Today I facilitated a “BC Education Experts Summit” at our offices in Gastown for the Pembina Institute. Pembina is an amazingly effective 65 person group that is part consultancy, part think tank, and part advocacy organization, one of Canada’s largest environmental groups. We have been hired by their education department to help launch GreenLearning.ca as a national teacher resource for sustainability education in Caanda.
Although we're fairly green (ha!) in online education, we've been helping orgs successfully create online strategies for a decade, and this meeting was designed to inform their education team on trends in the field of online learning.
The market context of student centered classroom learning is tough. There are very few success stories of sites that engage students and provide useful classroom resources to teachers. There's lots of ideas, lots of vision, lots of money thrown at sites and lots thrown at teacher outreach (if you can imagine, nearly every lobby group, citizen group, and marketing board in the country wants to teach the citizens of tomorrow their perspective on the world) but not a lot of tangible successes - with measurable results - are out there.
The BC Experts Summit was part of Pembina's ongoing engagement and consultation process, and about 10 of the leading praticitioners and thinkers in environmental ed and online learning gave us their ideas, feedback, and advice. We all learned a lot, and Pembina will use the information as direct input into the strategy for GreenLearning.ca.
We’re not going to make the same mistakes that many others have made. Stay tuned for updates as we roll out the strategy.