Development task

I´m going to plan a course about the sustainability as my development task. Sustainability is a wide concept, but I ask students to find out what would be the most sustainable way of living for them at the future. They should cover in their work some key areas including e.g. ecosystems, climate change, energy, agriculture, food and water. This course tries to find some answers how people can continue living sustainably in our world.

The main question of the course is for learners to solve: What would be the sustainable way of living for an individual? 

Students work in groups around the question. There will be several weeks time to solve the question. Groups will plan their work and agree what areas of the sustainability are covered. Possibly support from the teacher is needed in the planning phase. Groups will have their own online discussion forums where they can discuss and work together. Periodically (e.g. once a week) groups will write a diary (blog) about the work done and discussions around the topic. Writer of the diary changes every time so that each member of the group participates to writing. Other groups will then read and comment diary. If possible some blogs are replaced by f2f discussion meetings.

Teacher suggests a wide range of online resources for learner´s about the subject. There will be e.g. digital libraries, articles from magazines, interviews of experts, book chapters, videos, statistics and other web sites. Also experts working in this area will help students online. Also other resources defined by students can be used.

End product of the course will be an article which will be published in the school magazine. It will also be presented to other groups f2f or online, depending on the groups. Every group will write an article of their own, and the assessment will happen based on the article and group work (activities during the work). The assessment criteria has been agreed together before the work.

When planning the course, it´s important to consider the learning culture. It will form a basis to the whole learning process. It should be considered what kind of students there are in the course, what is their learning environment what will be their working environment at the future. It should be decided if the traditional teacher centered learning culture is enough to produce the learning students need or if the learning needs to fit better to the modern society as a student centered learning. 

Aim for this course is that multicultural authentic learning culture will be created in teams. Learning culture creation is possible when teams work collaboratively being positively dependent on each other. The nine elements of authentic e-learning also support the culture understanding and creation. Learning communities including access to expert thinking with group and individual reflections support the culture creation. 

In Table 1 I have used the template Reflection tool for e-benchmarking to help for the the course definition.

Element of authentic learning	Guidelines for implementation	Course implementation
Provide authentic context that reflects the way the knowledge will be used in real-life	• a physical/virtual environment that reflects the way the knowledge will ultimately be used	Sustainability course aims to gain the skills and knowledge which can be applied to own personal life in order to make sustainable choices.
	• a non-linear design to preserve the complexity of the real-life setting	Aim is to keep the course content flexible. Students can plan to work themselves. Students can choose the topics they want to work with and decide the working order.
Provide authentic activities	• activities that have real-world relevance	Aim of the course is to get it applied in real life with real knowledge.
	• ill-defined complex activities that provide an opportunity for students to define the tasks and sub-tasks required to complete the activity	Purpose is to have a very wide concept of sustainability here as a main subject. Students define the tasks to be done of their own.
	• a sustained period of time for investigation	This course will last several weeks, maybe five to eight weeks.
	• the opportunity for the detection of relevant versus. irrelevant information	Since the sustainability as a subject is wide, there is a variety of inputs available e.g. digital libraries, articles from magazines, interviews of experts, book chapters, videos, statistics and other web sites
	• tasks that can be integrated across subject areas	All tasks are to be integrated in to the area of sustainability
Provide access to expert performances  and the modelling of processes	• access to expert thinking and modelling processes	Accesses to expert skills are provided e.g. with online discussions (e.g. access to expert forums) and several video interviews addition to written articles.
	• access to learners with various levels of expertise	Addition to experts, learners can also learn from each other during discussions and find information we they think is needed e.g. different observations.
	• opportunity for the sharing of narratives and stories and access to the social periphery	Blog writings, online discussion and f2f discussion meetings are arranged in order to share stories.
Provide multiple roles and perspectives	• different perspectives on the topics from various points of view	Purpose is to get as broad view as possible from the sustainability; different points of view can be e.g. population, ecosystems, climate change, energy, agriculture, food and water or individual, company and global view.
	• the opportunity to crisscross the learning environment	The students are able to use the learning resources for multiple purposes and in flexible order.
Support collaborative construction of knowledge	• tasks are completed in pairs or groups rather than individually	The course work is done in groups.
	• appropriate incentive structure for whole group achievement	The assessment is done on group level based on the article and group work (activities during the work).