Why are OL 101 and OL102, or, OL 341 and OL 342 Prerequisites for Advanced Courses?
Prerequisites are absolute: there are no exceptions.

1. These first two foundational courses provide students with 12 important steps in the development of a project. Students receive a set of project templates which transfer into the advanced classes. We will be using students' participatory needs assessments, activity research, log frames and proposals from their projects developed in the first two courses in the advanced courses.

2. Students actually develop real projects with real communities in the first two courses. The advanced courses are the natural next step for the student’s projects. Perhaps their project was a nutrition project or a climate adaptation project and they need access to more specialized information for refining their project.

In Summary:
Participants bring the projects they developed in the first two classes into the advanced classes for further work. Students don’t have time to, nor or the advanced courses structured for developing new projects.

The first two courses are excellent; students are highly engaged. They work with real communities building real projects. People from 81 different countries are using the first two courses to develop projects in a range of disciplines:

Micro-enterprise development, micro-lending, clean water, lack of domestic water, access to education, poor family sanitation, gender equality, migration, vocational skills, chronic diarrhea and malnutrition in small children, lack of roads to villages, marginalization, food insecurity, illiteracy, environmental degradation, drought, lack of irrigation for agriculture, conservation, reforestation, restoration of watersheds, agricultural and post-harvest best practices, producer association development, alternative income generation, ecotourism, teenage pregnancies, sanitation, solid waste management, family planning, fundraising, micro hydro electrical generation, livelihood adaptation.