Course Syllabus

• Week 1 Learn to navigate course website, download the week's documents, and form partnerships.
• Week 2 & 3 Read the document on participatory needs assessments and conduct an informal assessment with a few community members to uncover a real challenge. List the needs identified and organize them into a clearly described challenge—a development challenge that you are going to solve with your project design. We want this as real as possible.
• Week 4 We will clarify your project’s challenge, develop a theory of how you plan to solve it, and research 3 intervention activities that would fulfill the premise of your theory.
• Week 5 Research one peer-reviewed paper for each of the three activities and see if scientists have found evidence that they are effective in solving your project’s challenge. Write a one paragraph summary of the papers’ findings.
• Week 6
  
  1. Share your proposed project concept locally with colleagues to gain feedback and constructive criticism.
  2. Return to the community with your project concept and get their feedback and hopeful buy-in.
  3. Pick one of your evidence-based activities and write a simple one page guide on how a field staff person could implement it.
• Week 7 Write a workshop lesson plan for introducing this activity into a community, and then make an illustrated, How-to card to give to community members.
• Week 8
  
  1. 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.
  2. Lay out your challenge, proposed solution, activities and the materials that you will need to launch the project into a simple matrix that I will supply. This will prepare you for the next course: OL 102 where you will transform your project into something that can formally be presented for funding.