you are seeking their comments, they are beginning to feel a sense of increasing ownership of the project. They will perceive this not as an outsider presenting a canned project to them, but as someone who’s working on their behalf following their suggestions.
This buy in is absolutely paramount in the long-term sustainability of the outcomes of the project. If they like what they see as the project design evolves, and truly feel that it was based upon their ideas, they are going to protect and take care of the outcomes long after you’re gone.
The second part of your assignment for the week is to pick one extremely simple activity from your Assignment Two project outline and write a step-by-step guide about how to implement this activity.
Part Three of this assignment is to make a list of aspects of your project activities where you and your NGO have no experience nor expertise. This course is all about “What works in development?” So we want to make sure that each activity has someone in charge who has the expertise to make it successful — and sustainable.
The Lite Version
Each week, running in parallel with the course, I will be posting a discussion sheet about community-based adaptation, and an example of the week’s homework. This is simply to give you the opportunity of seeing what these courses are like from the student’s perspective & also give you an opportunity to better understand what the students are discussing that week.
This is called the Lite Version, because the full course has a collection of online student resources, expanded discussions about that week’s assignment, and, of course, it has the course leader who works with students in reviewing their assignments and in making suggestions for their projects.
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