How to Make E Learning Courses in Curricula of Natural Resources Management More Sustainable?

The Internet may be the means of realizing a forestry lecturer’s dream. Imagine being able to discuss, for example, different timber harvesting systems used internationally with a group of motivated students from different regions of the globe in one virtual classroom. (Längin, Ackerman & Lewark, 2004). The huge potential of e‐learning has not yet been fully recognized let alone realized in higher education. Over the last ten to fifteen years many e‐learning courses in the fields of natural resources management, forestry and wood sciences emerged, have been used – and often disappeared again. Much effort and money has gone into development of e‐learning courses, but sustainable examples are few in these fields – the exceptions mostly being parts of bigger e‐learning units in some universities. Reasons for short‐lived success seem to be in the first place that these courses have often been add‐ons, elective courses or self‐standing courses with little institutional and curricular anchoring. They often started with great ideas and relevant contents, but with limited long term commitment on the side of the organizers as well as of the students. As time and money needed for e‐learning courses may be a limiting factor for successful development and running them sustainably options of courses must be examined for which input is lower or at least not higher than for traditional face‐to‐face courses. This could include using share‐ ware e‐learning platforms as well as technological minimalism (Fillip, in GTZ 2005). At the same time learner oriented and activating didactical concepts should be developed, which would make the courses attractive and work against early drop‐out. Experiences and considerations will be presented. In order to make better use of the potential of e‐learning for improvement of higher education, following these ideas, the concept of WELAN has been developed by higher education specialists from IUFRO, IPFE and faculties of forestry and environmental sciences of six universities as a worldwide e‐learning academy. WELAN will explore approaches of open learning resources, i.e. courses available without tuition fees. Activities of WELAN will start with the development of recommendations for administrative regulations including course formats, course delivery, credit recognition, accreditation, tuition fees in order to allow students from different universities as well as companies to have access to e‐ learning course information and to the courses of the collaborating universities and get their credits gained easily recognized independent their affiliation. Following this the development and offering of courses and course package under the umbrella of WELAN is aimed at, for organization and funding to be divided in separate projects with defined course packages. Thus in a growing and comprehensive system essential parts of Natural Resources, Forestry and Wood Science will be covered

New IUFRO Initiative to Improve Forest Sciences Study Programmes: the Task Force EFS (Education in Forest Sciences)

The system of higher education has been facing fundamental changes, triggered by globalization and global change, altering expectations of stakeholders and society from university graduates and novel insights of educational sciences – calling for a move from teaching to learning. Programmes of higher forest education have been challenged even more by changing societal demands, such as climate change, changing patterns of demands for ecosystem services, and novel resource governance systems. The development of forest sciences as well as of forestry curricula should adapt to or even anticipate those trends. Consequently development of forest sciences curricula should move towards: • Focusing on generic and methodical competences instead of contents and descriptive approaches, enabling graduates to tackle novel, complex problems; • Competences to integrate and communicate knowledge across disciplinary boarders and to analyze the existing interactions; • New learning units addressing challenges such as climate change, adaptive ecosystem management, governance systems, gender issues, forests as source of energy, role of forests and forest products in rural development and poverty alleviation as well as the assessment of other environmental and social impacts. The IUFRO Task Force on Education in Forest Sciences (EFS – http://www.tf-efs.proste.pl) is an attempt to answer to the growing demand for coordination of research based knowledge and education at university level. The objective of EFS IUFRO TF is an improved practice of Education in Forest Sciences worldwide. EFS therefore aims at contributing to development of standards of Education in Forest Sciences, which meet the requirements of today, using experiences and examples of good practice in the IUFRO community and cooperation with higher education experts. Part of this is the development of a framework on required competences of graduates of education in forest sciences, to be characterized in terms of skill dimension, context, and level of mastery. This will be based, among others, on focus group discussions with higher forestry education specialists worldwide