Video Introduction to the Online Courses
The Course Experience: An Overview of the Learning Environment
Take CSDi Field Courses Online.
Development Professionals from 104 countries have developed course projects that are impacting over 100,000 people. See a sample assignment from Kenya.
Your online experience will begin with a module of two foundation courses. In the first course, you 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, youy will transform it with the real management tools of logframes, budgets, 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.
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.
There are no books to buy—all course materials can be linked to, or downloaded from the course site.
Testimonials: What Students Think About the Online Courses
See an example assignment from a student's project in Western Kenya.
Browse on-the-ground student field projects. The best student projects get the chance to appear on this donation page.
Foundation Courses:
To learn about course fees and to enroll for the courses please visit OL 101. From the Ground Up and OL 102. Project Architecture. If you are interested in Adaptation to Climate Change Courses please visit our adaptation page.
CSD Online Classes Capture True Field Experience
Are you a donor, development practitioner, or student who wants to learn more about what works in designing impact-oriented projects?
These courses give you the same hands-on experience as attending one of our on-site 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 for use in the field. 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.
Learning Schedule. The work load is typically two to four hours per week. There are no set ‘class’ times; you work on your own schedule during the week. Completed assignments are due each Monday.
Consultancy. Course leaders have gained their development expertise by providing face-to-face consulting services to NGOs in the field. In the first two assignments of this course they will provide you the same consulting service as they would with a client for developing a project for funding and launching. This will ensure that your project will have a solid beginning and be organized such that it can be fully developed for presentation to donors, your board, and your teammates.
Who should attend? Course participants are of all different ages, genders and professions—and include Northern and Southern staff from large INGOs, field staff from small in-country NGOs, students, donors, executive directors, African business owners with a conscience, students, scientists, consultants and people who would like to transition into development work.
Current course participants include postgraduate students, staff from large INGOs, staff from small in-country NGOs, people considering career changes, and African business owners with a social conscience.
The classes are designed to be fun and interactive: you will be collaborating with colleagues from around the globe. You will only need to have functional knowledge of Word, Excel, email, and the Internet.
If you are a donor in Chicago, an INGO Grant Writer in Wellington, or a student in Manchester—rather than an NGO Staffer in Nairobi—where will you turn for a project idea? We will partner you with a field staffer working with a community and a tangible project on the ground—or we can help set you up with a real-life, virtual project.
If you already have a grant award with defined goals and objectives—use it as your class project. These two courses will magnify project impact by introducing you to evidence based interventions, lesson plans for effective workshops, and by fine tuning your logframe.
There are two very exciting aspects of the course:
One is that participants are using the course to design real projects with real communities on the ground. The second is the cross-hemisphere partnerships between participants. We have people living in big cities (without access to communities) in Australia, Spain, Canada, the US, Brazil, and Panama, partnering on projects with on-the-ground field staff (with access to communities) in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Kenya, Columbia, Peru, and Venezuela. Partners communicate with each other about assignments through email, photo exchanges, chat rooms, and Skype.
Course Format
Each week, you are provided with a series of background discussions and readings, an assignment, and an example of the completed assignment to use as a template. Participants are not required to access the courses at specific times—you can access these materials at any time during the week and just fulfill your obligation by turning the assignment and at the end of the week. It will be necessary to access the course two or three times a week in order to download course materials, post reactions and give feedback to other course participants.
Project development:
It is with a community’s needs list developed in the course that participants begin designing sustainable, impact-oriented projects. From needs assessments sent to us by course members, we have been able to see the many common problems worldwide including:
From needs assessments sent to us by course members, we are able to see that there are many common problems worldwide including:
Income generation, clean water, access to education, poor sanitation, gender equality, migration, lack of vocational skills, chronic diarrhea and malnutrition in small children, lack of roads to villages, marginalization, shelter, food shortages, illiteracy, environmental degradation, drought, lack of irrigation for agriculture, and overpopulation.
From these problems, 2010 course participants have developed real projects with real communities, that are impacting over 100,000 beneficiaries.
We look forward to working with you online.
If you have questions about the Online Learning program, please contact Online.Learning@csd-i.org .
To Enroll:
OL 341. Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change: Designing & Funding Community-Based Adaptation Projects.
OL 342. Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change: Planning for Impact.
List of 104 countries where course members live and work:
Australia, Argentina, Bangladesh, Barbados, Benin, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, British Virgin Islands, Burkina Faso, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Cambodia, Canada, Chad, China, Columbia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Denmark, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia , Fiji, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Ivory Coast, Jamaica, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mexico, Monaco, Mongolia, Montserrat, Morocco, Myanmar, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Philippines, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, Senegal, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Slovakia, Soloman Islands, Somalia, South Africa, Southern Sudan, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Switzerland, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago W.I., Tristan da Cunha, Turkey, Uganda, UK, Ukraine, United States, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
Here are lists of Students' countries, organizations and project challenges.
