OL 241 Student Resources: Writing Your Climate Change Action Plan

Welcome to OL 241 Writing Your Climate Change Action Plan Class Home Page

The Course

Welcome to the Center for Sustainable Development’s (CDSi) online learning course OL 241 Writing Your Climate Change Action Plan. In this course you will write a climate action plan defined by community need. It is the prerequisite for a second course, OL 242 Fund Your Climate Action Plan, which will transform your concept into a packaged project ready to fund and launch.

Logistics

The class week begins on Tuesdays; assignments need to be sent to me by the Monday 7 days later.

This first week’s Assignment will take longer than any of the assignments over the next 8 weeks. This is why I am giving you three weeks to do it. This will also give you extra time to get used to the course website, explore online resources and read introductory documents about the course.

You will land on this page—the Student Resource Page—each time you log in. It contains:
1. Links for downloading the weeks’ documents: be sure to save them for future reference.
2. Links for the background Discussion on the week’s homework assignment; in this case – OL 241 Discussion 1; read this first each week
3. Links to the week’s Assignment; in this case – OL 2341 Assignment One Homework
4. Links to the Magee Example Project Assignment for each week.
5. This, the ‘Class Home page with the class rules and logistics
6. A link to the Email & Homework Etiquette page in the Download Class Documents gives the rules of the game for corresponding with us and for posting assignments. Please print it out and read it first.

If you have questions please contact me here: Online.Learning@csd-i.org .

Important: The Email & Homework Etiquette page in the Download Class Documents gives the rules of the game for corresponding with us and for posting assignments. Please print it out and read it first.

The Class Project

This class is designed to be fun. We are each going to develop our own project – hopefully a real one. Each one of your assignments is actually a concrete element in building your project. I will comment on the development of each of your project’s assignments and have also posted my own project components as examples for you to see and use for ideas.

Please use my Magee examples as templates for your project assignments. They are formatted such that one week is the building block for the next week and therefore we need to maintain the format of the examples I provide. Download my examples and just write right over the top of what I’ve written. In this manner you will learn the system and be guided in thinking through the components of your project.

I will review each one of your assignments and make suggestions. In this manner, I get to know you through our correspondence, and I become familiar with each of your projects. My suggestions are meant to keep your assignment ‘on track’. There are very specific steps that we work through and each project usually needs a bit of guidance in preparation for the next assignment. Do not move onto the next assignment until you have received my comments on the current assignment.

I invest an unusual amount of time working with each student during the first three assignments, and I’m happy to do so. This is what I do as a consultant for my clients and so by the end of the second assignment you will each have a well conceived, well designed project outline that is formatted in a specific way so as to serve as the foundation for the rest of the 8 weeks—and for moving forward into OL 242.

We will lock in on this project concept at the end of the third assignment; your project concept can’t evolve, change, grow or morph from that snapshot over the following 4 weeks.

If in week five or six you have an idea and decide that you want to make changes to your project concept, I encourage you to develop a separate, new project on the side – outside of the course. Easier yet, upon completion of OL 241 and OL 242, using the templates that you have developed, you will see how easily and quickly you will be able to modify your course project to include your new idea after the course is over.

Assignments that drift from the original concept will be returned to be restored to the Assignment Two project outline snapshot.

Please send photos of you, your project, the community you are working with – and especially your participatory needs assessment (get some good close-ups) and I will post them  in an upcoming newsletter. For some tips on taking good photos please look at the Newsletter: Capturing Compelling Photos from the Field.

Class Rules

1. Schedule. The workload is between 1 and 2 hours a week. Please stay on schedule.

2. Certificates. Course participants who successfully complete a course on time will receive a course certificate. Learn more. Your certificate will be e-mailed within 30 days of the end of your course.

Signed certificates are delivered by email in a PDF format for you to print out. We do not offer paper certificates by mail. The name on the certificate will be your first and last names as they appear on your Student Enrollment Form.

Course certificates are issued for all students from one course all at the same time—usually within one week of the end of the course. Students requesting a replacement certificate at a future date will be charged a $15.00 fee. So save and backup your certificate when you receive it.

3. Email and Homework Etiquette: the rules of the game. We have had students from 153 different countries enrolled in different courses. It is a bit complicated managing all of the incoming emails. We have developed a system that you need to incorporate in submitting homework and in corresponding with us. Please read the etiquette page now.

4. Our Online Course FAQ has answers to most other questions.

Course Syllabus

OL 241 Writing Your Climate Change Action Plan. What’s the real problem?
Week 1. Learn to navigate course website and to download & read the week’s documents.

Weeks 2 & 3. What’s the Real Problem?
Read the document on participatory needs assessments and conduct an informal assessment with a few community members to uncover important community needs/problems. Prioritize a list of the needs identified.

Week 4. Organize them into a clearly described project outline—a development challenge that you are going to solve with your project design. We want this as real as possible.

Then, add a problem linked to climate change if your community hasn’t identified one.

Week 5. What’s your theory of a solution?
This week we will clean up your project outline, develop a project goal, and search for 3 activity/interventions that would fulfill your project goal.

Week 6. Will your theory of a solution work?
Research one peer-reviewed scientific paper for each of your three activities and see if scientists have found evidence that the activities are effective in solving your project’s problem. Write a one paragraph summary of each papers’ findings.

Week 7. Will the community buy into it?
1. Return to the community with your project concept to get their feedback and a hopeful buy-in.
2. You will also make a list of the parts of your projects where you have no experience nor expertise and list who might be a good consultant or partner that could provide this expertise to your project.
3. Brainstorm a list of 3 people that you would like to sell your project concept to: a donor, your boss, your professor. Make an appointment with one of them for next week.

Week 8. How will you organize your ideas for presentation to a donor?
1. Lay out your problem statement, goal statement, and intervention activities into a simple matrix that I will supply. This will prepare you for the next course: OL 242 where you will transform your project into something that can formally be presented for funding.
2. Share your project with someone that you would like to sell it to: a donor, your boss, your professor, someone in the development world for feedback.

Now that we’ve gotten past the rules we can begin our adventure together and have a lot of fun in the process.

So what’s next? Click on the Assignment One Discussion and get started in development!

Tim Magee