Online Environment Education (Life-long learning Model)

Online Environment Education (Life-long learning Model)

The aim of the project is to involve citizens in creating, maintaining and protecting India’s green spaces and forests.  We plan to create a working model of a framework for learning reflexive skills and applying them to Environmental Education and ground level action.   We propose to distil the archived information in existence for sixteen years, and structure the content for online environment education shared in a Community of Practice, in this case an online club for nature lovers, IndianWildlifeClub.com.  Conservation issues in developing countries need to go hand in hand with developmental issues.  Involving the common man, we believe, can throw up workable solutions.    

Background and Relevance:

Reflexive skills involve paying critical attention to the practical values and theories which inform everyday actions, by examining practice reflectively and reflexively. This leads to developmental insight.   A key rationale for reflective practice is that experience alone does not necessarily lead to learning; deliberate reflection on experience is essential.  Reflective practice is the ability to reflect on an action so as to engage in a process of continuous learning. 

An online Community of Practice of nature lovers, in existence for 16 years, is a fertile ground to study the impact of reflective skills in environment education.  

Online Communities of Practice (CoP) are unlike online educational courses which are task bound and time bound.    Environment Education, a subject for life -long learning, can thus be conducted online in a systematic and user-friendly manner.    However, for this premise to be acceptable to traditional education experts, pilot projects are needed where further research on how best to document the conversations without losing focus, can be conducted.  The problem of lack of proper India centric projects which are conducted in a democratic, bottom up and top down perspective can be solved only by creating a CoP of Indian users talking about the environment they live in.   Indianwildlifeclub.com, the first online club for nature lovers and a CoP with archived and searchable content is the platform where the problem will be investigated as laid down further in this project proposal.

In 2013, we conducted an online survey on the volunteering space in wildlife conservation in the Indian context.  The survey was administered to individual IWC members and to NGOs/Others in the space interested in recruiting volunteers.  We received 496 responses in all.  

The salient features which came through from the respondents’ comments are,

1. Many well known institutions take in paying volunteers.  This model does not exactly suit Indian volunteers.  Paid volunteerism in India is not well documented or followed up.

2. India has always had good environment laws and wildlife laws but the implementation on the ground has been lacking.

3. Concerns expressed by many potential volunteers we surveyed included lack of transparency in recruiting and deployment of volunteers and lack of follow up action on work done by volunteers.

4.70% of respondents were willing to volunteer for free.

After talks with the Forest Department, we created a platform for recruiting volunteers for joint patrolling of forests in India.   Using this platform we have provided about 200 volunteers to the forest department in the forests of Maharashtra.   Involving committed youngsters in grass root level work (our volunteers stay with forest guards and experience the forests by foot patrolling)  not only imparts education, but also gives impetus to the conservation projects taken up by the forest department.

The CoP based forum we plan to build will help volunteers take up projects which they can document using the mobile app.  This documentation will be part of the archives of IWC and can be channelized for further follow up. 

Relevant Literature:                 

The concept of "communities of Practice" (CoP) introduced by Wenger in the year 2001, and further developed by him as a tool for education over the years, has been the motivating factor for me to develop IWC.   IWC is now available across platforms and the communication tools available on a smart phone have extended the possibilities of using this platform to implement ground level work.  

Considering IWC as a CoP, we did a survey on our members regarding online education.  We received a total of 295 responses. 87% agreed that learning in a community/club is less stressful. 81% of the respondents also agreed that the online content spurs them on to read more about issues which concern them. 99% agreed that environment education is a life-long learning process. 95% also felt that environment education is best imparted in an informal way.   A surprising result of the survey was that 94.5% said they feel constrained when it comes to doing their bit towards environment.  The survey validated our assumptions and encouraged us to collaborate with the Forest Department to start joint patrolling programs in reserves and sanctuaries.   

The situation regarding volunteers is one of excess supply and less demand as the Forest Department is not very forthcoming to accept volunteer work.  This has made us want to innovate further by proposing to use the functionality of a forum to lead ground level voluntary work by citizen volunteers to improve the spaces they live in to be more eco-friendly.

 Goals and Objectives:

We plan to achieve two things by doing this.

1. In India we have a situation where people have been living with nature for eons despite the modern cities dotting the country.  IndianWildlifeclub has 70% of its members coming from smaller cities where the population is aspirational, yet not out of touch with their rural/living with nature, past.   We believe making these people interact in a forum moderated by experts can throw up valuable information worth sharing.   A team of four/five experts can then weave this information into an education project which will be disseminated online.    
2. Once the forum is created with local moderators, we expect to run these chapters for taking up on-ground  project work with deep involvement of local communities and volunteers from IWC. The plan also involves assigning to each such local chapter, a mentor and a few resource persons who will identify projects for environment conservation that the group will take up for implementation in the local area. The resource persons will collate and upload scientific and project data so that outcomes could be monitored and best practices identified.   Our mobile app (we already have a rudimentary app on Android)will create the necessary buzz, deliver project area specific knowledge inputs, provide support for coordination with other organizations/government agencies working in the area and keep the link to the host site IndianWildlifeClub.com  always ‘on’. 

Methodology

The area of intervention is online, limited to members of IWC (free membership).   Once the forum is ready and running, we expect our membership to grow exponentially.   State wise distribution of our members in India as on date can be seen at the link

http://indianwildlifeclub.com/Members/Members-India.aspx

The digital population of today’s India which is growing in leaps and bounds, is seeking answers in the social media platforms.  What we are attempting to provide, is a regulated and validated environment where the nature lovers are facilitated to learn and apply their knowledge on the ground.   Our user friendly interface works across platforms and encourage user inputs to generate content. 

We wish to structure the discussion around the following outlined six stages of a successful project. 1) Issue identification and Question faming, 2) Inquiry and tinkering, 3) Authenticity and real-life learning, 4) Self-directed learning, 5) Feedback, Evaluation and Assessment, and 6) Presenting and sharing the learning outcome.

Problem based learning approaches and enquiry based learning will be effectively integrated through our EE module.  Our forum will give members opportunity for peer evaluation.  This gives learners a strong sense of authorship/ownership over their projects, which really boosts engagement motivation.  The methodology used makes the process equally important as the final project.  

Results

The impact of our project will be best reflected in the increase in membership of the club and increase in meaningful interactions in the forum.  Both these are measurable metrics which can be analysed.  The project has a time frame of one year.   Six months from start of project, Basic Environment Education Module with hyperlinks to our archives and forum topics will be uploaded on the portal.   The forum will also be completed in six months time in parallel. We will finalise at least five local level projects to be carried out by volunteers, which can be completed in the next six months. On completion of the proposed one year project, we hope to see better and wider utilization of the volunteering platform involving more local leaders, local projects and local communities.

The CoP based forum we plan to build on the portal will help volunteers take up projects which they can document using the mobile app.  This documentation will be part of the archives of IWC and can be channelized for further follow up. 

Capacity Building:

The project is a community level intervention, where training, mentoring, education and media reach happen online before taking up a local, ground level project.  The project will benefit the IWC CoP, whose members are nearly 8000 in India as of now.   The second level of the project, namely taking up a ground level problem relating to protection of environment, will benefit the immediate surroundings of the ground level project.  Dovetailing this benefit into the bigger picture through our CoP will motivate and spur further action elsewhere.