Online Courses in Developing Sustainable Grassroots Development Projects
Center for Sustainable Development
Online Field Courses
Cursos en Línea sobre desarrollo—en español
CSD Online Classes Capture True Field Experience
Are you a donor, development staffer, or student who wants to learn more about what works in designing grassroots development projects? If you can’t travel to participate in courses, investigate these online alternatives to our traditional Field Courses.
A module of two courses is being offered online in January, 2010.
In the first course, each student will work to develop a community-centered development project from the ground up—carrying it through needs assessment and design development. In the second course, you will transform it with the real management tools of logframes and fact sheets into a project ready to share with a donor. 12 classes, 12 concrete steps. Your output is a fully designed project—with a complete set of documentation—and ready to launch.
OL 2.1. From the Ground Up: Designing Community-Centered Projects with Sustainable Solutions
January 12 - February 22, 2010: 6 Weeks
From the Ground Up will give you an insight into contemporary methods of developing community-centered, impact-oriented projects. You will leave the course with practical field tools and develop a range of skills: needs assessments, project design, community workshops, and discovering evidence-based activities. The course is designed to be used as a vehicle for you to develop a real project, in real time, during the course.
OL 2.2. Project Architecture: Planning for Impact
March 9 – April 26, 2010: 6 Weeks
Prerequisite for this course: OL 2.1: From the Ground Up
This course will take the project concept developed in OL 2.1 and transform it with a powerful set of management tools into a project for presenting to donors. Logframes, detailed budgets, schedules and compelling fact sheets: these tools will communicate to donors, staff, and stakeholders exactly what you are going to accomplish, and lead the effective management of the project once funded.
The Courses also Provide the Following Resources
Documents on course topics by contemporary experts.
Books, posters and manuals available online for download.
Internet development links organized by sector.
Class blog for sharing your project stories and photos from the field.
Class forum for posting questions to your classmates.
Access to tools and resources on the Center site that are only available to students and CSD members.
There are no books to buy—all course materials can be linked to, or downloaded from the course site.
These courses give you the same hands-on experience as attending one of our Field Courses—for less money—and with a smaller carbon footprint. But in our Field Courses, we actually work in villages—difficult to do online you say?
We have found a solution: Each class assignment is a concrete step in developing a project. Some of the assignments are done within the communities you serve: take your assignment into the field, do it as a solution-oriented activity together with the community, and thereby finish a component of your class project. And there you have it: an online field course with tangible, concrete results.
We will supply two levels of mentoring. Each week’s assignment will be accompanied by a clear, professional example of what we want you to achieve that week. It is yours to use as a template for your assignment—and for developing future projects. We will also provide comments, suggestions and encouragement for each one of your assignments individually. We want you to develop high quality project components, and we also want you to understand the hows and whys.
To learn about course fees and to sign up for courses please visit
http://www.csd-i.org/online-learning/ .
If you have questions about the Online Learning program, please contact
January.Course@csd-i.org .
