Ethics Education for Children Online Community of Practice

Posted on March 1, 2016 by vladepap

Part of my role as eLearning Program Manager at Arigatou International was to research, design and build an online platform for facilitators trained in the Learning to Live Together approach to ethics education on a global scale.

In this capacity, I was a one person eLearning department, responsible for research, design and planning, build, and graphic design.

Subsequent to a needs analysis, conducted through a survey and interviews with active facilitator trainers across the world, I chose to use Moodle as the base for the platform. My reasoning was that it is an open source and scalable platform, cost effective for an NGO and that would allow theme customization. It can deliver courses as well as sources of inspiration and resources to facilitators. The objective for the platform was that it would become a ‘one stop shop’ for anyone interested in ethics education.

Working as part of the Ethics education team, it was decided that the resource should also become the online hub and support of a new initiative, to build a Learning to Live Together community of practice. This initiative was born of the need for follow-up and support. The training structure at that time provided training workshops across the globe to interested facilitators, building programme planning capacity among trainees. However, the implementation of the Learning to Live Together programmes produced from training workshops went unrecorded, assessed or supported.

The Ethics Education for Children Community of Practice initiative would provide support for local, geographical communities of practice through regular face to face support combined with an online resource and hub where local groups could share stories, see what is happening in other parts of the world, share resources and inspirations

A pilot of the offline initiative was launched in January 2014 in El Salvador, in which I had the opportunity to participate. The value of this visit was to inform my thinking on how the platform could support local groups and deepen my understanding of the concept of communities of practice and how it could be explained and applied in other countries we worked with.

Take a tour of the platform in its’ last iteration before my contract ended.

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