On September 6th CIU arranged a breakfast seminar for its network members on the experiences of using distance education in their cultural youth exchange program with Costa Rica. t42 Distance Education was invited to address three questions, see below. 
What were the added values?
The distance education course forced the organisers and participants to relate, and interact with, a shared framework or mind-set. The purpose being to help local entrepreneurs support a more sustainable tourism. Placing this framework on a web-based educational platform accessible at all times, at least in theory, made it a focal point regardless of geographical boundaries. Although Internet access was low, preparing, supporting and working with the booklet version of the course, raised a number of issues to be dealt with. A process that deepened the cooperation between the project managers in Costa Rica and Sweden, brought new dimensions to team couple relations, strengthened relations with the municipality hosting the program and built a bridge between University and society.
The main added value was the sense of reciprocity it developed as the parties involved had to learn from each other in order to move the course forward, covering aspects such as guiding ideas, methods, tools and organisation. Aspects that in turn form the foundation of a learning organisation.
What made it work?
Factors contributing to the success of the program include high quality tutors, interest for sustainability issues, the problem-based learning method and the communication aspect of the Internet.
The tutors were vital for the end-result, as they lead and coach the participants, as well as sell the idea to the municipality. The sustainability issue seemed to attract the participants, although it took some effort in converting the abstract words into something tangible in their immediate surroundings. The problem-based learning method challenged the students to formulate their own questions, rather than trying to remember the ideas of someone else. Using the Internet for chat conversations on the web-based educational platform, enabled participants and resource persons to meet up on either side of the Atlantic in real time.
In sum, the course tested and improved the participants´ leadership abilities, awareness of sustainable development challenges, ability to learn-how-to-learn as well as handle digital working tools.
What can be improved?
The CIU learning-by-doing approach strengthened by the problem-based learning method has great advantages of increasing self-awareness and providing tools for approaching real-life unstructured problems. Although it encourages the participant to dig where he/she is standing in terms of level of understanding, the more confident student will always have an advantage over the less confident one. This confidence, however, is not only a matter of obtaining good grades at school, but also being used to non-hierarchical teaching methods or not. To overcome communication barriers due to different levels of pre-knowledge, more training is needed in the beginning of the course, especially for the tutors. Not only understanding the method in theory, but having the opportunity to try it out in practice before meeting the participants.
There are a number of improvement possibilities related to the host community. A major challenge is to find ways of integrating the course more closely to the core of the cultural exchange program. Perhaps by focusing more on trying a project idea in practice provided by the host community, rather than identifying it in the first place. This could be one way for the participants to faster work their way into the community and add value for the local entrepreneurs.
It was noted that in Costa Rica the lack of information caused difficulties. Interesting enough in Sweden the situation was the opposite. Here, information surplus caused new problems. The lesson to be learnt is that access to information is not a solution in itself. Evaluating the information and turning it into something useful is what counts in the end. Still, given the limited time the participants have at their disposal, providing a reference case study could be one way of lowering the level of initial frustration and injecting a bit more confidence in the learning process.
Finally, technological barriers are still an issue. Internet access meant some six hours journey in Costa Rica. Still, the situation in Sweden was not considerable better, as access to public computers is limited and Internet cafés are not an option in small towns on the countryside. Preconceived assumptions need to be challenged, again and again.
Here follows my answers to Jordan Gold, Canada, former staff member at Global 100, regarding his thesis for a Master in Environmental Management and Policy at the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics at Lund University. He defended his thesis "Design and Use of E-Learning to Accelerate Progress Towards Sustainable Development: A Case Study" on Sep 27th. 
The answers are related to the second round (2003-2005) of developing and running the Introduction to Cleaner Production and Sustainable Development (ICP) distance education course for Lund University as independent consultant. The first round (1998-2000) was developed under the leadership of Professor Don Huisingh.
1. Do you feel like you had the necessary resources to develop and run the course in the best way possible?
The approach we have taken for the ICP course is to focus on human interaction by engaging non-paid former ICP-course participants, IIIEE Alumni, IIIEE researchers and other experts in the environmental field. Spending more time on people than technology is cheaper and, in several cases, has lead to fruitful follow-up projects. This increased the efficiency of the limited resources offered to run the course.
2. What have been the biggest mistakes made during the development and running of the course?
The biggest mistakes have been to underestimate the time it takes to build a functioning web-community, when you add all the bits and pieces of booking external resource persons, communicating dates to the course participants, adding news features and making assignments self-explanatory with templates and links. On the other hand, this “mistake” of investing a lot of time in the course is what contributed heavily to the good end results.
3. What have been the biggest surprises during the development and running of the course?
The biggest surprise is that it actually works to run academic courses globally on the web, without ever meeting face-to-face, attaining similar academic quality and level of interaction as on-campus courses. The overwhelming positive responses from some of the course participants are always a pleasant and welcome surprise.
4. You said that you have had trouble finding the right pedagogical approach, which will work in distance learning. What have you found does not work? Have you determined what does work best?
What works is supporting experience sharing among the course participants. What does not work is to assume that as long as the course content is interesting, the course will run by itself. As course administrator you need to “sell” the course to the course participants again and again, combining challenging task with encouraging words and building personal relationships with each and every one.
5. Have you ever had problems with interaction between tutor and student, student and student, etc.?
There have been a few misunderstandings, but nothing that could not be sorted out. Normal courtesy is an effective medicine. Moreover, course participants are more often than not aware of cultural differences and try to first understand and then judge. There was a case back in 1998 when I did give a blunt statement on a student report that caused some tears, as this middle-aged woman, it turned out, was on sick-leave while recovering from a period of heavy stress. We worked it out, though.
6. How do you find balance between controlling the course as a teacher/tutor and in giving the learner the space and freedom they require?
Teachers often offer their courses in a way that reflects their own thinking, and tend to favour students who think like themselves. Therefore, what does work is to provide a wide variety of ways to interact with the course material, such as electronic discussions, open-ended assignments, specific reading assignments, one-to-one conversations, traditional exams, field studies etcetera, and giving them equal importance. Catering for different learning styles increases the chances of finding at least one favoured way for the student to engage in deep learning.
7. Do you determine what knowledge and skills the students have before they begin the course?
As the ICP-course is an introductory course, and the idea is for students with varying background to learn more about preventive environmental strategies, the level of knowledge is set to at least two years of full time studies at University level. Most course participants who complete the course, however, are already working with environmental issues as professionals, researchers, volunteers or last-year university students.
8. What kind of feedback is provided to the student and what kind of feedback do the students provide to the teacher (feedback i.e. guidance, answers, input, etc.)?
The ICP-course include various forms of feed-back: personal e-mails with the course co-ordinator, two electronic forums and a specific electronic chat hour each week, along with team work that course participants arrange themselves through a rotating chairperson.
9. Are there any sections of the course, which the students do independently, or are most of their actions interlinked with the tutor and/or the other students (i.e. some e-learning programs are simply the student and the computer; a.k.a. standalone format)?
During the first 10 weeks, the students complete 14 learning units organised as predominantly self-study. This is followed by a home-exam. Those who pass the exam are allowed to continue with the teamwork and project work. This is one way of offering the course to many while spending precious teacher/tutor time on the students most likely to pass the course.
10. Would you ever give the course in a standalone format?
No. If so, it would be designed in a different way.
11. In the course, do you discuss the difference between single-loop and double-loop learning?
No, I do not discuss the difference in the course, but I use the loop-concept when building some of the assignments.
Workshop presentation on the use of distance education at the IIIEE Alumni Network Conference (May 21st), Lund University, Sweden.
iiiee building, Lund University
Working our personal networks is something we all need to improve to create the change we want. A useful perspective in this context is to understand organisations as a social construction or a story we tell and re-tell. How we perceive an organisation and its future is actually what it becomes, like a mental film that directs our intentions and emotions.
Here, the art of formulating constructive questions is in itself an important change factor. It steers our focus when searching new information to act upon. Information that refines the story of what the organisation is all about. In turn, building and maintaining a powerful story supporting the mission of an organisation calls for more effective forms of experience sharing, using the Internet as a communication tool many-to-many, rather than just one-to-many. Framing it within a distance education course is one way of doing this.
Now, if experience sharing is important, how to promote the virtual networks supporting it? In other words, what gives life to a distance education course? The following account is based on experiences from the ICP-course presented in “5. ICP course in 52 countries”.1) Personal motivation
Motivation fuelled by accessing a virtual arena that is global in participant outreach matching the global scope of the ICP-course. An arena that converts passion into concrete action, opens up for new forms of alliances outside the course curriculum, and is used for in-house competence development.
2) Experience sharing
Sharing ideas on-line in an electronic discussion forum or chat is more personal, constructive and democratic than most participants imagined. Personal as written text can be very personal. Constructive as questions and answers builds a common understanding through reflection. Democratic when ´one person-one voice´ is practiced in reality, as everybody is able to write comments at the same time.
3) Course administrator
The administrator’s role in distance education is to provide a functioning web-technology, web-pedagogy and web-instructions. The web-based educational platform has to be reliable, with an intuitive self-explanatory user interface. The web-pedagogy has to allow for different learning styles. The web-instructions has to be clear enough to stand alone, with all course information accessible 3-clicks away, and stress the point that the team is the participant’s greatest asset.
4) Course content
The course content is important, but not the most important driver for completing a distance education course. Presenting the content has to be done in an inspiring, practicable and chewable way. Inspiring as to provide a movement and direction when filling the gap between the present and a desired future. Practical as to answer up to the key question for the participant: what is in it for me? Chewable as to use the Internet as a communication tool rather than information dissemination device.
What does not give life to a distance education virtual network?
Naturally, this is a large question. Sticking to the four aspects presented above, I would say that lack of personal purpose, collaboration possibilities, supporting organisation and inspirational material are crucial elements to take into account and deal with.
Working virtual networks is vital for building a learning organisation. Read more in the coming follow-up article on the IST-course presented in “3. Sustainable tourism in Costa Rica”.
What can we learn from social entrepreneurs when supporting collaborative learning at a distance?
www.ashoka.org Making a change in the world, something to be remembered for, however big or small, is an underlying driver we all share as humans. A motivator the accessible, non-hierarchical, Internet is especially well suited to serve as a mean to an end. Here we have a lot to learn from social entrepreneurs, like these people of the non-profit Ashoka organization offering “market solutions to social problems”. Distance education from this social entrepreneur perspective is about supporting change makers to join in and share experiences with the goal of promoting social/environmental innovations for the common good. A kind of joint effort to improve our social software, just like the non-profit open source initiative improves technical software:
“The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.”
The idea of open source is similar to the idea of open innovation, where research results are licensed out to other firms who take it to the market, creating a win-win situation. In turn, the open innovation paradigm creates a new arena for social entrepreneurs, who may act as laboratories to test real services on real customers before implementing it on a larger scale in organizations and nations. Something that may be even more useful than hypothetical market research, according to Chesbrough. Some established actors may see this as a threat, others see it as an opportunity to unleash the potential of their co-workers and reach/create new markets. Here, collaborative learning at a distance can play a vital role by forging new partnerships in fluid and vibrant web-communities.
What makes these web-communities prosper, in my experience, is very similar to the mechanics behind how social entrepreneurs engage the hearts and minds of their co-workers with barely any resources but their credibility, social capital and shared commitment. If positive change is the goal, then educating new social entrepreneurs, and having more seasoned social entrepreneurs act as facilitators in distance education courses, is one inspiring road to success.
Examples of open innovation: - ...and sustainability: DElabs. - ...and social entrepreneurship: Promsing Practices in Afterschool (a 3 billion dollar industry in the US)
On May 2-4, the yearly “Dare to Be Your Own” (Våga vara egen) event will take place at the Älvsjö trade fair in Stockholm, Sweden. High school students from all over Sweden competes for the best Young Entrepreneur company 2004-2005. The idea is to start, run and terminate a company during one year as part of their school curriculum. The energy, engagement and creativity these young people demonstrate are what entrepreneurship is all about: realize an idea to the benefit of themselves and others.
In Sweden where youth employment is soaring, where the employment rate among people capable of working is extremely worrying and a well functioning national integration policy is frightfully absent, entrepreneurship is a key area to prioritize.
Entrepreneurship, however, is not only about making money, although this is a precondition. All over the world a new civil sector is growing up between the public and the private. A sector that is driven by social entrepreneurs who are able to find new models to create wealth, social well being and safeguard the environment. Here is a possibility to work for what you care about, with what you are good at and enjoy doing, every day, and make a real difference. One example is Björn Söderberg, nominated the Best Idea Driven Entrepreneur 2004 by the Swedish Federation of Private Enterprisees for his company Watabaran in Nepal, selling designed Christmas cards made of paper wastes. 
What we see emerging is something that resembles a market economy of social ideas. During the 1990s, the civil sector grew by 60% in the United States and some estimates hold that that there are 2 million citizen groups of which 70% has emerged during the last 30 years. Moreover, international civil organisations has increased from 6 000 to 26 000 during the 90s. Global initiatives created to meet social problems as environmental destruction, entrenched poverty, health catastrophes, human rights abuses, failing education systems, and escalating violence. Initiatives coordinated via Internet accessible from all over the world with people self-organising faster than companies and government traditionally serving them, as pointed out in the 95 thesis of the Cluetrain manifesto. A collaborative learning process for a cause where distance is no barrier.
Society profits from entrepreneurship. The young people who competed in last weeks Young Entrepreneurship event ”Dare to Be Your Own” should not be just a fresh wind. They should rather represent the norm in a society where building companies and entrepreneurship are seen as invaluable elements in building our common civil society.
Read more
- Ung Företagsamhet (Young Entrepreneurs) (In Swedish only)
- Watabaran, an ethical business in Nepal
- Bornstein, D., (2004), ”How to change the world – Social entrepreneurs and the power of new ideas”, Oxford University Press
Ensuring environmental sustainability is one of UN´s millennium development goals, which 191 UN member states have pledged to meet by year 2015. The primary agent for transformation towards this end is education, as declared in the UN Decade for Education on Sustainable Development (2005-2014). "Education not only provides scientific and technical skills, it also provides the motivation, justification, and social support for pursuing and applying them."
One example of IIIEE´s outreach activities is the distance education course “Introduction to Cleaner Production and Sustainable Development” (ICP). During the past 18 months, some 267 course participants, or change agents, from 52 countries have been registered on this 20-week part-time course qualifying, amongst other things, web-tutors for the IIIEE Young Masters Program (YMP).
The ICP-course is a living example of entirely on-line collaborative learning. These change agents learn to know more about preventive environmental strategies. They learn to live together (in a web-community) by approaching an ill-structured real-world environmental problem on sustainable tourism. They learn to apply their skills in practice by doing an initial environmental review in a small organisation of 5-50 employees, thus contributing to raised environmental awareness in the local community.
Strengthening change makers far away is made possible by a web-pedagogy that facilitates learning to know, to live together and to do. Ample evidence suggests that this strengthens the course participant’s own willingness to learn to be in conjunction with the sustainable development principles, as demonstrated in the ICP-course evaluations:
- Final evaluation (June 6th), 2004
- Final evaluation (January 12th), 2005
- Mid-term evaluation (April 19th), 2005
Read more: Eneroth, C. (2000), e-Learning for Environment, IIIEE Dissertation 2000:8
Malin Hydén & Carl Eneroth
Prejudice tells us that communication via an electronic chat is needlessly complicated, confusing and not suited for learning. In reality, however, the chat is an important tool for collaborative learning at a distance. This is a conclusion a major Swedish insurance company drew from educating web-coaches on their educational platform.
Can a web-based education portal strengthen the course participant’s personal relations? This question was presented to a number of future web-coaches at a major Swedish insurance company t42 worked with in the autumn of 2004. Most of them answered no. The general perception was that communication on the Internet brings about superficial relations or no relations at all. The question is important, as the contact between the course tutor and the participants plays an important part in motivating them for further learning, especially when it comes to distance education.
After a t42-led education at a distance, the web-coaches were asked the same question again. Now, more than 60% of them had radically changed their mind. The course participants had basically reassessed the tools for communication presented on their web-based educational platform, in particular the chat. From being considered as a complicated and unnecessary way of communication, the written chat was viewed as an important tool for personal networking. Several even saw the chat as the most important tool on their educational platform, and suggested other ways of using the chat:
- “I could be a resource person to invite to a chat and share experiences in my field of knowledge”.
- “We (course participants) could become more aware of each other and solve tasks together”.
- “It (the chat) can replace some meetings with our sales staff and thereby save travel time”.
A chat can be used for formal learning, when the web-coach with different methods guides the conversation towards a specific goal, but also for informal learning where the participants are given the opportunity to more freely discuss, find solutions and in other ways share experiences. The written chat, thereby, becomes more personal than many are inclined to believe.
t42 Distance Education
TeaForTwo (t42) is a consultancy focused on distance education and collaborative learning on the Internet. T42 offers to companies to educate their educators. These web-coaches learn to support the group dynamics in a distance education course and formulate constructive assignments. Malin Hyden is a t42 partner with long experience of corporate e-learning. Read more: Eneroth, C. & Hydén, M.
- Chatt - en outnyttjad potential i distansutbildning (April, 2005), Frukostklubben- Innehåller är inte allt (October, 2004), Frukostklubben
